The Verge’s Russell Brandom on what, at first blush, looked like a security hole in Google Photos: when you right-click an image, you get URLs that appear to be fully public and accessible by anyone. It’s not as big a deal as it seems:…
Ben Thompson makes a good point in today’s Stratechery Daily Update (paywalled) about Tim Cook’s privacy stance, and his comments about Google’s business model that I previously and half-jokingly described as “throwing shade”. Thompson…
Elliot begins thus: Yesterday afternoon, I realised that I wasn’t wearing my Apple Watch. In fact, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been wearing it for the entire day. It was back in my bedroom, still attached to its charger and very much…
The best analysis I've read so far of Beam's announcement that they'll be diluting Makers Mark due to increasing demand. Makers is currently 90 proof, which is, like, the bare minimum alcohol content a bourbon needs to be taken halfway…
Susan Crawford for Bloomberg: The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and…
If nothing else, my blog post on configuring multiple Google Apps domains on a single account just got a lot more useful.
evangotlib: I bought a Microsoft Surface yesterday. Long story, don’t ask why, it wasn’t for me. This is the story of the purchase. It started with a phone call to the Microsoft Pop-Up store at the Shops at Columbus Circle… Evan: “Hi, do…
Finally. FYI, new Firefox builds support the proposed new dppx unit for resolution media queries, so if you want to target this new Firefox for serving hi-dpi images, use this:
He calls it the best computer he's ever used. And he's a hardcore Mac Pro devotee, one of those guys who wants a 12-core monstrosity at home and the tiniest possible Air on the go. Last week work surprised me with an upgrade to a…
The Verge: Microsoft's Windows 8 Pro software will be priced at $199 after a promotional price of $69.99 expires on January 31st 2013, according to one source familiar with Microsoft's plans. The software maker will also offer a Windows 8…
Paul Haddad explains what Twitter's new guidelines (which I discussed a bit in my last post) mean for the future of Tweetbot. If the title wasn't enough indication, while Haddad doesn't sound thrilled, in short they're not worried about it.
Anil Dash polishes Michael Sippey's pre-announcement of Twitter's new API v1.1, which has the entire internet throwing a tremendous (if possibly justifiable) hissy fit: We have awesome news for Twitter developers: Today we're announcing…
OMFG. This isn't just an interesting move, it was probably the only way the TextMate 2 story could end, apart from the whole project—and TextMate's six-year legacy as the first great OS X-native editor—being abandoned and dying out.…
Steve Klabnik writes about how the popular pattern of using object factories (via a library such as FactoryGirl or Fabrication) to build and save objects in tests has, in his opinion, set Ruby testing practices back two years or more. I…
Those are four words I never thought I'd use in the same sentence, unless that sentence went on to say "will never happen". Announced today at Google I/O, Chrome is — like nearly every other third-party browser for iOS — just a wrapper…
Finally. Podcasts is a standalone podcast-listening app similar in concept to Instacast, only instead of 99 cents this one costs nothing. And being from Apple, it's officially the only podcatcher or music app on the App Store that can…
I've been beta testing this new version for weeks, and pretty much everything Blanc writes is accurate. This is a major upgrade that makes reading RSS feeds on your iPhone a lot nicer. Available now on the App Store for $3; current users…
Sure sure, yesterday's Apple announcements — iOS 6, Mountain Lion, the new MacBook Pro with Retina display — were really cool and amazing and all that. But what really made me jump out of my chair with excitement was the news that…
Hell yes. I've been beta testing Coda 2 for a few weeks — it's a fantastic update, still very much the same Coda I've enjoyed using for years, but totally cleaned up and refreshed. It's still the best way to edit static/PHP web sites on…
Dan Benjamin responds to his pal John Gruber's decision to move The Talk Show to Mule Radio Syndicate, away from Dan's 5by5 network (and, obviously, away from Dan). I don't really have a dog in this fight, unlike some other people who…
Exactly what it says.
Jeff Atwood writes about the deeply frustrating "everyone should learn to code" movement, which also frustrates me because it feels symptomatic of a broader trend: a general cultural focus on how software is made over why we make it. So…
The NYT's Kevin Roose lives like the 1% for a day, and reports back: I’m outfitted for the day in a navy pinstripe suit, picked out by Clifton C. Berry, who outfits Wall Street workers with his own line of bespoke menswear. It’s probably…
Or: "Multi-tasking: Threat, or Menace?" Tony Schwartz writes: What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our…
Ryan Tomayko on how he manages engineers at GitHub: I actually don't show people how to make decisions and ship product in any real direct way. There's no How To Ship Product training class or anything like that. Instead, I just do work.…
Matt Bai tells the long, sad story of last summer's initially promising but ultimately failed debt negotiations between John Boehner and the White House. In short, it seems the main reason Obama administration should have been less eager…
Om Malik: Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and…
David Weisman in Seed, on a surprising overlap between what Buddhism teaches and science observes: Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we…
You know this acquisition is different because Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post about it: For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even more closely…
I agree with most of this. In my experience, pair programming is very useful as an occasional tool for transferring knowledge (i.e., when one developer knows a lot about something another developer needs to know a lot about). Other than…
This in response to recent reports of employers demanding access to job seekers' private Facebook profiles. In a blog post, Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, spelled out why demanding a social network password is an even bigger…
Josh Fischel talks to Hilary Beth Hendel, a psychotherapist who worked as a "mental health consultant" on the first four seasons of Mad Men, about why the show feels so real: One of their early discussions focused on an idea Weiner had in…
USA Today reports that employers have moved past requiring job candidates to friend their HR managers, to requiring access to their private news feeds and profiles as a condition of employment: Asking for a candidate's password is more…
UI designer Louie Mantia, whose "Andy's Room" background I use on literally all of my devices, has started upconverting his wallpapers to Retina format. Only a few of them have been done so far, including all of the ones in the slideshow…
Mislav Marohnic: Apple’s staff can design the magical gadgets you have in your hand. They can even program all the software, and run the services such as iCloud and Siri in the U.S. But they can’t produce the hardware fast enough and…
John Gruber: Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple, and the journalism of the New York Times and ABC News in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and…
Including a slideshow that explains the whole process of making bourbon. (Mmmm, bourbon.)
In short, Daisey made shit up. Not everything, but TAL aired the piece on the basic assumption that things in it were true that it turns out were not. This weekend's new episode of TAL is a full hour detailing the errors in the original…
Slate's Annie Lowrey looks into the 2009 disappearance of Why the Lucky Stiff, and his impact on Ruby and the world. For a mainstream magazine-style article on programming and developer culture, this was pretty good.
