Blog – page 2 of 16

Today my middle child turned three. It has been so amazing to watch him grow up this year. It seems like he just turned two, and suddenly he has grown into this big kid.

He is such a sweet boy and a good friend. It is so cool to see how he—as a middle child—can adapt his play between roughhousing with his older brother and being gentle (most of the time) with his baby sister. I am looking forward to another year of watching him grow up and turn into an independent young man.

According to recent census data, 47 percent of the United States’ territory is uninhabited.

A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.</blockquote>

My wife shared this image with me the other day, which shows how having more kids can actually give you fewer things to worry about. One or two kids more and she will be completely worry free.

One of my credit card providers sent me an email this morning promoting some of the ways I can use my membership rewards points.

Here’s a screenshot from the email:

The albums Through You and Through You Too are incredible works of remix art. The two albums consist of video songs made up of clips from unrelated YouTube videos. Somehow Kutiman–the man behind the music–manages to bring the seemingly random videos into coherent original songs that have enough of a unified sound to go together on an album.

The YouTube clips Kutiman used in his songs come from guitar instructors demonstrating riffs in their basements, members of a brass ensemble rehearsing in a hallway, a kid’s recording of her piano lessons, a high school string quartet practicing in a kitchen, lots of teenagers singing a capella into their computers’ web cams, and many other sources. Kutiman even made the intro video for Through You Too by combining clips of other people talking.

The Hubble Telescope, which launched 25 years ago, recently sent back some incredible high definition photos of the Pillars of Creation.

The last time Hubble sent back an image of this cosmic phenomenon was in 1995.

I do not want to try this machine that changes how you perceive your hands, but seeing what is possible with augmented reality is amazing.

The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

My oldest boy is becoming more adventurous, climbing anything and everything he can find. Here he is sitting atop a rock climbing wall at Lakes Park. Last winter he couldn’t get more than a few feet off the ground at this rock wall.

Christmas is over, and the photo is from last year, but this is too cute to not re-post.

The wife is at a girls night out this evening. I put older two boys to bed shortly after she left. We had a big day, and they had short naps, so they went down without incident.

The baby girl, on the other hand, made it very clear that she was not yet ready to go down for the night. I wasn’t surprised since she had slept in the car on the way home from the children’s museum in Naples in addition to her regular nap.

Little by little, the world is becoming a better place for the humans who live here, and no amount of bad news seems to slow it down. Improvements in broad economic, health, and security trends are making life better for millions.

Progress is slower than many would want, but there is progress. Poverty and hunger are falling, life expectancy and leisure time are increasing, violence is diminishing, education and literacy are increasing, technology is moving forward fast, and fewer children are dying from preventable diseases.

2014 was a good year for me and my family. Here are a few of the reasons I’m thankful:

There was so much to be thankful for in 2014, and so much more to look forward to in 2015. I can’t wait to find out what exciting new adventures will make this new year special.

Last night, I read throught the entire archive of the Tumblr, Deep Dark Fears. The premise of the site is simple. Visitors can anonymously submit their deepest, darkest fears, and the site’s creator, Fran Krause, will then illustrate them as a short comic.

Some of the entries are funny. Some are morbid. Some come as a relief—because they let me know there is someone else in the world with the same weird fears as me.

When the only tool you have is a bottle opener, every problem looks like a beer.

Parable of the Polygons - a playable post on the shape of society.

Jacob O’Neal makes animated infographics on his site, Animagraffs, that show how things work. A recent one that caught my attention shows how loud speakers work.

Below is an example of part of the Animagraffs on speakers, but you need to see the full sequence to appreciate how he breaks down the complex technical processes into a visual learning experience.

There are only about ten of these Animagraffs on the site, which isn’t surprising because of how much research and work they take to produce. Other interesting ones are about how a car engine works, what happens inside a jet engine,  how to Moonwalk (the dance not the space activity), and the biology of tarantulas (not for the faint of heart).

This is how us dads stay in shape. (via artofmainliness.com)

Well, this is depressing. I used to think I was one of the young ones, but it turn out I’m older than 51% of the world’s population, according to data from Population.io. I still have a ways to go before I’m older than half the people in the United States, and I live in Florida, so I’ve got that going for me too.

