Congratulations! You bought a big, fancy, expensive SLR camera. You’re fighting the camera phone movement and are making physical sacrifices in order to capture better images. Well done. But you’re probably holding it wrong. Wrong See how my thumb is under the lens? This makes for poor support of the camera. Try this, and then [...]
Mosh is a modern remote terminal application. You can literally slam your laptop lid shut in the middle of a session, re-open it, and be right where you left off. IP address change? No problem. Laggy connection? No problem. It’s super responsive, even on a slow mobile connection.
“I hereby resign as CEO of Apple.” Those words, written two days ago by Steve Jobs, shouldn’t hit as hard as they do. Jobs’ health issues have been public knowledge for a long time, and he has taken multiple indefinite hiatuses. But it unsettles me seeing it spelled out as plainly as that (“I hereby [...]
If you are one of the people who creates amazing experiences and unforgettable moments on the web, watch this video. Go ahead, feel proud. You’ve earned it.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land revealed a few days ago the results of an internal Google “sting” to see if Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses Google search result data as a factor in Bing’s search results. Short answer: they do, albeit indirectly. Microsoft admitted as much, though they obviously couched it more delicately. In [...]
I get asked this a lot: “should I buy an iPad or should I buy a Kindle?” The TLDR; answer is: no, you should buy both. When the iPad was announced, I immediately thought “LCD? Well that will be crap for reading.” Actually, it wasn’t half bad… for about ten minutes. The next ten minutes [...]
Atticus seems to get bigger every day. Here he is a week ago in Savannah, GA.
By popular request, some more photos of Atticus, ranging from 8 weeks old back to his birth day.
Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support. The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god [...]
Cory Doctorow wrote a scathing critique of the iPad. Well, not so much a critique of the iPad as a critique of the future of sealed-box, sealed-ecosystem computing that it portends. We should have seen this coming with the iPhone, but somehow we didn’t grasp the impact of making the screen roughly six times bigger. [...]
I’m no designer. Does someone with a bit of design sense want to take a stab at the above concept? Done right, I could see it as a fun t-shirt for WordPress contributors to wear. There are some other fun things you can play with, notably the fact that “web” starts with a “W.” What [...]
Automattic announced VaultPress, a WordPress backup and security service, in private beta. Sounds wonderful, even if the proposed price of $30 USD a month is way too high (especially if that is per blog).
Robot Touchscreen Analysis. This matches my real world experiences. The iPhone has uncannily accurate touch screen performance. Everything else seems like you’re trying to coax it into recognizing where you touched. This is a huge deal. One of the biggest reasons the iPhone feels so right is that it feels as if you are directly [...]
Back in November I made my first-ever trip to New York City with Sarah for WordCamp New York 2009. I’ve been backed up on my photo workflow, but am gradually catching up. Here are my New York photos at long last. I’m trying to move away from Flickr towards something I can control. I’m also [...]
This is my answer too. Another shareholder urged the company to consider more women for executive and board positions; Jobs said it’s Apple policy to look for the best people, and that sometimes they’re women and sometimes they’re men. Macworld People say “consider more” when they often really mean “preferentially hire.” Kudos to Jobs for [...]
Mark Pilgrim elucidates what is so upsetting about the Apple iPad to people like us who grew up tinkering on their computers, in Tinkerer’s Sunset. Our children are going to grow up in pristine computing jails that both legally and technically thwart attempts at tinkering.
The Phylomon Project merges my main area of interest (web publishing, generally; WordPress, specifically) with that of my wife (zoology). It’s an open-source real-life-animals Pokémon-esque card project, using user-submitted art. I love it.
Tina Daunt: The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality. This well-written piece makes me almost sad to be putting Kubrick out [...]
Finally, Apple is going to ditch their Windows CE-based point-of-sale devices and replace them with specialized iPod Touch devices for use in their flagship stores. Next, the handheld checkout devices will be swapped out for specially-equipped iPod touches. A new scanner accessory will interact with point-of-sale software on the iPods. When iPhone OS 3.0 came [...]
The new 27-inch Apple iMac reportedly puts the WiFi antenna behind the plastic Apple logo to get the best reception (the rest is aluminum). Brilliant fusion of form and function.
I was rather pleased with how this shot came out. Shot at 50mm, f/2, 1/60s, ISO 2200 on a Nikon D700. Full set soon. More photos:
Derek Powazek on SEO experts: The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web.
Fake Steve Jobs: Anyway, I need some code assistance from someone who understands the frigtarded mess that is the Blogger infrastructure. Do such people even exist? Or have they all long ago fled to WordPress? Heh. Update: Looks like FSJ switched to WordPress.
I’ve probably been to San Francisco half a dozen times or more, but it wasn’t until this past July that I finally saw the Golden Gate Bridge from any reasonable distance. It gave me an excuse to play with my then-new Olympus E-P1 Digital PEN. I was really impressed with the result… it produces great [...]
WordPress made a cameo in the latest xkcd comic.
Anil Dash on the vociferous criticisms that people heap upon tech pundits: It would seem the more effective form of criticism is obvious, effective and relatively easy: Just do better yourself.
Simon Willison has a rather important question about the pending Yahoo!/Microsoft search partnership that will see Microsoft’s Bing engine powering Yahoo searches.
James Kendrick calls laptop users out on their mostly-irrational fear of running out of juice: Cut the Cord—Use That Laptop Without Plugging In. I have observed mobile workers for years and it is uncommon to see one working on a laptop in a mobile venue without plugging into the nearest available outlet. I have asked hundreds [...]
Anil Dash on the technology that could finally usher in realtime push data over the web: The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real.
I typed up my Aperture photo workflow for Digital Photography School: 8 Steps to Developing a Better Workflow in Aperture.