Nice write-up from Mark Dalrymple on a new, very long overdue feature in Objective-C: literal syntax for creating numbers, arrays, and dictionaries. In current Objective-C, to create a NSNumber object you have to write (for example)…
Funny that this Ideas of March thing should happen today, or rather, that yesterday I posted the exact thing I'd have wanted to say today if I'd known we were going to spend today talking about why blogging matters. But, to expand on some…
Really nice explanation/tutorial from Sam Stephenson of one of the techniques used to make the new Basecamp so damned fast. I'll admit I've been reading about "bubbling" vs "capturing" events for years but never really understood the…
Funny how Mozilla's idealistic, world-changing mission has shifted since everything started going mobile. Supporting H.264 will not save them, but they'll look somewhat less ridiculous on their way out.
Gee, that was fast. Guess not enough people were using Oink to oink oinks. In my talk about naming things in January (video), I spent like half an hour trashing critiquing Oink's product naming (hence the "oink oink" joke). Though it's…
Tom Downey, reporting in the Wall Street Journal Magazine on Japanese artisans replicating, then often obsessively improving on, everyone else's fashion and cuisine: Such obsessive—some might say insane—pursuit of perfection, in coffee…
Great critique by Lukas Mathis of the many confusing, non-obvious buttons and gesture controls in iPhoto for iOS. I haven't used the app on an iPad yet, but I found it maddening to use on an iPhone. Not only is the UI as confusing as…
My favorite Markdown writing app for Mac, now available for iPhone/iPad for a introductory price of $2.99. There's iCloud syncing and Markdown preview, but its killer feature so far is its super-nice editing toolbar: you can change…
I'm trying a couple of new things this week: Last week, after hearing John Gruber talk about his Das Keyboard on The Talk Show, I thought it might be (ironic) fun to get my old Happy Hacking Keyboard out of the closet and use it for a few…
A seriously cool new app for web designers who design sites for mobile devices, that lets you preview and inspect your work on many different devices all at once. The demo video is pretty awesome. (via Jason Santa Maria)
A more detailed, thoughtful reaction to Readability's "pivot" away from paid subscriptions: I know exactly who Instapaper’s customers are: the app users. Knowing that allows me to know Instapaper’s motives: make the app users happy. In…
Last Thursday the folks at Readability finally released their long-awaited iPhone/iPad app. Having switched back to Readability for a few days in order to give the app a fair trial, in general I think it's well executed, with high…
Since the first of the year I've been trying to write one of that sort of post where the blogger describes the tools they use. Obviously, I haven't succeeded yet. And what's more, it's taken me until now to precisely identify why it's…
Since almost the beginning, Google Apps has worked like this: Every account has one domain name (let's call it yourdomain.com) that users use to log into their mail/calendars/etc, which Google calls the primary domain name. You set this…
Yesterday I spent a few hours building an elaborate web photo gallery for our wedding photos before my wife and I realized we're more interested in seeing everyone's likes and comments than in building yet another elaborate web thing for…
This week I (re-)discovered that Heroku's polyglot Cedar stack supports PHP. The PHP support was launched a while back in partnership with Facebook, to attract developers of Facebook apps to Heroku's cloud. While it's not listed on their…
As a software developer currently working on a search feature, I understand why Siri falls short. I acknowledge it's logical to expect that an electronic brain capable of understanding the semantic relationship between "broke a tooth" and…
A photographic recap of the late North Korean dictator's life. Related: The creator of the Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things Tumblr blog says he plans to keep going even after his subject's death.
A really nice, simple iPhone interface for the really nice, simple website analytics service from GitHub (who acquired it a couple of weeks ago along with its developers, Ordered List). I tried using their web interface to look at my…
Thank goodness. Now I never have to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
Verge, the new project from the former Engadget editors who left to start their own site after theirs was acquired by AOL, is probably the best shitty gadget rag out there. But it's still a shitty gadget rag, and Ben Brooks wanted more:…
Watts Martin: The key to understanding Paypal is this: Their policies in dealing with their customers are all crafted with the assumption that their customers are out to screw them. It’s not that they don’t want to do business with you,…
Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams: About two months ago, my co-founder Scott [Raymond] and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team…
Mark Richardson, for Pitchfork: "Wicked Game" covers were as common this year as covers of Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" were in 2007. Washed Out's tossed-off take was weak, but something about the Widowspeak's carbon-copy version hit home…
Rick Ungar, for Forbes: [The medical loss ratio, a provision of Obama's Affordable Care Act,] requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect on actual medical care rather than overhead,…
Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS: In a move reminiscent of how Greenpeace harangued Apple for the PR value, MoveOn.org even sent out email encouraging people to sign a petition asking Apple to modify how Siri works, claiming that Siri…
Some of the most mind-blowing language features in popular Ruby libraries/frameworks are made possible through the use of delegate proxies: objects that invisibly intercept method and variable calls in your code and forward them to one or…
People I know who aren't even web people are tweeting and posting about this Little Printer thing. I agree, it looks really, really cute. It's hard to design an electronic gadget with that much personality that doesn't look like a…
Rich Ziade: With this release, Readability is available at no cost. Sign-up and you’ll have your own profile and reading list in no time. Both Readability accounts and our companion apps will always be completely free, but we also offer a…
GitHub's Kyle Neath has had it up to here with recruiters and their shenanigans: Here’s the thing: recruiters do not give a fuck about doing good in the world. They do not care about making people happy. They do not care about building a…
As a developer I spend a lot of time thinking about names, categories, and relationships. And as a product person, I also spend a lot of time trying to look at products from the perspective of someone who (unlike me) isn't steeped in…
Zug is a Swiss canton where low taxes have brought high employment and lots of wealth. It also has real estate prices and cost of living so high that none of its workers can afford to live there: "If you make 300,000 or 400,000 francs,…
Now this is interesting: FontFont have released a series of 14 of their best fonts — including Basic Gothic, Tisa, and Yoga — as iOS-optimized TTF/OTF files, for developers to include in iOS apps. Including a custom font in an iOS project…
I'm excited to announce the following upcoming events, at which I shall talk about nerdy things and answer your questions about said things: ChicagoRuby Downtown, Tuesday 10/4 at 6 pm I'll be giving this month's featured talk at the…
GitHub's lead designer shares some simple tricks that can help anyone build better UIs and presentations.
