October 2014
Kids think I'm rich
There is nothing you can do to seem more wealthy to a kid than to hand out full-sized candy bars on Halloween.
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There is nothing you can go to appear more wealthy to a kid than to hand out full sized candy bars on Halloween.</div>
Gandhi's letter to Hitler - 1939
![letterFromGandhitoHitler[1]](https://wsrv.nl/?url=media.jonathanfrei.com%2Fv3-archive%2Fmedia%2F2014%2F10%2FletterFromGandhitoHitler1.jpg&w=1100&output=webp&q=85&we)
(via Scripting.com)
Busy Vader
Darth Vader lives a busy life.
Gabi's Yoga Challenge
Gabi is participating in a 30-day Yoga challenge during the month of October. I’ve been in charge of taking most of the photos (for some she sets up the timer or grabs a screenshot from a video). Here are a few of my favorites:
This one is not from her Yoga challenge but is also awesome.
Test flight
I love this scene from How to Train Your Dragon 2. There is such a feeling of freedom and trust.
The movie is very good overall, despite some ham-fisted dialogue. Some of the lines seemed like callbacks to scenes that got cut from the final version.
Napping in her swing
The baby girl fell asleep late yesterday afternoon while rocking in the tree swing in the back yard. She had taken an especially short nap earlier in the day and just nodded off while the boys played.
Illustrations of my family
Well, they’re not really of my family. The illustrations below are by Pascal Campion and are of his family, which happens to have a very similar size and structure to mine. He posts one illustration each day, and I’ve found myself sending Gabi the ones that remind me most of our family.
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Twitter is down
Twitter is down. This is why I think it is important to have my own site. If my site goes down, it’s probably my fault…and I can probably fix it.
Competing views of the future: Huxley vs. Orwell
This comic by Stuart McMillen suggests Aldoux Huxley had a more accurate prediction of the future in Brave New World than George Orwell had in 1984–at least for this generation.
(via thecitrusreport.com)
Star ship size comparison chart
To enjoy properly, you’ll have to click to zoom and then scroll and scroll.
Living with a lion
In the early 70s, Tippi Hedren–of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds fame–lived with her husband, teenage daughter, and a cat…but not your ordinary house cat.
31 Years
My parents celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary today. I’m so thankful that they found each other. via
Napping snake
Today on my lunch break I saw this snake napping on the side of the road…at least I assume it was napping. Its eyes were closed and it didn’t seem to mind that I was creeping in so close.
A blast from the past
Thank you @faitherina for reminding me of this. This show was the highlight of many Saturday mornings.
Introducing Carrot
Many landing pages for new tech products follow a very standard layout and structure. It’s one that Apple popularized, and that others have copied repeatedly.
Introducing Carrot pokes fun at the trope, showcasing the familiar vegetable in the popular product marketing format of the day. Here’s the pitch:
Carrot is designed with you in mind. It’s a seamless experience, meticulously crafted, from beginning to end. It’s not just a vegetable, it’s what a vegetable should be.</blockquote>
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Aaron, are there prizes for participation?
Appleoctopus
After last year's government shutdown
20th anniversary of the blog
The Guardian had a short piece celebrating the inventor of the blog, Dave Winer.
Twenty years ago this week, a software developer in California ushered in a new era in how we communicate. His name is Dave Winer and on 7 October 1994 he published his first blog post. He called it Davenet then, and he’s been writing it most days since then. In the process, he has become one of the internet’s elders, as eminent in his way as Vint Cerf, Dave Clark,Doc Searls, Lawrence Lessig, Dave Weinberger or even Tim Berners-Lee.</blockquote>
The personal site
Andy Baio and Gina Trapani recently expressed the sentiment of what I’m trying to do with this site–I’m making a place where I can write and share short things that either don’t belong on other platforms or shouldn’t only exist on other platforms. They are also reviving their sites to share and writing more personal short-form stuff.
Twitter’s for 140-character short-form writing and Medium’s for long-form. Weirdly, there really isn’t a great platform for everything in the middle — what previously would’ve just been called “blogging.” Mid-length blogging. Middling.
