Blog – page 4 of 16

‘Tis the season for the Google Santa Tracker. I’ll be enjoying this site with the kids this year. They’re finally old enough to appreciate it.

I started working on a simple business card for myself the other day. It’s more of a calling card since I don’t have a business to go with it. And it’s not really a calling card either, since there’s no phone number on it. It just has an email address, URL, and Twitter handle1.

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](http://i.imgur.com/nzJxFwx.png?1)

Intelclinic launched a Kickstarter project to fund the creation of a polyphasic sleep mask.

NeuroOn is the world’s first brainwave - monitoring SLEEP MASK that allows you to switch from monophasic to polyphasic sleep. That means you can sleep less and more efficiently.

[

One of the reasons I bike to work is so I don’t have to use as much gas as the rest of the country.

[

](http://www.mint.com/blog/consumer-iq/what-does-traffic-cost-you-a-visual-guide-to-how-much-commuters-pay-to-sit-in-traffic-0313/?display=wide)

The Pixar Theory Timeline

Asana · Apps & Integrations

cyanidedaze:

Hawkeyes by Martin Simmonds

The New Yorker has an interesting look at the robotic side of Twitter and the challenges the service will face as it becomes a bigger business.

As a service, Twitter’s greatest strength is that its users have total control over whom they follow and what they see. As a business, Twitter’s greatest opportunity is in violating that control with advertisements.

A few items on my personal to-do list had lingered, untouched, for more than a month.

I just deleted them.

Those tasks did nothing but make me feel bad about what I had yet to start doing. They were guilt tasks. Maybe, now that they’re gone, I’ll be able to work on them again.

Striving after goals means failing every day until you succeeds. Living a system means succeeding every day, building on the momentum of earlier successes, and living with a more positive sense of self. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, recently wrote:

My problem with goals is that they are limiting. Granted, if you focus on one particular goal, your odds of achieving it are better than if you have no goal. But you also miss out on opportunities that might have been far better than your goal. Systems, however, simply move you from a game with low odds to a game with better odds. With a system you are less likely to miss one opportunity because you were too focused on another. With a system, you are always scanning for any opportunity.

Pencil by FiftyThree

This clever holiday gift guide is filled with all the stuff I’d buy myself if I had the money to afford more expensive taste. There are no gift suggestions in this guide for my wife. However, the writer has a good reason for his omission, which he expressed like this:

My apologies, there are no gift ideas for women in here. If you don’t know what to buy a woman for Christmas, you’re an idiot.

@GSElevator, who authored this post, is behind what is very possibly my favorite non-personal Twitter account, mostly because of his quips like this and seasonal jokes like this.

‘This one runs on fat & saves you money’ by Peter Drew of Adelaide (photo by carltonreid).

I previously posted this image more than three years ago, shortly after I started commuting to work by bike. It represents one of the many reasons I ride to work, which I will continue to do for the foreseeable future.

Slob vs. Sharp (by Jim Benton)

Web comments are awful. Most comment threads are complete garbage. They are full of the worst of what people say and think. But you knew that already.

I recently installed Steven Frank’s Shutup.css extension to shut down the cesspool of Internet comments. Shutup.css hides the comments sections on most popular websites. I’ve only had it for a few days, but it’s already making the web a much happier place.

Your education will quickly become outdated if you stop learning. Don’t let the years of your life spent in the classroom and the thousands of tuition dollars you (or your parents) spent go to waste. Never stop learning.

One of the best parts of being an adult is that you get to spend your time learning the subjects and skills that interest you. The days of being stuck working through someone else’s curriculum, someone else’s agenda are over. In school, your teachers would decide what you should worry about and what you need to know to pass the test. As an adult, you decide what to worry about. And you can choose to spend your time worrying about more interesting things.

Knowing it’s coming doesn’t make this scene any less shocking.

I received the note above in my email today from Tumblr and had to share it. It’s amazing to think I’ve run this site for that long. I let the 1,000th post come and go with little fanfare but feel I should mark this milestone with more than three short sentences.

From the beginning, this site has been a side project, a hobby that would get bursts of attention and then months of neglect. I learned the basics of HTML and CSS from working on this site, and, more recently, it served as a sandbox for learning responsive web design, typography, JavaScript, and a number of other web technologies. It’s been a valuable hobby, teaching me skills I’ve used in all my jobs over the last four years.

How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse

How Would We Report on the Government Shutdown if It Were Happening in Another Country?

4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again (by Sincerely Truman)

Non-Chemical Warfare: Violence Continues in Syria

By Oliver Reichenstein

Anatomy of a bicycle - anthonyoram

IBM Smarter Enterprise - U.S. Open Case Study - United States

via Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows

[

](http://www.businessinsider.com/half-of-the-united-states-lives-in-these-counties-2013-9) Map via Census/Business Insider

People like to live live near other people. Out of the 3,000+ counties in the United States, 146 contain half the population. So much for the 80/20 rule. It doesn’t seem to apply to population distribution.