In my epic-length debut post for the Typekit blog, I explain why we use JavaScript (instead of just CSS) to load web fonts, what our JavaScript does at load time, some of the problems this method helps us solve, and how we've solved them.…
An excellent NYT op-ed by Drew Westen, explaining in narrative/informational terms how Obama has failed to sell, or even adequately explain, his policies to the American public. Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what…
Once again, Michael Lopp says it better than I ever could: Context isn’t just the art of knowing where you are, but the illusory and friction-free belief that you know where everything is. Questions like: “Where is that?”, “How do I find…
Michael Lopp, explaining why the Exposé and Spaces features of Mac OS X never really caught on, and why Apple's completely re-imagined them in Lion: How would you react if, whenever you were wondering where something was on your desktop,…
Matt Gemmell explains one major reason why native apps have an edge on web apps: The calculator web app is running in the frontmost tab of a web browser app, which in turn is running on a smartphone. The device’s screen is no longer…
Our non-cable-having, non-DVD-renting friends will have no further excuses for not caring about who Don's sleeping with, what Joan is wearing, or whether Pete Campbell is a dick.
Paul Krugman: We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that…
Anna Lewis on the Fog Creek blog about women returning to computer science, and why they've stayed away until now: One of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in…
Joseph Cohen gets it: They reversed the direction of mouse scrolling! Crazy! But really, they needed to. With Lion, Apple is trying to change the user experience metaphor that has governed OS design since the 80s. It was a symbolic move,…
The just-released Mac OS X Lion has a lot of killer features, but so far, for me, the most killer is the ability to easily toggle any app that supports it into a distraction-free, full-screen mode. Apple's marketing page for the feature…
Are you tired of hearing about it yet? I'm getting there. There's more chatter about Google+ right now than there is on Google+, and most of what's on Google+ is conversations about Google+. I'm sure Google didn't set out to build the…
Happy Cog's Joe Rinaldi on the obsession with "cool": Cool just happens; it shouldn’t be the target a project tries to hit. I don’t think great work and being cool are mutually exclusive. I think a lot of creative agencies are cool. But…
Hilarious.
In short, he's not (too) worried: If Reading List gets widely adopted and millions of people start saving pages for later reading, a portion of those people will be interested in upgrading to a dedicated, deluxe app and service to serve…
Almost as exciting as whatever comes out of today's WWDC announcements: A Book Apart's newest title launches tomorrow, on how web designs can (and should) adapt to the devices used to look at them, rather than force users to pan, scan and…
There's something a little distasteful about writing an Apple predictions post. Practically, what I'm doing right now is giving one of the richest, best-known companies in the world some free advertising, and at the same time taking an…
M.G. Siegler on why calling Groupon a ponzi scheme misses the point of why they're chasing such an aggressive growth strategy: If you look at the actual breakdown, most of the money is being spent internationally. In the U.S., they’re…
This is big: For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. … For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers.…
The New York Times investigates the strange new phenomenon that is the adult prom. The adult version featured much of the same awkwardness as the high school prom, made only more tolerable with the addition of alcohol. Inside a ballroom,…
On this week's Build & Analyze Marco Arment talks about good and bad programming languages, and building on that, how a good, consistent coding style helps programmers write good, consistent, maintainable code. This is very true, and…
I don't know what's crazier: that someone on Quora asked this question, or that the answers were so detailed and thoughtful: "Well do you mind if I look around the car a little bit?" Well my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in…
Because heaven forbid they figure out how to make useful tools for the Web we have before trying to shove a bunch of print layout conventions into CSS.
A new jQuery plugin for creating ginormous headlines that scale to fit the width of their parent elements, especially useful in fluid or responsive layouts. Just beware: Don't you dare let us catch you using FitText on paragraph text.…
David Chartier and some other folks are worried what this will mean for the Skype user experience on Apple platforms, but they may be overstating the problem somewhat. I mean, could Skype 5 for Mac really get any worse? The Office 2011…
Don't be fooled: Adobe hasn't released a standalone 'Photoshop for iPad' image/photo editing tool, but rather a suite of three add-ons that let you use your iPad as a control pad for Photoshop CS5 running on your desktop computer. Of the…
It's a brand-new (and very, very rough) Mac OS X text editor that wraps a slick GUI similar to the semi-abandoned Espresso around an editing engine with support for TextMate bundles and — this is the crazy part — Vim's editing modes and…
Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera remembers Capcom's early-‘90s NES adaptation of the Disney cartoon series featuring Scrooge McDuck. I straight-up loved this game when I was a kid.
There is no non-nerdy way to talk about this, so non-developers feel free to sit this one out. Pow is a Ruby/Rack application server written in Node.js, with CoffeeScript, by Sam Stephenson. Through a series of small hacks, Pow lets you…
If you develop software on a Mac, you probably need this right now.
