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Brett Terpstra has made the mother of all logging scripts for Day One users. I mentioned before how journalling with Day One never stuck for me, but now I am using it a lot. Well, Slogger is really neat because it can grab all sorts of your internet activity and pull it into Day One…
Brett Terpstra has made the mother of all logging scripts for Day One users. I mentioned before how journalling with Day One never stuck for me, but now I am using it a lot. Well, Slogger is really neat because it can grab all sorts of your internet activity and pull it into Day One as entries, all without you having to do it manually.
All your tweets, your posts, and so on. It is very cool, I just set it up and can’t wait to see how much data will be in Day One now.
Nancy Macdonell: >“The original Paper Denim look book was done with Polaroids,” says Chantel Valentene, the brand’s creative director. “Instagram is the modern equivalent, so when we were talking about doing the look book for the relaunch, it was a natural step. It fits in with our idea that getting dressed should be easy —…
Nancy Macdonell:
>“The original Paper Denim look book was done with Polaroids,” says Chantel Valentene, the brand’s creative director. “Instagram is the modern equivalent, so when we were talking about doing the look book for the relaunch, it was a natural step. It fits in with our idea that getting dressed should be easy — with Instagram you can’t retouch, it’s what you see is what you get. It’s the opposite of fussy.”
I like the analogy that Instagram is the new Polaroid, but I think that Valentene is being a bit short-sighted. Even if an Instagram photo is taken with an iPhone, and never leaves the phone, there are still plenty of tools that a person can use to tweak and retouch the image. Not to mention selecting a proper filter can be quite “fussy”.
Still, I think one of the biggest questions that surrounds modern photography (as we move forward) is going to be: what’s real? Some of the more iconic photos of the last 5 years were shot on digital and heavily tweaked in software during editing — are these photos then, not real?
Which photos do we archive as a historical record of our world? Do we care that we removed cellulite and zits? Do we care that everyone looks perfect, unless taken to show how evil the person was?
I wonder if 20 years from now when my daughter is looking at photos of nature from 2010, if she won’t stop and ask: “Dad, why aren’t the trees *as* green anymore?”
Well, sweety, boosting color saturation used to be *the* thing to do…
Yesterday I deleted access to the ‘articles only’ RSS feed, so if that’s not working for you that’s why. There were about 400 of you using it, sorry for the lack of notice. With the increased length of my linked listed posts and the subsequent decrease in post frequency I no longer find it necessary…
Yesterday I deleted access to the ‘articles only’ RSS feed, so if that’s not working for you that’s why. There were about 400 of you using it, sorry for the lack of notice.
With the increased length of my linked listed posts and the subsequent decrease in post frequency I no longer find it necessary to offer an articles only feed. Also I believe now that it is equally important to read both post types.
I deleted it yesterday and did not set a forward. The reason there was no forward set was simple: I feel that it is within my rights to remove things without your permission, but not within them to add things to your RSS reader without your permission. Redirecting, forwarding, or changing the RSS feed instead of deleting it would have added things to your feed and I wasn’t ok with doing that.
This is the main and only (non-member) RSS feed now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheBrooksReview
My grandparents gave us one of these chairs. Not only is it really comfortable but: 1. My daughter loves to nap in it with me; 2. I love to nap in it. If you have a spot in your yard to hang one, I think it’s better than a regular hammock. Amazon has a bunch…
My grandparents gave us one of these chairs. Not only is it really comfortable but:
1. My daughter loves to nap in it with me;
2. I love to nap in it.
If you have a spot in your yard to hang one, I think it’s better than a regular hammock. Amazon has a bunch too, but I can’t vouch for any of those brands.
Pro tip: mount with an eye bolt and hang with a caribiner for easy winter take down.
Alex Arena, commenting on Things, in response to Shawn and me on the B&B podcast: >But since they haven’t been acquired, they still need to make money, and Things is their only product. Lying to all of your customers isn’t a good way to make money. I think Arena ((If this guy’s name is really…
Alex Arena, commenting on Things, in response to Shawn and me on the B&B podcast:
>But since they haven’t been acquired, they still need to make money, and Things is their only product. Lying to all of your customers isn’t a good way to make money.
I think Arena ((If this guy’s name is really Alex Arena — that’s badass.)) gets to the heart of the user frustration, but he’s off base. I don’t think Cultured Code lied, I think they were over matched with a task that they had to ship, but couldn’t get shipped.
Things was solid at one point but has been so distracted by this cloud sync that they have lost significant ground to rival OmniFocus. Now all that remains to be seen is if they can quickly ship some great updates (since the biggest one is now mostly out of the way).