Creating new accounts for web services is easy. Getting rid of those accounts…not so much.

JustDelete.Me offers an expansive directory of links to pages where you can delete your accounts from various websites and services. In addition to pointing you to the pages, it also rates each service by the level of effort required to delete the account.

Maintaining inbox zero is like a game of whack-a-mole. For every email deleted, organized, or responded to, another one pops up in its place. However, that only happens if your email is always open. By just opening up email and responding to it at set times during the day, you can process messages in batches and be much more productive. When you finish, close your email, and get to work.

I don’t have to check email as much these days as I have in the past, but I check it anyway if it’s open. I check it even when there’s nothing new in there. Ideally, there could be a notification when the inbox has 10 new items, or email could launch automatically two hours from the time I closed it.

Is this a deceptive or just poorly worded error message? Also the ‘Visit Website’ link is broken. I’m pretty sure there’s some way to get Twitter working on my phone. The other apps at the bottom of the page work just fine.

Twitter and Facebook don’t have to play nice together, but if Facebook is going to show Twitter in its App Store, it should probably just let Twitter tell its users if if works on my phone or not. Getting into the habit of telling your users what your competitors are capable of is often bound to make you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

This isn’t the right bike for my current riding habits, but it would be very cool to zip around town on one of these at night. The Pure Fix Glow Bike has a clean simple look to it during the day, but lights up with an alien-green glow in the dark.

The bike is coated with a solar-activated paint that absorbs sunlight during the day and glows at night. They say an hour of sunlight will give an hour of glow, so you’d have to park it in the sun during the day if you’re planning a night ride.

Flickr released a new version of their iOS app today. So far I am very happy with the features of the app and the results it has produced.

Flickr followed the lead of Instagram and the thousands of other copycat apps by adding more filters and gimmicky features, but they also added some very useful and professional editing tools that allow for and encourage more fine tuning of images.

I have intended to post more photos for a while. Especially now, with the new baby, I should be snapping away every day and capturing as many of these early memories as possible. Looking back on old albums has always been such a joy. I’ll have to collect these photos now so my kids and I can enjoy looking back on them in the future.

I recently finished reading Butterick’s Practical Typography, a short web book by Matthew Butterick. It is filled with many practical rules and tips for producing professional-quality typography with common tools. The book starts off with a short chapter called Typography in ten minutes which offers some simple rules to fix the most common typographic violations (it’s a great place to start).

I’ve made several minor design changes on this site over the past few months, primarily focused on improving the typography and visual layout. Butterick’s book showed me a few other areas where I could improve. After reducing the size of the header tags and making some of the typographic elements on the page more subtle, I think it is getting closer to the clean and clear look I’m after. There does not need to be such extreme contrast in the elements on the page, especially since it should be primarily about the words.

I Forgot My Phone - YouTube: Written by/Starring Charlene deGuzman and directed by Miles Crawford.

This video shows me. And probably lots of us.

Far too often, I find myself absorbed in the action of a 4-inch screen instead of seeing the real world unfolding around me. I’m not going to throw the phone away or retire it when my contract is up, but this video has inspired me to try to put it away when there are others around.

ARod promotes muscle enhancing substance to kids.

A living room view.

Every Second on the Internet

Well, I wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight anyway.

(via Sunset Reflected in an Alligator’s Eyes - Imgur)

Hats.

Looking everywhere.

(via Luke Pearson - Illustration Nation)

Frog holding an umbrella. Photo by Penkdix Palme – National Geographic Your Shot

Ninja Remote - Stealth TV Gadget

In Chicago, 3-D Printers Are Available To Anyone With A Library Card

The World Without Mobile (by QUALCOMMVlog)

I like this playful .gif from the top of the newly designed Google Play Store.

NASA Hubble Finds a True Blue Planet (by NASA Goddard Photo and Video)

This motorcyclist understands the importance of a morning cup of joe. The driver of the SUV, unfortunately, doesn’t.

(by Bossaucey)

There are many ways to be bad at eye contact. The WSJ reports that the ideal gaze lasts 7 to 10 seconds. Is that creepy in practice?

(via The Decline of Eye Contact - WSJ.com)

Feedly will support third party RSS readers

Harley Davidson National Rally in China

Life’s a Happy Song on Disney Video

Happy Sunday!

I love this song. It makes me happy every time I hear it.

BrandColors

The World’s Smallest Movie

This short stop motion video, made by IBM, captures individual atoms moving across the screen. That’s amazing to begin with, but what’s really incredible is that the researchers are moving and animating the individual atoms.

Lifehacks can save lots of time, but can use up lots of time implementing. XKCD made a handy chart so you can see when the pursuit of efficiency starts to pay off.

If the fans we responsible for making the new Star Wars movie, it might end up being good and having one of these awesome promo posters.