Online file storage and backup on Amazon's servers, and if you upload MP3s you can play them from any computer—or at least any computer that has Flash Player installed. There's a 5 GB free tier, and you can buy up to 1 TB of storage…
The rumor mill is saying not to expect a new iPhone to be announced at WWDC in June, even though Apple has announced new iPhone models there three years in a row. It's also saying iOS 5 will be announced (not released) at the show, OS X…
There's finally a date—a Mac-only (no iOS) pilot program launches May 2, and you can sign up today to be invited to the beta when it opens. Cloud syncing will replace, not complement, the existing Wi-Fi sync. For people who still want…
For readers who aren't Chicagoans or beer fans (but who'd get a coffee reference), Goose Island is sort of like the beer version of Intelligentsia Coffee: local, independently owned, way too big to be called a "micro" brewery, but still…
Piling on stupid-sounding ideas, crazy valuations, and VCs in general is a popular spectator sport in tech circles, but—call me naïve—when I heard Color got $41 million in funding for that app, I just assumed there was a good reason, like…
A really nice lightweight PHP app for archiving and browsing your Tweets on your own server. Installed it on my personal site in less than 5 minutes, then lost at least half an hour exploring the stuff I was tweeting about in 2009. For…
In case you were wondering why anyone ever thought Detroit was a compelling target for al-Qaeda: When an admitted al-Qaida operative planned his itinerary for a Christmas 2009 airline bombing, he considered launching the strike in the…
Slate's Jack Shafer reports on how NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger sees readers who try to get around the paper's pay fence and read for free: Can people go around the system? The answer is yes, just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right…
And here's an infographic showing the annual prices of various online subscriptions side-by-side, made to demonstrate one simple point: the New York Times's $455/year all-access pricing is totally insane. MobileMe, Hulu Plus, and Rdio all…
Ars Technica: Numerous owners of the latest 15" and 17" MacBook Pro models have taken to Apple's support forums to report an issue that causes their systems to freeze, with one user going so far as to successfully reproduce the problem on…
Leave it to John Gruber to express everything I wanted to say in a post I didn't get around to finishing about the NYT's "pay fence" plan, only smarter and in more depth. I'd add only my worry that because this pricing scheme is so…
You get 20 articles a month, unless you're following a link from Google, social media like Facebook or Twitter, or from blogs, in which case you can view the linked article for free. If you want to view more than 20 articles a month, you…
Brent Simmons responds to yesterday's baffling announcement by Twitter's platform head Ryan Sarver that third-party developers are now (at the very least) actively discouraged from making new client apps. It's baffling because third-party…
Maciej Cieglowski describes what happened once Yahoo! let it slip they were thinking of shutting down Delicious, and thousands of users all started moving to his competing service Pinboard all at once. Pinboard is a PHP app that Maciej…
It's amazing how every time ABA launches a new title about making websites it feels like an event, one that smart people worth paying attention to are genuinely excited about. Erin Kissane's Elements of Content Strategy is (naturally)…
This is bullshit: under Apple's "new" policy rejecting apps that ask/require users to have a paid subscription, even if the iOS app is clearly a companion UI to a mostly non-mobile product, Readability's app has been rejected. This is the…
If you were wondering "will the stats wizards at OkCupid still write awesome blog posts full of observations based on analysis of their user data now that they've been acquired by Match.com?", it turns out the answer is a definite yes.…
Jonah Lehrer writes for Wired about a statistician who noticed a pattern in the visible numbers printed on scratch-off lotto tickets, and from that was able to figure out how to tell if a ticket was a winner without scratching off a…
Completing his world tour of spectacularly bankrupt European nations, the author of The Big Short asks around about how Ireland went from poverty to "Celtic Tiger" during the real estate boom, then back again when the bubble burst: When I…
So apparently John Casasanta from tap tap tap had a bad experience with a contract iOS programmer. Any sane, properly socialized person in his situation should have followed one of two paths: Sue the guy for breach of contract (they did…
When I was a full-time freelancer, doing agency-type work, a big chunk of my business involved setting up and managing my clients' servers for them. In fact, this was part of my sales pitch to clients. I'm not just going to build you a…
Or maybe not. But you probably at least gave it permission to read those private Twitter DMs you've been trading with whoever, and didn't realize it.
In short: The King's Speech and The Social Network got the most nominations. In The Social Network's case, that includes well deserved ones for Jesse Eisenberg (Actor), Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (Original Score), and of course, David…
Yes, children, Amazon is doing for email what they did for data storage. SES provides app developers with a robust, scalable way to send bulk or transactional emails using a simple, RESTful API. Java or .NET clients are provided; I bet…
Not everyone featured in this Crain's Chicago Business article expected to launch the next Stuff White People Like or Julie/Julia Project. But all of them expected to get at least something out of the time they put into their blogs that…
Oh brother: "There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit," Bentley said. ''But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved,…
Find out with this handy flow chart. And beware the "exposure" of a "good portfolio piece".
Yes, this is an actual product sold to actual humans. The company, based in Panama, also makes a non-alcoholic whisky for the Muslim market, which I think is actually stranger than selling whisky in a can.
Topolsky is the editor of Engadget, a blog Arrington thinks has some kind of vendetta against his own blog TechCrunch, despite the fact that they're both owned by (and part of the same business unit of) AOL. Arrington did a good (where by…
Like many folks I was delighted to hear that not only was Twitter for Mac 2.0 (née Tweetie) still alive, and not only was Twitter Inc. finally behind the project (and not just in the sense of letting Loren Brichter work on it in his spare…
As part of Deadline.com's award season coverage, they interviewed Sorkin about the film and posted a PDF of the complete screenplay. Reading the amazing opening scene—where Zuckerberg's girlfriend breaks up with him—the most notable thing…
This is pretty cool: the NYT have released a new feature that lets you share links not only to individual stories/pages, but also to specific paragraphs or sentences within those stories. To use the feature you just double-press the shift…
Shi Jianfeng was convicted of not paying more than $550,000 in road fees over a period of just eight months. And in addition to his life sentence, he (or, I guess, his family) are also being fined $300,000. The Chinese public and media…
A photo essay featuring some of Detroit's most decaying buildings. Hard to imagine these buildings were full of life just a few decades ago.
Sounds like a lovely place to work: A total fear of failure permeates the ranks. Netflix basically gives you a warning on your first mistake, and then fires you after your second mistake. This is why the annual turnover rate is well over…
Larry David gets to keep his Bush tax cuts, and with all the money he's saving he's gonna start buying real granola: The only problem is if, God forbid, the tax cuts are repealed in two years, how will I ever go back to Special K and…
The NYT discovers teens and young adults, who think the relative slowness and formality of e-mail is "so lame," are texting like maniacs. Facebook's new Messages product (which I've tried out—it's pretty good) tries to adapt to the new…
You know your favorite zombie-apocalypse cable TV drama has become a cultural touchstone when economics bloggers are using it to illustrate a point, as Mike Konczal does writing here about insurance regulation: Speaking at a conceptual…
Yahoo! is laying off a bunch of people in order to better focus on "our strengths (like email, the homepage, search, mobile, advertising, content and more)". Photographer & blogger Thomas Hawk is upset by this new focus, because it…
Includes such popular favorites as Hungover Owls, Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber, Unhappy Hipsters and, of course, Michael Bublé Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.
