December 2011
2 posts
The Nebulous Notes Utility Bar and Markdown
I heard Merlin mention Nebulous Notes on Back to Work this week.
I’m a massive Markdown nerd and a reasonably prolific note taker so I’m always looking for the next, great iOS text editor. I’d seen Nebulous in the App Store before, but honestly I’d been a bit put off by the icon and screenshots. It didn’t seem to have the polish of Elements or the simplicity of...
October 2011
5 posts
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson →
I highlighted so many great parts of this biography, that it’s hard to pick just one to share. But this—from the day he resigned as CEO—is quite salient:
When the talk turned to tablet computing, some expressed a sense of triumph that HP had suddenly given up the field, unable to compete with the iPad. But Jobs turned somber and declared that it was actually a sad moment. “Hewlett...
The New Value of Text →
James Bridle:
We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of...
“And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much...”
– Barack Obama
September 2011
4 posts
Ghetto coffee roasting
I heard Shawn and Ben talking about roasting coffee in a popcorn popper on the B&B Podcast. So I decided to give it a shot.
I watch the videos they linked to and quickly started searching for where to buy green beans in Melbourne. I found the CoffeeSnobs Starter Pack which seemed good. They send you four random varieties of green beans to get started with. I then told my wife about the plan...
SEO for Non-dicks →
Matt Legend Gemmell:
I fully acknowledge the value of, and need for, actual SEO; I just think that in many cases, the tactics employed under that title would better be described as Search Engine Manipulation or even Abuse.
I agree with absolutely everything in this article. Make good shit, people will want to look at said good shit. Nuff said.
Do users change their settings? →
Jared Spool:
We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how...
August 2011
4 posts
July 2011
8 posts
Safari Omnibar →
Safari Omnibar is a Safari SIMBL plugin that mimics Chrome’s combined URL and search bar.
I’ve seen a few average attempts at this before, but this works. It works really well.
I switched from Chrome to Safari when I upgraded to Lion, but I was missing this feature. It just makes sense to have them combined.
There’s an installer package that installs the plugin and SIMBL....
Adding to the internet →
Justin Kemp makes things that Google can’t find. Like:
“Plastic six pack holder cat necklace”
Apple Stoer in Kunming, China →
They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.
You crazy, China.
Lamb pasta with mushrooms, anchovies, capers &...
Just made this up, cooked it and ate it. So good.
Ingredients:
350g of lamb chops
Spaghetti
8 or so small mushrooms
Jar of anchovies (in oil)
Jar of capers (in vinegar)
Tube of rosemary paste
Cooking:
Fry mushrooms in butter then put them aside.
Start cooking pasta and frying lamb chops.
Mush up capers and cut up anchovies, then mix them together with the mushrooms. Do this to taste,...
June 2011
4 posts
Why coming first does not always mean winning:... →
Malcolm Gladwell’s job applications were turned down by 14 advertising agencies in his native Canada. Lucky, because since then he’s busied himself with The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and – today – the best talk so far at Cannes Lions.
Here’s Malcolm’s talk, recreated from notes in as close to his own words as possible.
How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at... →
This piece by James Somers about Project Euler really resonates. It essentially describes why I failed maths at school, why teaching yourself is sometimes better than learning from someone else and why I can code now. You just need the right problems to solve.
May 2011
1 post
The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale →
Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother:
A girl is allowed to be crazy as long as she is equally hot. Thus, if she’s this crazy, she has to be this hot. You want the girl to be above this line. Also known as the ‘Vickie Mendoza Diagonal’. This girl I dated. She played jump rope with that line. She’d shave her head, then lose 10 pounds. She’d stab me with a fork,...
April 2011
13 posts
“Unnecessary page cruft is being interpreted as damage and routed around with...”
– Jeffrey Zeldman
“As of May 10, any organisation that signs up for a new [Google Apps] account...”
– Ads not good enough?
