See also:
This is one place where the digital age is unquestionably superior. Dropbox, iCloud, email… there are myriad ways to back up your digital writing, and text is easy to search. On the mac, Spotlight gives you great search across every document you’ve ever written and searching within a document is easy in any text editor. Paper… not so much.
Appcelerator was recently caught extorting one of its free users, and then that users client for £5000, and then others spoke up to say it’d happened to them too.
Initially it looked like it could have either been a bullshit company policy, or just a salesperson lacking in morals. In the end, it turns out to be both, but the response by the CEO is why I would strongly encourage you to never use an Appcelerator product (free or otherwise) for your project.
Cheshire: the collective noun for sidecar motorcycles (alternately known as “hacks”) owing to the extraordinarily high probability of generating smiles in the people they pass relative to all other vehicles.
Usage:
“Upon encountering a cheshire of sidecars one should strongly consider playing the lottery.” or “Wow! There goes a cheshire of hacks.”
Not too long ago I sent out a question. I asked people when, and why, dates were important to them on blog posts. The responses were revealing, both for what they did, and did not contain.
There are some situations where having a date on your blog posts is obviously needed. If you write about anything techy you absolutely need them. I come across tons of sites with perfectly good code examples, that have been obsolete for years. Ditto for how-to’s related to software and operating systems. The other place where dates are critical is anything related to news or politics.
I’d like to make a simple offer to the web geeks out there:
One hour of one person’s skills, to make the web a little bit more awesome, and raise $75 for your favorite environmental or medical charity.
Information Architects (the people behind iAWriter) have come up with a really spectacular JavaScript / CSS widget. When you load one of their long articles (like this one) you’ll see a widget in the top right corner that says “Older | Newer” and links you to the previous or next article. No big deal. What’s cool, is that as you gradually scroll through the article the widget disappears, then returns, hovering beside your scroll bubble (wherever that may be in its track); its message now telling you how many minutes it’ll take you to finish the article, at an average reading speed. When you get to the bottom it reverts back to the “Older | Newer” state.
Something kind-of amazing just happened.
Unglue.it is a really cool site, that I’d never heard of until Amazon decided to stop processing payments for them. Think Kickstarter for freeing out-of print books. They get people to create a wishlist of books they’d like to see released as Creative Commons licensed DRM-free ebooks. They then talk to the authors and publishers of the books people want to find out how much money it would take to “unglue” them. Then they crowdsource that amount.
I just turned down an interview with Apple.
There are a few companies who, when they call with a job offer you’ll respond with “fuck yes”. Apple is on that list for me. And yet…
A recruiter called me the other day. Apple needs someone and my particular skillset and background. It seemed to be a pretty good match, and she’d been looking for a while. An internal tool building kind of job, in a language I enjoy, for a company I admire? Fuck yes. Would you be willing to move? “Fuck yes.”
I’ve just merged the experimental branch of MObtvse into master. This represents a huge update and in addition to the feature list below there’s a nice update to the default theme, great new editor, improved Kudos integration on the admin screen, and a number of more subtle improvements. I’m really happy with the progress I’ve been able to make on MObtvse in my free time, and if you’ve been considering it, now is definitely the time to grab it from Github and give it a spin.
I’ve been a big fan of David Seah’s Productivity Tools for a while now, but when it comes to task management his needs, and mine frequently diverge. As a freelancer he needs to track hours in a way that is totally irrelevant to me. He’s got no-one to answer to but his clients, whereas I’ve got a boss and coworkers who are asking for details on current and past tasks in ways that clients rarely do.
I am an adventurer, a geek, an entrepreneur, an esperantist, and a writer. I’m passionate about about exploring the world and helping people to get out of their cubes and actually live their lives.
You can find out more, including all the latest contact info, at masukomi.org.