Population.io is a data visualization project that takes demographic and population data from a variety of sources to present personalized graphs. Here’s how the project’s creators describe it.

I upgraded the wall art in the boys’ bedroom this afternoon with some additional classic comic book covers.

This map would have made it much easier to get through Inferno.

I’m a sucker for year-end-reviews of everything. These collections of news photos from Buzzfeed and Reuters show that 2014 was a rough year all around the world, so bring on 2015.

Phil Noto drew two cover concepts for the upcoming movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, based on the recently released trailer.

The trailer for the new Jurassic Park movie came out yesterday. It looks like a promising summer blockbuster. While there is little chance it will live up to magic of the original, the previous sequels left a low enough bar for this one to easily surpass.

Even without a Michael Crichton novel to draw from, the writers of the movie came up with a great premise: despite the previous disasters on the island, the park is completed and opened to the public. It features various dinosaur attractions that follow the familiar motifs of Disney Land and Sea World. However, things go wrong when a genetic hybrid dinosaur escapes. Tim Siedell has high hopes for the genetically modified monster.

I’m feeling sharp today in my new argyle Batman dress socks.

Late night excavations in the front yard</div>

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This is the most incredible music video. I don’t know how I managed to go so long without watching it. It was all over the web a couple of weeks ago, and I had saved it to watch later, not knowing that I should have been watching it on repeat from that moment forward.

I especially liked the nod to Citizen Kane at the end.

If you’re struggling to come up with something new to serve this Thanksgiving, the New York Times has you covered with recipes for dishes from every State. I’m interested in trying Florida’s Mojo Turkey.

Florida’s cuisine ranges from the deep Southern cooking of the humid, citrus-scented central and northern parts of the state to the more Caribbean-inflected cuisine of the marshy lowlands of Miami and the Keys. Here, the turkey nods to what happened when Cuban culture drifted onto the Thanksgiving tables of South Florida, with a bird dressed in a marinade of sour oranges (a mixture of orange and lime juice works as well) mixed with a lot of garlic and oregano. Serve the bird with black beans and white rice on the side — and a Key lime pie for dessert.</blockquote>

You can fit a lot of bikes in a single parking spot built for cars. This bike rack by Peter Murray conveys a clear message about inner city parking. (via Swissmiss)

There was a very strange cloud formation in the sky earlier this morning. It was a evenly spaced,  17x6 grid of small wispy clouds. It dissipated about 5 minuets after I noticed it. There were no planes in the sky at the time. I have no idea what could have caused it. Any ideas?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on moving my personal site (this site) over to WordPress on a VPS. The move was inspired by a desire to adopt the principles of the IndieWeb movement for my personal home on the web.

Owning my data is important to me. Liberating the things I post online from the corporate silos like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr means I can own my data and control how it appears. Mozilla expressed the sentiment well with their Choose Independent video.

Olivia Muus created the Tumblr Museum of Selfies. It is a collection of famous museum portraits who’s subjects look like they are in the process of taking a selfie. Muus describes the project like this:

This is a project that started when my friend aka. right hand and I went to the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. I took a picture for fun and liked how this simple thing could change their character and give their facial expression a whole new meaning.

The daily routines and rituals of creative people is largely irrelevant to anything I will do or make, but it is still interesting to see how they decided to slice up their days. Click the image for the big version.

My wife texted me a picture of our DSLR’s viewfinder.

It think it’s pretty obvious we need a better way to share the photos from our good camera. I love the quality of the photos that come from that camera, but it is such a pain to transfer them to the computer.

The extra levels for Monument Valley were an instabuy for me. Now I just need to find the time to properly enjoy them.

It was sad to see the game get so many one-star reviews from people upset at a $1.99 in-app purchase, but it looks like word got out and the real fans pushed the average rating back up to where it belongs.

First Drafts of History is a Tumblr that collects screen shots of the first versions of various Wikipedia entries.

Some of them are humorously incomplete and surprisingly accurate.

The roads are not for pedestrians.

(via Chris Bruntlett)

IndieWeb Camp Online looks awesome. I’ll do my best to be there.