Planet Money translates the Federal Reserve Board's latest policy statement from Fed-speak to English. For example, when the Fed says this: Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price…
24 Ways, "the advent calendar for Web geeks", is back with an article by Drew McLellan on progressive enhancement for embedded maps. There's always tons of good stuff posted here during the holiday season. Highly recommended for people…
Scrunchup is a "web magazine" (some would call it a "blog") by and for young web professionals, where by "young" we mean "21 or younger". Anna Debenham is one of the founders and wrote a post about her experiences being discriminated…
First Jack Dorsey was CEO and Ev Williams was chairman. Then Ev took over as CEO and Dorsey became chairman. Now Dick Costolo has been promoted to CEO, Ev is just a "co-founder" who's "focused on product", and today Nick Carlson reports…
Less than three weeks after the launch of Rock Band 3, the latest installment in a franchise most of us thought was a smash hit, Harmonix is being put up for sale by Viacom/MTV Games. And Wired's interpretation of Viacom's balance sheet…
Marco Arment's Instapaper iOS app has long been able to switch into a light-text-on-dark-background mode for easier nighttime reading. That's useful, but not so interesting. Other apps, such as Amazon's Kindle app for iOS, do the same…
Short version: teens (and some adults) in high-risk social situations don't like to leave an online history, and don't like anything happening to their profiles when they're not around to respond to them in real-time. Fascinating stuff.
What if a huge internet company developed a software platform for TVs, got some huge device makers involved to make and sell the hardware with a big, splashy holiday-time launch, but forgot to check with the content providers to make sure…
Not at all surprising. I enjoyed watching the show while it was on, and it had a few well-written episodes. But neither the characters nor the season-long mystery ever really came together enough for me to be excited for season two.…
Vanity Fair excerpts Bill Carter's upcoming tell-all book about the nasty battle earlier this year between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, which put Leno back in charge of The Tonight Show only six months after he finally handed it over to…
Gizmodo profiles the Nokia 1100, the 7-year-old model used by more than 250,000,000 people in (mostly) developing nations. It's easy for us here in the first world to mock Nokia for being (so far) a non-participant in the smartphone…
This morning/afternoon, I needed to make a long, long, long overdue change to my dear friend Lucy Knisley's web site. It was a simple change, literally just adding two images to a static HTML file. But I'm me, and that's not heroic…
Tomorrow Apple is opening its second Chicago retail store, more than seven years after the existing Michigan Ave. location. That's seven years of Chicago residents having only one place to line up on iPhone day, only one Genius Bar to get…
Sometimes I really hate reading Paul Graham, even though in the context of Silicon Valley startupland I don't doubt that this essay of his is absolutely right: Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that…
One of MailChimp developers strikes back against programming language elitism: You can imagine the horror and surprise we see when we try to tell a good developer that we use PHP to solve cool and interesting problems. So here’s my best…
Short version: Ben Galbraith and his partner, sex blogger Violet Blue, were using vb.ly as a URL shortener for sexy web content and the Libyan government cancelled their domain registration. Additionally, the Libyans have decided to stop…
The article is full of great anecdotes and insights, mostly from a Michael Lopp/John Gruber panel at SXSW, but the factoid I've been repeating most this week is this one (bolds mine): Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups…
In a nutshell, they'd tried to shard their database by user ID on the assumption that both halves of their database would grow at a similar rate, i.e., that each shard had a similar mix of light and heavy users. But as it turned out,…
Lorrie Moore looks back at the show and its legacy in The New York Review of Books: In exposing the nerves, fallout, and sealed fates caused by a remorseless breed of capitalism and its writing-off of whole swathes of the populace, and by…
Speaking of Condé Nast properties, internet hipsters, and the iPad: Anil Dash describes the all-star team of nerds (Paul Ford! Garrett Murray! Andre Torrez! Liz Spiers! And don't forget: Anil Dash!) who brought Gourmet back as a…
That's what you get for creating one of the most important television series ever made.
Jeremy Toeman and Greg Franzese: Apple is dominating its competition in customer service because the company cares about creating a quality customer experience at every brand touchpoint. And they do this for a reason – it’s called…
Short verdict: You'll like this score a lot if you're a fan of Ghosts I-IV, Nine Inch Nails's calming/haunting instrumental album from 2008. The soundtrack album releases on Sept. 28, but you can get a free 5-track sampler starting today,…
Not surprisingly they're slower, but so cheap they're still worth considering if you can afford to wait a few extra minutes for a job to finish.
The first developer beta of iOS 4.2—the first 4.x release that's compatible with the iPad—is now available to registered iOS Developer Program members. The new software will include a new wireless printing technology called 'AirPrint';…
Of interest to Twitter Platform developers: the new site uses a new version of the @anywhere JavaScript SDK announced at the Chirp conference in April. And the other big Chirp announcement—Annotations, which would allow API developers to…
Nikon's finally announced their new "enthusiast"/prosumer DSLR model (and successor to my beloved D90), the D7000. Features include a 16 megapixel sensor, 1080p HD video, two SD card slots and 39 point autofocus. It goes on sale next…
I totally missed this back in March, but Beanstalk—who've been known until now as strictly a Subversion hosting service—has expanded their offering to include Git repositories as well. From their announcement: It’s our firm belief that…
The new developer agreement and App Store Guidelines are now live on Apple's developer portal. In short: third-party developer tools are fine (but using private APIs still isn't), interpreted code is fine (but downloading it at runtime…
Less than 1/4th the cost of a standard "small" instance, but there are catches: the CPU is "burstable" but defaults to less than one full core, and you get no local storage—your server's filesystem has to live in Amazon's Elastic Block…
Based on Arduino (of course). It polls for updates once a minute, so he can see the needle steadily drop as he marks items read.
He retweets Fitty, then translates the tweet into the Queen's English. For example, when @50cent says Busta still has the best show in hip-hop I'm not shiting on him. And I aint dissing serena either I said i gotta workout!yal be buggin…
FastCompany "expert blogger" Aaron Shapiro says we're in an "app bubble", based on crackerjack analysis like this: Apps don't generate profit for developers. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said, the App Store has generated more than $1 billion…
Backblaze is an online backup service; you install some software on your computer, and it'll continually back up your hard drive to their secure servers. They're a small company, but profitable and growing, and unlike a lot of startups…
280 North's products are: 280 Slides, a web-based clone of Apple's Keynote slideshow app Atlas, a web-based clone of Apple's Interface Builder tool Objective-J, a port of Apple's Objective-C language to JavaScript And Cappuccino, a…
New York Magazine interviews Ira Glass: Times, Post, or Daily News? Times. Please. I'm a cliché. Did I mention I work in public broadcasting?