Boy in a box
Skottie Young's Star Wars Covers
Skottie Young drew this great interlocking cover set for the first three issues of the upcoming Marvel Comics Start Wars series.
Young shared his excitement at getting to do these covers with MTV:
16 October, 2014 07:26
Coffee, it feels so good just to know you’re there.
I'm learning a lot from the fine folks involved wi...
I’m learning a lot from the fine folks involved with indiewebcamp.com
Ball
dancedancedance
dancedancedance
Police Clash with protesters in Hong Kong
For weeks now, pro-democracy protest groups have occupied parts of central Hong Kong, calling for open elections and the resignation of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. Local police have been urging the demonstrators to leave for days, and have recently stepped up efforts to dismantle barricades on several major roads - only to have many of them rebuilt hours later. Tensions boiled over last night, leading to a violent clash between police and protesters.
Building a minimum viable product
Development for MVP means having something serviceable in each stage of the process.I made a playground
The back yard of our house now features a playground! It was challenging to build and took most of a weekend to complete. I was so glad to have the help of my next door neighbor and good family friend.
The kids love it–I mean spendtwohoursadayoutsideplaying kind of love it. It’s given Gabi a new lease on life.
"You are life"
Watchmen, 1986-87: the moment when Dr. Manhattan discovers the miraculous value of human life.
Pushing buttons to turn on lights
Can anything be more satisfying to a one year old?At the farm
This was taken before a moment the wheelbarrow slipped out from under her.Learning to play chess
I spent some time Sunday morning teaching the boys to play chess. They didn’t even knock the board off the table.
This girl is too cute
My wife, the acrobat
The boys relaxing
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My 3yo girl refers to Empire as “The one with Yoda dying” (also her favorite scene from the movie). Unsure if this is a “win” or not.
— Dan BRAAAAINSjamin (@danbenjamin) October 12, 2014</blockquote>
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Spurious Correlations – ” US spending on science, space, and technology correlates with Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007……”
The DigitalOcean difference
I’ve seen a great improvement in the response time of my site since moving from Tumblr to WordPress. Having more control over what shows up on the page along with the fast DigitalOcean SSD seems to have made a big difference in the performance of the site.
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Immigrants now make up the largest share of the U.S. population since the 1920s. http://t.co/aOGpAKYPWs pic.twitter.com/mFUquRJ7Qw
— Sudeep Reddy (@Reddy) October 11, 2014</blockquote>
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The marginal value of Foursquare has only been confused by addition of Swam, so I’m deleting them both.
— rands (@rands) October 11, 2014</blockquote>
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Jack Jack Attack by jibé
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Cascading HTML Style Sheets – A Proposal – “CSS is 20 years old today. Happy birthday, CSS! http://t.co/CGygOXl5Uz…”
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Will Twitter pull another “fast one?” – “Conventional wisdom says that developers won’t return to Twitter unless they assure us that they won’t pull another “fast one.” I know I felt that way for a……”
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Habitasteroids – “If you want to hollow out an asteroid for you and all your Twitter friends to colonize, you need this http://t.co/b8a4QHnmOW #sciencehackday…”
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Arne Jacobsen: Room 606 at the SAS Royal Hotel, Copenhagen, 1955. pic.twitter.com/AuWGjuQLwD
— Paul Graham (@paulg) October 10, 2014</blockquote>
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To properly display our minimalist content, you will need at least four free cores, 8GB of RAM and the following plugins
— Pinboard (@Pinboard) October 10, 2014</blockquote>
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Coworkers Each Putting In Herculean Effort To Sustain Conversation For Entire Commute http://t.co/6va7ba1tdp pic.twitter.com/ETYw47tlDO
— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 10, 2014</blockquote>
Auto-complete
This has been my experience so far with the iOS predictive typing–not that I spend a lot of time typing movie quotes on my phone. (via XKCD)
![ios_keyboard[1]](https://wsrv.nl/?url=media.jonathanfrei.com%2Fv3-archive%2Fmedia%2F2014%2F10%2Fios_keyboard1.png&w=1100&output=webp&q=85&we)
Yoga Joes
Yoga Joes–“Peaceful action figures designed to inspire children, men, and military veterans to try yoga”–are the result of a recently funded Kickstarter project. This is a fun re-imagining of the classic toy.