My Mom shared a few photos from my Dad’s 22 years of military service.  He was in the Navy and Wisconsin National Guard. He has retired from the military now after serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq.

Coming up with an idea for a successful startup used to be difficult. But then Uber came along. That made coming up with a startup ideas as simple as saying “Uber for [fill in the blank].” But you still had to come up with a clever name and flashy website before you could launch your dream startup.

Launchnik fixes that. It is like Uber for startup ideas. All you have to do is click ‘Go!’ and the site comes up with an Uber-based startup idea, a Web 2.0 company name, and a splash page.

W3C released a short animated video celebrating the benefits of web standards and the open web.

(via Reddit)

We made a trip to the Naples Zoo this weekend. The photos suggest we spent more time at the playgrounds than looking at the animals.

[gallery type=”rectangular” ids=”4956,4955,4954,4952,4951,4950,4949,4948”]

I’ve been watching (listening really) to the videos from this year’s XOXO. There were some some excellent speakers and talks at the festival.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCbA9r6ecYWUhf2EuEs9eoLT2Dc1yjiGh

I can’t, in good conscience, recommend anyone watch Too Many Cooks, the 1980s sitcom intro parody. And not just because it’s an 11-minute YouTube video (who has time for that?).

The video has its own brand of weird. I watched it with my wife the other day, and now she’s understandably trying to keep me away from the Internet. But the song and idea of it has been stuck in my head for days now.

Thank you Andy for unleashing it on my corner of the Internet.

Nick Bilton is worried about the threat of artificial intelligence.

Right now these artificially intelligent machines are pretty cute and innocent, but as they are given more power in society, these machines may not take long to spiral out of control.

In the beginning, the glitches will be small but eventful. Maybe a rogue computer momentarily derails the stock market, causing billions in damage. Or a driverless car freezes on the highway because a software update goes awry.

Just in case you’re feeling down, here’s an emergency compliment.

I could listen to this again and again.

There are new levels for Monument Valley coming on Thursday. I can’t wait. I play very few iOS games, but Monument Valley has been, by far, my favorite. The game is simple, yet fun, and the soundtrack is beautiful.

Jason Kottke posted images of vinyl records magnified 1,000x so you can actually see the music.

The EFF published a scorecard that shows which messaging apps keep messages most secure.

In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.</blockquote>

(Via Gabi’s Instagram)

The Guardian published a collection of 25 famous photos of the legendary boxer, Muhammad Ali.

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site has an amazing picture of an Aurora over Norway taken by Max Rive. I especially like the climber standing with hands raised at the summit of the mountain.

This is my favorite song by my favorite fictional 80s rock band, Love Handle.

This line always gets me: “Like a ninja of love, repelling down from above, you snuck your way right into my heart.”

The kids spent 45 minutes this morning sitting still on the couch, listening to this and other Phineas and Ferb songs.

This is the one day of the year when I understand the value of daylight savings time. I haven’t had this high of sleep quality in months.

There is nothing you can do to seem more wealthy to a kid than to hand out full-sized candy bars on Halloween.

There is nothing you can go to appear more wealthy to a kid than to hand out full sized candy bars on Halloween.</div>

(via Scripting.com)

Darth Vader lives a busy life.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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)

To enjoy properly, you’ll have to click to zoom and then scroll and scroll.

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.

My parents celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary today. I’m so thankful that they found each other. via

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.

Thank you @faitherina for reminding me of this. This show was the highlight of many Saturday mornings.

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>

Aaron, are there prizes for participation?

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>

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.

Andy said:

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.

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:

Coffee, it feels so good just to know you’re there.

I’m learning a lot from the fine folks involved with indiewebcamp.com

dancedancedance

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.

Development for MVP means having something serviceable in each stage of the process.

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.

Watchmen, 1986-87: the moment when Dr. Manhattan discovers the miraculous value of human life.

Can anything be more satisfying to a one year old?

This was taken before a moment the wheelbarrow slipped out from under her.

I spent some time Sunday morning teaching the boys to play chess. They didn’t even knock the board off the table.

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>

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……”

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.