February 2012
1 post
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Tumbling on success →
Tom Cheshire’s article How Tumblr’s David Karp built a £500 million empire is a good retrospective of how my favorite blogging platform grew to have more page views than Wikipedia or Twitter.
Having raved about and avidly used Tumblr since it first appeared, I can say he gets the facts right, as I know them, while telling me more I didn’t know about the history of a favorite...
January 2012
7 posts
2 tags
Duck Duck Go →
I set this as my default search engine a couple weeks ago, and have rarely missed Google.
“More instant answers, less spam, real privacy”, results ordered without bias.
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“A search engine should be designed to send users quickly and accurately away to...”
– John Gruber
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“For a long time, illegal file-sharing has been a powerful market and promotional...”
– Frédéric Filloux
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App Producer
THEM: So, what do you do?
ME: I develop software.
THEM: Software?
ME: iPhone apps.
THEM: Oh! I’ve got this great idea…
ME: [listens patiently]
THEM: So, you’re a programmer?
ME: No.
THEM: So, you’re a designer?
ME: No.
THEM: What do you do then?
ME: A lot, actually.
source: http://DavidBarnard.com/post/9673929463
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“The solution to piracy must be a market solution, not a government intervention,...”
– Tim O’Reilly, publisher
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A threshold paywall… is the commercial equivalent of the National Public Radio model, where sponsors reach all listeners, but direct suport only comes from donors… Newspapers with thresholds now aspire to NPR’s persuasiveness.
- Clay Shirky
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fanboy
|noun| a derogatory term that means someone who is blindly and irrationally devoted to a product that I believe is inferior to what I bought when faced with a similar choice, and whose opinions and arguments can therefore be completely disregarded.
(according to Marco Arment)
December 2011
11 posts
1 tag
“How would you do it differently if the building were burning down?”
– Seth Godin
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“Why bother going to a meeting, if you’re not prepared to change your mind?”
– Al Pittampalli
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CLIENT: You should have indicated a problem with the app sooner.
CONTRACTOR: It was only just made available to me at launch. As soon as I saw the problem, I flagged it.
CLIENT: But you should have looked for a problem sooner.
CONTRACTOR: I just saw it for the first time. I wasn’t involved with the project until now. You just hired me.
CLIENT: That’s not true - I sent you an e-mail three months ago about it. Where I said I found someone to make the app at a lower price. Remember?
CONTRACTOR: I think so. How’d that work out?
VIA: http://ClientsFromHell.net
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Mr. Sulu's Rules for Living
1. Show up 2. On time 3. Work hard 4. Be kind
I do wish many of my students understood just how far the first three of these rules will get you. Number four is a bonus, and at the least should always be practiced DOWN: be nice to office staff, building service workers, groundskeepers, wait staff, and the like, since they are essential and doing what are quite often terrible jobs. Sycophantic...
5 tags
As web ads become more and more annoying...
“I’m doing the majority of my reading in RSS and Instapaper where I can read in peace without being pummeled by distractions.”
- Rian van der Merwe
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inches are for printers
There’s only one situation in which inches are a useful measure of digital images: when you print them. We measure the size of the paper it is printed on, such as a 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of letter-size paper, or a 4 x 6 inch photograph.
While the quality of a printed image can be measured by counting how many dots-per-inch (DPI) were used to print it. Dots-per-inch means what is says: 300 DPI...
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count the dots
A lot of folks get confused about how to measure the visual size of photos and other images that are created or viewed on their computers.
The simplest way is by counting how many pixels (tiny dots) were used to make that image. A thumbnail-size photo, like those in your Friends List on Facebook, might only be 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels high. The video you watch on YouTube might be 560 x 315...
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“Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone...”
– Andy Baio
#art #quote
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bargain apps I actually want
Having concluded that the two best calendar applications for the Mac seem to be BusyCal and Fantastical… Having realized that they can each be used alone, or in combination with the other… Telling you that they can also be used with or instead of iCal or Outlook… Planning to synchronize my professional and personal calendars to “the cloud”, using BusyCal…
I was...
2 tags
“calling the Web ‘dead’ because apps make more money is like reading...”
– Doc Searls (paraphrased)
November 2011
8 posts
3 tags
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Pub Rules →
“if I were to run a publication, I’d have a few rules… just avoiding stuff that’s stupid, but that lots of publications do.”
Brent Simmons - 23 November 2011
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“I know my father would have understood it. But his father? I don’t think...”