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the... →
On the 26th of October 2009 Geocities seized to exist. In between the announcement and the official date of death a group of people calling themselves Archive Team managed to rescue almost a terabyte of Geocities pages. On the 26th of October 2010, the first anniversary of this Digital Holocaust, the Archive Team started to seed geocities.archiveteam.torrent.
On the 1st of November...
Mac vs. PC infographic →
Shawn Blanc:
And waddayaknow? I actually do have some hummus and San Pellegrino in the fridge right now.
FFFFALLBACK - A simple tool for bulletproof web... →
Web fonts are here, sparking an exciting new era in web design. FFFFALLBACK makes it easy to find the perfect fallback fonts, so that your designs degrade gracefully.
Nifty. For some reason the preview is pink, rather than being in the original colours. But it’s an excellent tool for checking what the fallback fonts in your font stack will look like.
A Sledgehammer Called OmniFocus →
Shawn Blanc:
Finding the right tool to keep track of your projects sometimes feels more like a journey than a destination. Many task-management apps have come and gone (some of us have tried them all). But in the past few years, as task-management software has increased its footprint on the Mac, the one app which has stayed in active development and which continues to grow and improve is...
“It’s in ALL CAPS because our lawyer said it had to be.”
– Typekit Terms of Service
The ALP Afterlife →
Excellent article by Julian Morrow in this months Monthly.
The après-MP activities of these Labor figures stand in stark contrast to the predicament many faced when the parliamentary pension scheme was introduced by Ben Chifley in 1948.
Après-MP is definitely the best word I’ve read this week.
An especially grotesque feature of the system is that it effectively creates an...
100% Natural. Who needs implants? How tissue... →
Sharon Begley in the November issue of WIRED:
…a discovery in tissue engineering, a process that could well be one of the most momentous medical advances of the 21st century: the use of stem cells—specifically stem-cell-enriched adipose (fat) tissue—to enhance, heal, and rebuild injured or damaged organs.
Moar boob.
Gmail Labs: Smart Labels →
I turned this on a month ago when it was released.
I only just realised I’ve had far, far, far less shit in my inbox. I already had filters to get rid of some stuff, but this just got rid of all the crap.
Do yourself a favour.
Merlin Mann at Webstock 2011 - Scared Shitless:... →
Watch it. Also check out the other talks. I’m still amazed conferences put the talks on the interent these days. Sounds like this one was well and truly worth going to though.
March 2011
10 posts
“Take off your shoes: you’re going to need more than just your fingers to count...”
– Gruber
WatchMr Scribble, the man from Footscray
Haven’t laughed that hard in a while.
via Adam Morris
Why Do eBooks Cost So Much? A Publisher's... →
Publishers still have to pay for acquisitions, royalties, editorial development, copyediting, cover and interior design, page composition, cataloging, sales, marketing, publicity, merchandising (yes, even in a digital world), credit, collections, accounting, legal, tax, and the all the usual costs associated with running a publishing house.
In addition, publishers have to incur at least three...
How Google should go social
A rumour came out of SxSW that Google is working on a new social network called Circles. I have no idea what this is, but I know what I think it should and shouldn’t be.
It shouldn’t be another Twitter rip-off. And it certainly shouldn’t be a Facebook wannabe with the ability to put people in groups. Facebook already does lists.
What Google should do is add recommendations based...
Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD →
From the July 2007 issue of Rolling Stone.
Amazing life. Aside from fueling a generation, he also invented the wall of sound:
After two years of planning and problem-solving, the “wall of sound” made its debut on March 23rd, 1974, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Forty-feet high, it was composed of 604 speakers using 26,400 watts of power supplied by 55 McIntosh 2300s. With nine...
Instapaper’s Arment: Seek Money From Customers,... →
Arment said his paying users have surprised him with their support. He started a $1 a month subscription plan in October that didn’t actually offer much in the way of extra features. It was more of a way to let users show their support for Instapaper. He said the response was overwhelmingly positive.