Dan Chung is on assignment shooting for the Gaurdian as a professional photographer, but he is shooting with what appears to just be an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S. This is a link to his photoblog of the coverage, and he notes on each picture any adapters he used on his iPhone(s). I hate…
Dan Chung is on assignment shooting for the Gaurdian as a professional photographer, but he is shooting with what appears to just be an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S. This is a link to his photoblog of the coverage, and he notes on each picture any adapters he used on his iPhone(s).
I hate to say it, but this is going too far.
It’s one thing to only take your iPhone places for photos, it’s even fine if the iPhone is your only camera. But to take the iPhone on assignment shooting sports, that’s just a gimmick.
His composition and lighting is fine, but just look at the sharpness of each photo — for the most part the photos are soft. The photos *look* like iPhone snapshots.
[Compare them to these taken with pro level equipment on *The Big Picture*](http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/08/london_2012_olympics_one_week.html).
The difference is immediately visible.
There is one cool thing that I hadn’t thought about though — for journalists. With Photostream uploading all your photos to iCloud, and the ability to share those streams with others — this could be a powerful tool for covering breaking news events for news networks. Photojournalists wouldn’t have to stop to upload and news desks would get the photos in near realtime. That could be pretty damned useful.
All that said, I get that Chung isn’t trying to take the world’s best photos with his iPhone, but I get the sense that when he gets home and sits down to review his shots, he’s going to see more than a few that he regrets not having his dSLR for, and that sucks.
Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield reporting on testimony from Christopher Stringer, a longtime Apple industrial designer, in the Apple v Samsung spat: >In his testimony earlier, Mr. Stringer said that Apple’s design team consists of 15 or 16 designers who work around a small kitchen table, a sharp contrast to Samsung’s 1,000 designers. I cannot…
Nicole Perlroth and Nick Wingfield reporting on testimony from Christopher Stringer, a longtime Apple industrial designer, in the Apple v Samsung spat:
>In his testimony earlier, Mr. Stringer said that Apple’s design team consists of 15 or 16 designers who work around a small kitchen table, a sharp contrast to Samsung’s 1,000 designers.
I cannot be the only one that finds this to be the single most interesting note about this trial so far. Some questions that I have:
1. What kind of table?
2. How big is “small”?
3. Why does it take a 1,000 designers to rip-off an Apple design that only took 15-16 people to make?
I can’t wait to read more testimony like that.
“These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so. That might be O.K., but it also means they have a lot more in common with advertising than they do with curation.” — Carina Chocano
Watts Martin on the real ramification of Apple’s sandboxing requirements: >Thing is, iCloud also magically brings document sandboxing to OS X. If I want to see what I wrote in Byword on the iPad, I *need* to go to Byword on the Mac. If I want to preview it in Marked or do some power…
Watts Martin on the real ramification of Apple’s sandboxing requirements:
>Thing is, iCloud also magically brings document sandboxing to OS X. If I want to see what I wrote in Byword on the iPad, I *need* to go to Byword on the Mac. If I want to preview it in Marked or do some power editing in Sublime Text, I’d still have to open it in Byword and then drag it to the other app.
He goes on to talk about how rough a time you then have if you decide to ever switch away from the Apple ecosystem — because once you buy into iCloud, you have really bought into iCloud.
This is a really important point, something I hadn’t thought about. I don’t think we should be calling on Apple to turn iCloud into Dropbox, but I do think that it’s not out of the question to ask (demand?) Apple to provide an “export my iCloud documents” button.
Though, I’m not holding my breath on this one.
“If we are going to trade off functionality for portability, let’s go all the way and make the thing really portable.” — Fraser Speirs
>Shawn and Ben talk about the new Digg, Cultured Code’s Cloud Sync, the balance of shipping half-finished products early versus taking longer to ship products that are finished, why not being on Facebook may mean you’re a suspicious citizen, and how real-life priorities intersect with “GTD”.
>Shawn and Ben talk about the new Digg, Cultured Code’s Cloud Sync, the balance of shipping half-finished products early versus taking longer to ship products that are finished, why not being on Facebook may mean you’re a suspicious citizen, and how real-life priorities intersect with “GTD”.
I purchased my Mac mini the day that Apple announced it — I mean the very first Mac mini Apple made — and I spent every last dollar I had on it at the time. I have used that Mac mini everyday since I purchased it and it’s only on its second hard drive. Suffice…
I purchased my Mac mini the day that Apple announced it — I mean the very first Mac mini Apple made — and I spent every last dollar I had on it at the time. I have used that Mac mini everyday since I purchased it and it’s only on its second hard drive. Suffice to say, I have gotten my value out of the machine.