There are prints of this available.

via

Hilarity ensues when stock photographers try to put employees in artful situations with laptops. I love how the guy’s pose in numbers 6, 7, and 12 gets reused in different situations.

Via the clever folks at Hubspot.

He’s going to be a big brother and I’m going to have three awesome kids.

Video by Paul Kasmin Gallery.

STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerizing experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view that extends beyond the streets of New York where it was filmed.

via Kottke

via Pants are Overrated

…neatly packaged in two volumes. via

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

— Peter Drucker via GTD Times

How Far is it to Mars?

I guess social networks have already been around for a while. (via vintage social networking - Wrong Hands)

These animals are looking fine. via ZOO PORTRAITS.

Swissmiss - How To Be Happy In Business

Sunrise at the North Pole With the Moon at its Closest Point.

via Twitter / ThatsEarth

Musical Chairs (Choosing the Right Seat) by Alex Cornell

Lent is over. Easter is here. That means it’s Coffee Time!!!

mrgan:

“Work” icon

Painting by James Tissot (1886-94) via Plum leaves.

This is how working with new CSS elements feels.

In this video, she’s performing a forgotten Broadway piece, the Alto’s Lament. The song is a medley of the alto and supporting parts of famous Broadway numbers.

via Gabriela Frei: Alto’s Lament

This is a great looking weather app, and since it’s from the makers of Dark Sky, I feel like I’ll be able to trust the data.

forecastio:

We’re extremely excited to announce the launch of Forecast, a new global weather service.

Paris is the Paris of things that other things are the thing of.

— Dan Wineman (@dwineman) January 6, 2009

via The Verge Forums

Even when the food’s not perfect. Even when the server mixes something up (as long as they fix it). Even when there’s something stinky that comes with the order.

With the recently announced demise of Google Reader in Google’s Spring Cleaning post, it looks like Google is getting out of the blog reading business. Therefore, I’ve decided to transition away from FeedBurner, their blog feed publishing platform, as well. (Goodbye RSS subscriber stats of questionable reliability).

The new feed for this site has a link up in the header and here. Please re-subscribe when you get the chance. If you use RSS, you’ll know what to do. (The old feed is still around, not deleted or broken, so it will still work as long as Google lets it. Update : Actually, I ended up having to delete the feed to get rid of the redirect loops.)

This is from Saga #2.

How is it that there was there never a Calvin and Hobbes TV show? Or was there one that I missed? Somehow my childhood seems incomplete. This helps a little:

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](http://imgur.com/gallery/YpBR9Mh)

Ryan Block:

This is by far the best bit of user interface design I have ever seen. Ever. EVER.

If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.

— Frank Chimero

While we may judge ourselves by our motivations, we tend to judge others by their actions.

— John Siracusa

Since copywriting is interface design, you can do an awful lot of great design in a text editor. Don’t worry about where things will go, or how they will fit. Worry about explaining it clearly and then build the rest of the interface around that explanation.

— Jason Fried

This is awesome.

Autotune the Clergy Ep 2 by ClarkJaman via Gabi.

We’ve spent a lot of time together over the years.

It was a good run, but I see you’re ready to move on. Maybe it’s for the best we’re splitting up. I’m sure I’ll find somewhere else to read the Internet.

p.s. It won’t be Google+.

The new Pope overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Everyone wanted to get a picture.

Small states have a significant advantage in the senate.

Kerry Skarbakka makes the act of falling into a work of art.

Arizona-based artist Kerry Skarbakka has received both awards and death threats for his controversial ‘falling man’ images.

This set of images gives me anxiety, but it captures a beautiful moment of panic. More of his work is on his site.

Here’s a website with a collection of historic pictures of the city of my birth.

I like these r-rated classic movie scenes made into Pixar style art. I’d read these book if someone made them, but I won’t read them to my kids. Yet.

I think I have seen every one of the films depicted.

From Don Boudreaux’s news story, Minimum Grade:

WASHINGTON (CH) – In a bold effort to improve the educational fortunes of students who perform at academic levels significantly below the average of their peers, Congress has mandated a minimum grade to be assigned to each student in each course taught at any school in the country. Starting in September, it shall be unlawful for any teacher, professor, or instructor charged with assigning course grades to assign to any student a grade lower than C-.

Don’t look too long at these hypnotic animated GIFs.

Like the coffee shop vibe but hate coffee? Need to focus, but it’s too quiet or the background noise is too distracting? Coffitivity promises an ideal level of ambient noise to focus on work and get things done.

Research shows it’s pretty hard to be creative in a quiet space. And a loud workplace can be frustrating and distracting. But, the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing.

Zen Pencils never fails to inspire. The latest entry about Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tells a beautiful success story.

Feb. 24, 2013. A tiger plays with a pig before killing it at the Sumatra Tiger Rescue Centre compound, inside the Tambling Wildlife Nature Conservation (TWNC) near Bandar Lampung, Indonesia.

via