John Gruber speculates that if Google has become creepy in the last year or two, that may be attributable to the creepiness of CEO Eric Schmidt. Where by "creepy", he means "amoral" and "willing to sacrifice privacy for mobile or ad…
Trendy software engineering management is a lot like trendy parenting, and both are harmful: It strikes me as silliness to think that one can create a universal methodology for something as complex as potty training an individual toddler,…
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released their "Mindset List", a list of some of the cultural touchstones for the new incoming class, so their faculty can better understand their students and know to avoid dated references.…
I didn't leave out a question mark or anything; Graham's not asking what happened to Yahoo, a company whose brightest talents have all left and who's best chance for long-term survival is as a unit of Microsoft. He's telling us it's…
Same basic idea as the 37signals one: $300 buys you a 30-day job listing. If you're a GitHub user, you can opt into seeing targeted job listings on your dashboard by marking yourself "available for hire" in your account settings. Targeted…
Remember how the North Korean soccer team managed to give the Brazil—then considered the world's greatest team—a workout during the just-ended World Cup before being eliminated in the group stage? Remember how some people joked about the…
The latest trend in online dating (according to the NYT): printed calling cards you casually slip to hot strangers you're too nervous to walk over and talk to: Willa Bernstein, 43, who uses Cheek’d, was recently making eyes with a man at…
Tom Vanderbilt in Slate on Hollywood's habit of depicting non-drivers as losers: In The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, for example, Steve Carell is that rarest of filmic creatures: a bona-fide bike commuter, shown pedaling to work, navigating the…
On how it feels, and affects one's thought process, to be granted above-top-secret security clearance: First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you.…
Turns out almost everything you need to know about the differences between these companies can be found out by just looking at how differently they show off their flagship products on the Web. Apple's iMac site is clean, focused, and…
Beautifully designed essay, with charts, graphs and photographs, on the process of using Kickstarter to finance a new printing of Mod's book Art Space Tokyo. Short version: A++, would crowd-finance again.
The Michael Jackson lookalike zombie in _Plants vs. Zombies_—one of that game's best, most surprising enemies—is being phased out on the request of the late King of Pop's estate. PopCap Games's official statement: The Estate of Michael…
Reputation isn't something you can pay for, but a positive BBB rating (apparently) is: The author of the website BBBRoundup went a step further to illustrate just how easy it is for an entity to earn the BBB's seal of approval. He…
Venkatesh Rao on questions that seem important but aren't, like "Who is our customer?" or "How can I lose weight?": They are terrible because they are useless. Asking them doesn’t help you answer them. They won’t help you create a…
The facts are these: right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart published video of Shirley Sherrod, a senior official at the Dept. of Agriculture, boasting over having once discriminated against a white farmer. There was a blogstorm, and the…
The WaPo investigates the impossibly large national security infrastructure built up after 9/11, a monster that employs over a million people (including over 850,000 with top-secret security clearance) and is so disorganized it is…
Next on Crazy Things Banned By Municipal Governments: San Francisco is seriously considering a ban on pet sales (except fish, who don't count) within the city limits: The ban would include mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds,…
All of my biggest iPhone OS feature wishes were, let's face it, pretty boring: Multiple Exchange accounts (or: wanting Google to ActiveSync my calendars without getting cockblocked by work meetings) Unified e-mail inbox And, no kidding,…
As announced on Starbucks's Twitter feed: We're very excited to announce that coming July 1st: Free. 1 click. No registration WIFI at all US locations! 🙂 This is apparently part of an exciting new business strategy for SBUX—"free access…
McSweeney's puts the SEO to some literary classics, thus answering the burning question: what if Faulkner had been writing for Jason Calacanis?
The year: 2007. Filter closes (along with my ex-favorite hot dog joint, Swank Frank) after losing their lease, to be replaced by a Bank of America branch at North/Damen/Milwaukee. Now, Filter wasn't the only place to get a cup of coffee…
This morning I've been writing a longer post about the fact that I've not really been using my iPad as much as I expected. There are a few explanations, some more valid than others. One of them is that I love using Pages to add a touch of…
A few of the major new features had leaked previously, like vocal harmonies (a holdover from Beatles Rock Band), a new instrument (a keytar) and a "Pro" mode that makes playing Rock Band more like actual music. But wait, there's more!…
Flash Player engineering manager Paul Betlem, as relayed by John Mack: First and foremost, Flash Player 10.1 is a full-fledged Cocoa app (though legacy Carbon support remains for some browsers that require it). We now leverage Cocoa…
Nate Silver: Some exciting news this morning: We have reached agreement in principle to incorporate FiveThirtyEight's content into NYTimes.com. In the near future, the blog will "re-launch" under a NYTimes.com domain. It will retain its…
In a nutshell: AT&T is expanding the iPad 3G's fair, easy-to-understand data pricing to their entire network, tethering will cost $45/mo (including the required 2 GB data plan), and iPhones will finally finally finally be able to tether…
Geoffrey Grosenbach is wondering how to bring the URL back into Rails: This epiphany came while writing a few Sinatra applications. The exact URL for a handler sits right in front of my eyes as I write the code for it. I can’t ignore it.…
A delightful PSA from your friends at Microsoft Australia, about finally throwing out a certain 9-year-old browser. Note that this is from Australia—Microsoft's U.S. mothership has never been this direct.
Matt Drance: Right now, every iPhone in the world uses GSM technology, regardless of the carrier. Adding Verizon [who use a different technology, CDMA] would mean building, testing, and forecasting new hardware for a CDMA model. It would…
From David Chartier at Macworld: Chrome for Mac left beta at the rather unceremonious version number of 5.0.375.55. It boasts many of Chrome’s most popular cross-platform features too, including syncing of both bookmarks and browser…
The only sports video game I ever loved is coming back. The new game is being developed by EA SPORTS (in collaboration with the original game's lead programmer/designer), and came about after EA had started planning a different basketball…
John Gruber comments on an interview by John Paczkowski with Adobe co-founder Chuck Geschke, in which the following exchange happened: JP: Why isn't Flash an open standard? CG: It is. What are you talking about? I would like to join the…
Gawker's Ryan Tate e-mailed Steve Jobs to ask him a simple, direct, incredibly inane question: if Bob Dylan were 20 today, how would he feel about Apple's iPad "revolution"? "Revolutions are about freedom," wrote Tate. Jobs, to his…
A welcome surprise: TypeKit, responding to customer feedback, has made some nice changes to their account structure. Full library accounts now can use TypeKit fonts on unlimited domains, and usage limits are measured in full pageviews,…
How is it that House Industries made and released a font/graphics series based on the work of Charles & Ray Eames, and I was not informed?