For the last five years or so, the Mac mini has spent its little life attached to my TV as a media center. It downloads and stores all the video files ((I don’t know the legality of downloading TV shows from the web if you pay for the cable subscription already, so that’s *not* what I am talking about. Either way, it’s not movies — honestly.)) I would like to play on my TV and plays them over a DVI connection. Up and until this year everything worked really well, I couldn’t playback 720p or higher quality files, but “normal TV grade HD” played back just fine.
Then everyone made the switch to encode video files with h.264 and well, the Mac mini struggles to play those files back. I get random artifacts and massive amounts of dropped frames during fast moving scenes. This is something that has been driving my wife and me nuts.
This all got me to thinking about how I could get back smoother playback without having to buy a new machine. Initially I thought Mountain Lion would be the answer, streaming the files from the mini and AirPlaying to the Apple TV, but having to move my retina MacBook Pro into the living room didn’t sound appealing.
I wanted to stream from the mini to the Apple TV, but with none of the video streaming to AirPlay apps working on PowerPC chips, I thought I was SOL. Then I found [File Browser](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-access-files-on/id364738545?mt=8), a $4.99 universal iOS app that allows you to browse network shared files, play them back on the device and/or stream them over AirPlay.
So with that I can stream the videos on the Mac mini to my iOS device, from there I can AirPlay them to my TV via the Apple TV. Thus giving me smooth playback for $4.99.
It’s not all roses though, the app is pretty ugly and the icon is blue.
That said, it worked, worked well, and amazingly was damned easy to setup.
And so the G4 Mac mini lives on.
Twitter has launched a pretty cool project that analyzes all the tweets on a given day and shows how favorably each presidential candidate is on Twitter. That is pretty cool and a really great use of Twitter. **But…** Why is it only updated once a day at 5:00pm? Isn’t Twitter about the “real-time web” —…
Twitter has launched a pretty cool project that analyzes all the tweets on a given day and shows how favorably each presidential candidate is on Twitter. That is pretty cool and a really great use of Twitter.
**But…**
Why is it only updated once a day at 5:00pm? Isn’t Twitter about the “real-time web” — what the hell is real-time about updating data once a day at 5:00pm?
This data would be far more interesting and informative if it was updated in real-time. A candidate says something more dumb than usual on TV and we can see them drop in likability, and then minutes later does something great and they begin trending back up. Seeing that kind of data would be awesome, seeing the data on a one day snapshot is just neat.
Twitter could have made this awesome, but instead they only made it neat.
That is what worries me most about Twitter right now…
When Day One, a Mac and iOS journaling app, first launched I gave it a go for a while and quickly dropped it. I was contacted a while ago from the developer to test out a new version of the app (just launched the day of this posting) and I have been using and loving…
When Day One, a Mac and iOS journaling app, first launched I gave it a go for a while and quickly dropped it. I was contacted a while ago from the developer to test out a new version of the app (just launched the day of this posting) and I have been using and loving the app quite a bit lately.
[Shawn Blanc has an excellent review of the suite of apps](http://shawnblanc.net/2012/08/day-one-review/), so be sure to check that out if you are interested in it.
What I have to say about the app is this:
– It is damned clever. In Shawn’s review he mentions that if you add a photo to your journal after the fact, the app will ask if you want to back date the entry to the time and location the photo was taken. This is so perfect for me, I don’t want to interrupt an experience as it is happening, but I love logging that experience after the fact. I never did this before because I didn’t want to have to remember dates and locations — now I don’t.
– The app is gorgeous, even for how blue it is.
– The power of the app is in the simplicity of the app. It is just about journalling, not any other social muckery.
– It’s on my home screen. I had used it for about a week before I had to clear off another app from my home screen to get Day One on there. This is big for me, because it really does take a lot to get on my home screen. ((Fun note: since taking this site behind a paywall I ditched having Ego on my home screen and replaced it with the WordPress app for fixing my typos.))
I have never been a person that keeps a journal. I always thought it would be great to be that kind of a person, but I never enjoyed doing it. With Day One I am really enjoying journaling.
One wish: I wish that the app had some sort of analytics that could look for keywords in all my entries and then graph my happiness v. sadness over time — that would be pretty neat.
“It’s the thought that Twitter may not be Twitter anymore.” — MG Siegler