– Dave Winer
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“We lacked the ‘benefits’ of age and experience. We didn’t know...”
– Ed Roberts, who DID invent the first personal computer
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“For most people, every other computer in their life feels like work, and they don’t need another one.”
- Marco Arment on Amazon’s Kindle Fire
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The Mystery of Jobs
A Facebook friend is curious why Steve Job’s life has gotten so very much attention, with his untimely death. This was my personal response:
As a lifelong student of history and technology, I’m fascinated by Jobs, because historians yet unborn will be writing about him (and school children will read about him) the way we still study Edison or Ford. Although human advancement is a...
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“Apple undertakes major new initiatives only after figuring out a new way that...”
– John Gruber
October 2011
1 post
4 tags
WatchThis is the future.
September 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Your Toddler's Personal Computer
I can’t think of any reason to teach little children to use a Windows or Mac computer. Introduce them to the future with a truly personal computer: iPad.
Why not teach them to use a “real” computer? Well, why not teach them to use a typewriter? Looking at the combination of hardware and software which we’ve come to think of as a normal computer, I think it will feel like...
4 tags
QuickBooks for Mac 2012
If you’re already using QuickBooks for your business accounting, it may interest you to know that Intuit is about to release a new version for Mac (as others have reported).
It’s too soon to see actual reviews of this application, but I haven’t heard anything about Intuit fixing the biggest problem with QuickBooks: lock in. QuickBooks provides no real export option for your...
August 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Watch“Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.” - Steve Jobs
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What's the difference between an idea and an...
An idea is something you can write about in a science fiction book. An invention is when you build something that people (who read about it in the science fiction book) said was impossible.
- Seth Goden
You’re not making money from your ideas — you’re making money because of them.
- Doc Searls
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
“It isn’t until a technology becomes boring that it becomes truly useful....”
– Dave Winer
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“If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my...”
– Marco Arment
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Who is the customer?
Who’s Google’s customer? You? Really? When’s the last time you paid Google for anything?
Advertisers are Google’s customer. What do they sell to advertisers? They sell you. Or, at least, they rent you out, or provide access to you.
- Mike Elgan
If you aren’t paying for it, you aren’t the customer. You are the product. Keep this in mind, as you use and rely on free services...
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“Find things that you’re attached to that are slowing you down, realize...”
– Seth Godin
June 2011
8 posts
2 tags
LMGTFY →
Did you check a search engine before you asked a human to be your search engine? You’d be surprised how often people ask people for help where much better answers are available in writing.
- Dave Winer
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“When we speak of the future we cannot escape speaking of the present. We are...”
– Kevin Kelly
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Browsers should be like the lens in my glasses. If you’re thinking about it, your attention is in the wrong place. You use a browser to look through, at other things.
— Dave Winer
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Accelerate Android With Tips and Tricks →
12 tips you should know, if you own an Android phone.
(by Paul Boutin)
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“we now live in a world where Apple hardware is not only better than...”
– Brian S. Hall
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When it comes to making money online: ideas are cheap, and development has never been easier; it is viable and sustainable business models which are scarce.
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What's so great about being right?
In the mid-90s, Apple Computer’s financial reputation was in the gutter, with stock selling for under $20 per share — and I told anyone who’d listen that it was undervalued and they should buy. At the time, all of my own “spare” income went to paying my son’s tuition, in the liberal belief that a good education was essential for his future. As confident as I was in...
3 tags
WatchThis is the future I was promised in elementary school.
May 2011
5 posts
1 tag
“Too often marketers take a product and try to invent a campaign. Much more...”
– a marketing lesson from the apocalypse
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Keys to the cloud castle →
A clear and reasonable explanation of how and why your online storage is or isn’t private, starting with:
CONSIDER the purchase of a home in two adjacent gated communities. Both have houses with truly impregnable locks. In one community, whenever you need to enter your house, you visit the management office and show your driving licence. A guard walks you to your home, and lets you in...
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"But how did you get onto the internet before... →
One day (a friend) printed out a high resolution image on photo paper and left it on the coffee table. He noticed his toddler come up and try to unpinch the photo to make it larger, like you do on an iPad. She tried it a few times, without success, and looked over to him and said “broken.”
What does it mean to grow up in a digital world? Here are a few anecdotes told to Kevin Kelly.
April 2011
3 posts
3 tags
“A company starts off scrappy, and against all odds, not only does it vanquish...”
– Dave Winer