This guy gets it: When you want to eat, you go to the refrigerator. When you want to listen to music, you go to your stereo system. Completing these actions just requires knowing the locations of the things you want to use. If you want to…
Following a series of events I won't recap here, this morning I launched Echofon for Mac to discover my password had been cleared out and instead of tweets Twitter was sending back a 401 Unauthorized response code. I clicked on the error…
Brian X. Chen tells the inside story of how they found Brian Hogan, and determined he was the guy who took Gray Powell's iPhone out of the Gourmet Haus Staudt.
Remember right before the iPad was announced, when Microsoft was all like, "whoa, dude, hold on there—what about our secret tablet project?" Yeah, that's been cancelled. (Though they say technically they never planned to ship it as a…
Blast from the past: The interesting part is Odeo still exists, and Williams is still CEO. So what’s he doing to fix these mistakes? Not refunding the VCs their investment, that’s for sure. And not even trying to earn revenue; Williams…
The guy who originally found Gizmodo's infamous iPhone 4G prototype has spoken: Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, says although he was paid by tech site Gizmodo, he believed the payment was for allowing…
Selected portraits taken during the MoMA's exhibit of performance artist "Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present", posted to MoMA's Flickr stream. The artwork, in a nutshell, consists of Abramović sitting at a table in silence, where…
From back in 2008: the story of how black drug dealers from Baltimore came to use a crazy legal defense first developed and employed by white supremacists in the 1970s: A few minutes after 10 a.m., United States District Court Judge Andre…
Daniel Jalkut: Twitter’s 140 character limitation beguiles and infuriates its users. At its best, it forces users to come up with the most concise, purest of language expressions for their thoughts. At its worst, it leaves users “just a…
The boss speaks: Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever…
The Boy Scouts of America now offer 'Video Games' awards for Tiger, Cub and Webelos Scouts. Among the criteria: With your parents, create a plan to buy a video game that is right for your age group. Compare two game systems (for example,…
Think your office is too reliant on PowerPoint decks? Could be worse, you could be trying to manage U.S. military operations: Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of…
First thing I thought when I saw this: "huh, so for all that trouble Gizmodo only beat the iPhone 4G announcement by what, 7 weeks?" (It's expected Steve Jobs will announce the next iPhone at WWDC, as he's done the last two years in a…
I'm not usually a fan of Amy's, but she is crushing it with her new blog. It's worth noting (since it's related to the linked post) that Le Corbusier's theories of what housing should be are why we have housing projects like Chicago's own…
Last night I had the following brief Twitter exchange with a fellow about the whole Gizmodo-stolen iPhone affair: ddemaree_old: @esoneill @chartier Property != information. If the seller had sold them photos of the stolen iPhone, they…
There's a lot golden in this interview with Pixar president Ed Catmull, but the thing I want to highlight is this bit on the idea of honesty as "an abstraction easy to ignore" in the creative/collaborative process: They don’t want to walk…
On its face, the Double Down looks disgustingly unhealthy. But how does it really compare in a world of Thickburgers, Angry Tendercrisps and Triple Baconators? FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver took a break from politics to do some math and…
Yesterday was the iPad's launch day. It's a new beginning, and the consensus so far seems to be that the iPad really is a new kind of device, that the future of computing will look more like this magical multi-touch gadget than the clunky…
Zach Holman hypothesizes that the iPad's lack of multitasking as we know it — its single-window UI paradigm — isn't a bug, or just a feature, but the secret sauce that makes iPhone OS apps so tasty. You play differently when you're on…
Derek Sivers on how consideration and civility go completely out the window when strangers talk to each other over the internet: Last week, one of her clients sent her a 10-page-long scathing email, chopping her down, calling her a scam…
Jonah Lehrer discusses some of the latest research on the effect of long commutes on happiness. It won't surprise you to learn that the effect is not positive.
Newly updated: a list of financial crisis literature, ranked by the number of F-bombs. Interestingly the F-bombiest two — Michael Lewis's The Big Short and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail — are also really the best two.
Clay Risen found the ten best weatherman names in America. The intro: Think of every TV news team you’ve ever watched. Lead anchor: John, vaguely Midwestern, definitely tanned. Co-anchor: Julie the Blonde/Vaguely Asian or Hispanic.…
Geoffrey Grosenbach: If I had no experience with computers and were to guess which group of people had the best software tools to do their job, I would guess “computer programmers.” And if I were to guess what task would have been…
I've only used the app for 5 minutes, and it's obvious how much thought they put into the design. The feature set and presentation are exactly right; when I say they left room for improvement, I mean they did a great job and left me…
Never let it be said Apple's CEO doesn't use his own products: for the second time recently an Apple customer reports having gotten a one-word e-mail answer to a question from Jobs himself. The latest question: will the iPhone OS get a…
Most people wouldn't even think of file management as a feature of traditional computers; files are just always there, like grass or rocks, part of the landscape. It's not just that filesystems are ubiquitous. From a technical standpoint,…
This story has made the rounds as an example of how Randy Michaels is crazy. And yeah, I'll grant that distributing weasel-word 'bingo' cards and asking Tribune employees to rat each other out just because of the CEO thinks making his…
Not only can you now [pre-order][ippo] or [reserve][ipr] the iPad, Apple has updated their site with some fresh info about the device. The biggest news is about the iBooks app: yes, it will support DRM-free ePub books from any publisher,…
Breaking news: Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in…
The conservative Tea Party movement so dominates the Google rankings, it's becoming harder and harder to find information pertaining to actual tea, y'know, the stuff you drink. From the Tribune: "I certainly can see and have seen some…
And before you go assuming this came out of their little video embedding disagreement with the label: A word on Capitol/EMI: Neither our lawyers nor their lawyers have any hard feelings and, in fact, the split has been remarkably…
If you hadn't heard, Valve is expected to announce Portal 2 this Tuesday at GDC. GameInformer's upcoming cover story on the new game leaked over the weekend, and the helpful folks at the Portal Wiki scanned and transcribed it. The whole…
Ars Technica editor-in-chief Ken Fisher, following up on a failed experiment in blocking users of ad-blocking software from the site: As ad revenues go down, many sites are lured into running advertising of a truly questionable nature.…
Jeremy Stoppelman, on the Yelp company blog: We'll be the first to admit that, by conventional standards, Yelp can seem weird. We're different than other review sites and that can throw people off. The main basis for confusion: Yelp has…
That's just the regular Wi-Fi model; Wi-Fi + 3G ones aren't out until "late April." Both versions will be available for pre-order (either for shipping, or for in-store pickup at an Apple Retail Store) starting next Friday, March 12. Note…
