Recent Articles

Shawn Blanc:

Also, after nearly a decade of using Simplenote, I’m giving Bear a try. Bear is, without a doubt, far more polished and sophisticated than Simplenote. But it’s the — ahem — simplicity of Simplenote that has always been its charm.

I loathe Bear, but many like it. Notes is the best Note taking app you can get on iOS, especially if you move between iPads and iPhones.

As a side note: it’s really great to see Shawn back to blogging on his site again.

By the way, we’ve also released 3.2.4 for iPad, which adds some basic shortcutsfor external keyboards. We hope you enjoy these updates!

I didn’t realize this was added, but this makes me very happy. I gave Things shit for a long time, but Things 3 is the best productivity app you can get.

Christina Bonnington:

First, you choose a car—in its case, a pre-owned vehicle less than three years old—and then you choose a monthly mileage package ranging from 500 miles to unlimited. Additional miles add to your monthly subscription cost, but like some smartphone data plans, if you don’t use all the miles you paid for, they’ll roll over to the next month. From there, you schedule a delivery, and the car arrives with everything else included—registration, warranty, insurance, roadside assistance, and maintenance. At the end of each month, you can renew your subscription or return the vehicle.

I’ve said for a while that this is the best way to make cars work as we move towards self-driving. Fastest way to get everyone a self-driving car is if no one owns a car.

This is a solid primer on the how and why of Bitcoin’s value.

Massdrop has my favorite flashlight right now. It’s not very bright, at 110lumens, but it is so close to perfect. It feels amazing in hand and the CRI is great. Highly recommend. $36.99 is a good deal.

Fuck putting this into an iPhone, give me my Westworld phone/tablet.

Christopher Mims:

His example was DDT, a pesticide and probable carcinogen that nonetheless saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in India as a cheap and effective malaria prevention. Today, we can see how one technology, Facebook groups, can serve as a lifeline for parents of children with rare diseases while also radicalizing political extremists.

Interesting set of rules, and the above is from the ‘technology is neither good nor bad, but both,’ section.

Farhad Manjoo:

As I’ve argued before, Twitter has become the small bowel of the American news landscape — the place where the narratives you see on prime-time cable are first digested and readied for wider consumption. It’s no accident that it is President Trump’s social network of choice. And it’s also no accident that foreign powers are attracted to Twitter. According to its recent congressional testimony, Twitter was a primary target of Russian trolls who sought to influence last year’s presidential election; collectively, trolls created millions of election-related tweets, according to the company, some of which were widely cited across the media.

Great update to keep the app feeling perfect with iOS. The new D12 theme is also really great, I think a lot of people are going to love using it.

GORUCK started their deals on all bags (just not black ones) this week. $250 for a GR1 is a fucking steal, I grabbed another one. If you’ve been waiting: get on it. Ranger Green and Steel are both awesome colors.

These are easily the best backpacks money can buy.

Sandy Parakilas:

Facebook is free to do almost whatever it wants with your personal information, and has no reason to put safeguards in place.

That’s got to be a terrifying sentence for any Facebook user.

Keith Collins:

Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.

Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.

This is hardly surprising.

One complaint I kept hearing when people started getting access was: “I can’t see how many followers I have”, or “there’s no one here”. But that’s thinking about it wrong. Micro.blog in my eyes is a platform for openly sharing your content to other places.

That’s why the content starts on my site and get’s pushed to Micro.blog and from there to Twitter. I would hope that this could lead to more services. Let those services fuck around and breach privacy, Micro.blog can remain pure and easy to use. I like that much better.

I have one of these as well, love it.

Melissa Hogenboom:

Misleading by “telling the truth” is so pervasive in daily life that a new term has recently been coined to describe it: paltering.

As noted, this is very common in business.