August 2011
38 posts
“I used to have a rule of thumb as an audiophile—your stereo should never cost...”
– Mike Johnston, The Online Photographer
Connected Disconnect →
Stephen M. Hackett on the growing phenomenon of being with someone and yet not being there at all:
At the restaurant, there were — as you could imagine — several tables with large, multigenerational families enjoying brunch after church. At many of these tables, the kids weren’t talking with their parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents, however.
They were glued to iPod touches.
Some of the...
That truck driver you flipped off? Let me tell you... →
Via kottke:
Let me tell you a little about the truck driver you just flipped off because he was passing another truck, and you had to cancel the cruise control and slow down until he completed the pass and moved back over.
His truck is governed to 68 miles an hour, because the company he leases it from believes it keeps him and the public and the equipment safer.
The truck he passed was...
“Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking,...”
– Warren Buffett, in an editorial for the New York Times
What's wrong with PC manufacturers →
Jason Cross makes an apt observation at PC World:
Several times a year, I have meetings with major PC manufacturers about their upcoming product lines, and the tenor is always the same: “Our customers told us this is what they want, and our market research says this is what people are buying, so we made this great product to address that market!”
…
The real irony here is that their marketing...
“The problem with PC manufacturers is not that they can’t build a computer as...”
– Jason Cross, PCWorld
“God’s Blog” →
Paul Simms in the New Yorker:
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.
The comments are spot on.
via Little Brown Pen
“Microsoft.com is a terrible website” →
Ben Brooks:
Bill Gates in an email to Jim Allchin from 2003 describing his experience trying to download and install Moviemaker from Microsoft’s website:
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package
Can you imagine getting an email...
Why sequences of words picked at random make... →
Good followup article from AgileBits to the comic I posted earlier:
The strength of a password creation system is not how many letters, digits, and symbols you end up with, but how many ways you could get a different result using the same system.
via Practically Efficient
Kieran Healy's Weblog – Text Editors in The Lord... →
Kieran Healy on text editor analogies:
Emacs: Fangorn
Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of ancient shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.
via...
Birds-eye view of 6,000 airports →
I didn’t look at the rest of the page, but zooming in and out of the satellite views was incredibly fascinating.
via BoingBoing
Tiled Terminal Windows →
I’m going to try this tomorrow.
One of my complaints with the default Mac OS X Terminal app is that you can’t split the Terminal screen, instead you have to open two windows. Well, this must have annoyed some other developers too because iTerm2 aims to address this problem.
The Five Food Groups →
via Little Brown Pen:
Bread Cheese Fruit Pastry And another pastry
"Junk Jack" →
Sounds like a great game.
“That’s why, for example, we have implemented a simple yet effective mail system that allows the player to craft his own mailbox and use it to accept fun quests asked from various people which need to retrieve their lost items, providing rewards in exchange.”
Pixbits tells us that the mailbox is just the beginning of some sort of quest line — the studio will continue...