Would you believe I've never really thought about the freakishly regular shapes McNuggets come in? McNuggets come in three different shapes: "The Boot", named for its boot-like appearance, "The Tombstone", named for its tombstone-like…
Dave Pell: “I Can’t Read Anything Longer Than This Headline” The introduction of the iPad has re-energized an ongoing technology debate. Is it better to have one device that does a whole lot of things, or do certain activities require a…
Nadia Arumugam, for Slate: Not only are expiration dates misleading, but there's no uniformity in their inaccuracy. Some manufacturers prefer the elusive "Best if used by," others opt for the imperative "Use by," and then there are those…
Man vs. Flash-based restaurant website. Guess who wins. (via DF)
So there's this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect: A cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled…
Marco has more self-awareness and discipline than most of us: Instapaper is a one-person operation, and all of its development needs to fit into my free time. I originally made it for myself, because I had a need for it, and I didn’t even…
News flash: Googlers and Gmail users have different ideas of how social software should behave! Says Todd Johnson, Google's product manager for Buzz: We've been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback…
TechCrunch's MG Siegler: KrazyDad was a man on a mission: to show the holes in Foursquare’s check-in based system. And boy did he. To be clear, anyone who has used Foursquare quite a bit is likely well aware of these holes. For example,…
From the helpful dudes at Thoughtbot: thanks to the new internationalization framework in Rails 2.2 and later, ends up you can easily override the text used by relative date/time helpers like time_ago_in_words by just adding some lines to…
If you weren't convinced already that TextMate 2 will never ship, this January 6 blog post from TM creator Allan Odgaard may seal the deal: I got a letter asking me why I didn’t use the 1.0 model for developing 2.0, that is, released 1.0…
Remember those people who left a lot of angry comments on a ReadWriteWeb post that happened to be the first Google result for the phrase “Facebook login?” Well, today's search fail is even better: a blog post that happens to be the top…
Someone in Mountain View has seen that post about the woman auto-followed by her ex one too many times. Google has announced the following changes to Buzz: Buzz is now opt-in, and users who've never turned it on are now given a prominent…
The title of “world’s greatest restaurant” is now really up for grabs. Adrià had already planned to take a 2-year hiatus starting in 2012, but now will be focusing indefinitely on establishing a foundation and culinary academy in Barcelona.
Web designers' worst nightmare come true: Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think…
This could be a thing. She writes: I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive…
So, they don't have any known crashing bugs, and until now haven't seen much need to actually write a Mac-optimized version of Flash Player. Except now they're rewriting Flash's graphics engine, going from a direct port of the Windows…
Here wycats explains not only what's changed in the beta release, but also why it's changed, in a clear, thoughtful way that makes me feel I've been both wrong, and an asshole, about Rails 3. To wit: One of the things that most surprised…
The amygdala, the part of the brain believed to be responsible for fear, is likely also related to the human aversion to loss. Researchers at UCL and Caltech have found evidence that people with damaged amygdalas are willing to make…
I know what you're thinking: "we were still training soldiers to use bayonets?" Apparently so. And apparently, they've even been used this decade: A group of 20 British soldiers near Basra fought off an ambush by over 100 Mahdi fighters…
From Adobe's John Nack, who's this reasonable probably because he works on Photoshop rather than, y'know, that other app: [Adobe's] in the helping people communicate business. We'd all do well to remember that, because it means that the…
Can we seriously say we want him to be responsible about fixing out $8 trillion deficit, then complain that we're not gonna have a Hilton on the moon? No. No we can't.
Jeffrey Zeldman: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to…
Gruber, in discussing the current blogstorm over Apple's continued non-support for Adobe Flash in iPhone OS, touches on why Apple—who certainly have no problem with proprietary technology so long as it's theirs—are being such champs about…
Omni CEO Ken Case: We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and we want to make all of our products available for it as soon as we can. Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product…
Via Salt & Fat: The inventive Spanish restaurant is currently only open for half a year as it is and quite possibly the most difficult reservation in the world. The good news is that he’s compiling everything he learns during his hiatus…
Whoa: While televisions have transformed from bulky and boxy to slim and sleek over the last decade, one thing hasn't changed. The basics of displaying color on TVs still derive from the same three fundamental building blocks: red, green…
Calacanis says it has an OLED screen, a solar panel for recharging, an HDTV tuner and a DVR built-in. He also says there's a Farmville app for the Tablet, that Steve Jobs himself is going to demo it onstage today, and it's "insane." (Note…
The words are the NYT's, but italics are mine: Prison officials said they banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist in gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape. The game could…
Well, maybe. They look real, and they look right. The Tablet could just be a gigantic iPod touch, or this could be a gigantic hoax. 24 hours to go until we find out.
When writing about things I'm passionate about, such as Apple products, I tend to be long-winded in a misguided attempt to demonstrate just how much I know about the subject at hand. This usually results in me spending days crafting a…
The producer of the BBC2 documentary series "How Earth Made Us" visited Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales, a place he describes as "the deadliest place on earth": It's 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been…
Mark Vanhoenacker visits, compares and contrasts two icons of American food—Thomas Keller's French Laundry, and Mickey D's—and finds them to be, in some ways, not all that different from each other: At McDonald's one is not likely to be…
Once again, the math geniuses at OkCupid mined their users' data and struck gold, drawing some interesting connections between message/response rates and profile pics: Now, you’re always told to look happy and make eye contact in social…
The WSJ: Apple has recently been in discussions with book, magazine and newspaper publishers about how they can work together. The company has talked with New York Times Co., Condé Nast Publications Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers and…
It's worth remembering that we didn't end up with a crippled health care bill because Democrats just felt like giving a gift to the insurance industry. It's also because Republicans told them they'd vote for the bill if it got turned into…
While working on a little Rails project this week, I discovered something very interesting (and little-documented) in ActiveSupport: Module.model_name. It's a core extension to support Rails's handling of models as RESTful resources, as…
Chrome (or Chromium) has been my default browser for about two weeks now. (I was using Chromium nightlies, with bookmark syncing and Extensions, until a few days ago when those features trickled down to dev channel builds of reg'lar old…
“If you don’t paying, then I delete files that I send you,” he responded, “I don’t want deleting your web, but it is not fair for me. I know you changing my password and I can’t logging on, but I don’t needing SQL or server password to…