Glass floor on the Eiffel tower
The Eiffel Tower now has a glass floor.
Color explosion
There has been an explosion in the number of colors offered by Crayola since the crayons were introduced in 1903. Slate has an article about the colors added more recently.
First invented in 1903, the original Crayola box contained only eight colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black. It sold for only a nickel.
Comic Book Heaven
Comic Book Heaven is a short documentary that tells the story of Joe Leisner, owner of the comic book store Comic Book Heaven located in Sunnyside, Queens NY.
It’s a sad story of the store owner’s final days of doing business. Leisner wanted to get out for a while, but once he’s done you can see he misses it.
New site
I just finished moving my site over to WordPress. Now for the fun stuff of fiddling with design, updating old entries, and making new posts.
Common misconceptions--visualized
The data visualization site, Information is Beautiful, recently published an infographic of Common MythConceptions, which borrows its data from Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions. This is related to my earlier post on the list.
This site turned 5 over the weekend.
This site turned 5 over the weekend.
I’m not sure if this should be categorized as a pro-tip or a life-hack.…
I’m not sure if this should be categorized as a pro-tip or a life-hack. Regardless, do not splash aftershave into your eye. – @jonathanfrei
Florida Fall has begun. Sitting outside, the wife said, “I need a blanket.”…
Florida Fall has begun. Sitting outside, the wife said, “I need a blanket.” http://j.mp/1rYNyAJ – @jonathanfrei
Age verification exploit
A 12-year-old hacker uncovered a weak spot in the user age authentication process on budlight.com. There is no telling how many other alcohol-related websites have the same vulnerability.
@MikeIsaac Now all the brands are going to want to get a dog to increase…
@MikeIsaac Now all the brands are going to want to get a dog to increase their #engagement. – @jonathanfrei
Terms of Service; Didn't Read
You clicked ‘accept’ without reading the terms. It’s okay, nobody reads the terms. You’re in a hurry to use the app you just signed up for.
Most people accept the terms without having any idea about what they are agreeing to. Terms of Service; Didn’t Read aims to fix that by assigning rating to popular websites and apps as well as labeling and explaining various clauses their TOS.
We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E.
Halloween
So the moral is, I should just put my posts here from the beginning. If the draft isn’t working properly, there is no advantage to using it or a similar app to putting together my blog posts.
I can just put thebeginning this of each post directly into tumbler. The problem with that, however, is that after I save a draft it inserts all of the HTML tags, making it more difficult to edit later.
It will still be best for me to use a text editor before pasting it in to tumbled .
Homemade Halloween
Creating homemade Halloween costumes for your children is a great way to save money. And you can come up with a one-of-a-kind invention that will one day be as terrifying as some of these monstrous creations.
Are the rumors true?
Emergent provides real-time information to help you determine which rumors you’re seeing on the Internet have been verified or debunked, as well as which are still up in the air.
Emergent is a real-time rumor tracker. It’s part of a research project with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University that focuses on how unverified information and rumor are reported in the media. It aims to develop and best practices for debunking misinformation.
nosense
nosense
2014 National Geographic photo contest
Unsurprisingly, there are some incredible photos among this year’s submissions.
Hamster wheel standing desk
I’ve been thinking about trying out a standing desk and just found the perfect one.
How’s this look?
How’s this look?
Hong Kong protests from above
The Guardian posted an impressive video, shot from a drone, showing the Hong Kong protests from above.
Jeff Goldblum is going to sell a lot of light bulbs.
Jeff Goldblum is going to sell a lot of light bulbs.
![letterFromGandhitoHitler[1]](https://media.jonathanfrei.com/v3-archive/media/2014/10/letterFromGandhitoHitler1.jpg)
