January 2012
40 posts
Waking up at 5am to code →
Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class →
Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, NYT
When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.
But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products...
Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz →
by Paul Marks, New Scientist
“A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph.”
“There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse...”
– John Ruskin (via youmightfindyourself)
Use Perian to enable previewing of all video... →
Thanks to Perian, I can finally I can see video previews in Finder and Quick Look in OS X Lion.
The Rise of the New Groupthink →
by Susan Cain, NYT
“Something that is often overlooked with creatives is time management and getting...”
– Ben Barry - http://the99percent.com/articles/7118/Facebooks-Ben-Barry-On-How-To-Hack-Your-Job (via tarngerine)
Douglas Coupland on coincidence and déja vu →
I take comfort in the fact that there are two human moments that seem to be doled out equally and democratically within the human condition—and that there is no satisfying ultimate explanation for either. One is coincidence, the other is déja vu. It doesn’t matter if you’re Queen Elizabeth, one of the thirty-three miners rescued in Chile, a South Korean housewife or a migrant herder in Zimbabwe—in...
Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter →
by Mat Honan
“I try to remember all the products I’ve talked about that I won’t even bother to cover—and that nobody’s going to buy. There were some Bluetooth speakers. Or maybe they were WiFi. But there was definitely a helmet cam. And a waterproof phone. And a tablet and an ultrabook and an OLED TV. There was ennui upon ennui upon ennui set in this amazing temple to...
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as...”
– Hunter S. Thompson’s cover letter to the Vancouver Sun, 1958
“Due to our fascination with the forms of technical inventions on the one hand,...”
– Eva Zeisel (1906–2011)
This American Life: Mr. Daisey and the Apple... →
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
– Buddha (via jedsundwall)
The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard →
November 17, 2006 by Oliver Reichenstein, Information Architects.
This is such a lucid, important article for every web designer to read, understand, and act upon. I know I’ve been guilty of setting type smaller than necessary. No longer!
“Taking vacation at Red Frog is encouraged (and even celebrated). And it’s not...”
– Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days
Some look at business management techniques like this and think they are pipe dreams or flat out silly. I disagree: I think it’s a shift in our culture and a necessary one. Just as sales commissions train salespeople to focus on the wrong results, so do...
“Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to...”
– Jony Ive on Simplicity
“…happy endings in life, and in fiction too perhaps, are really about where...”
– William Gibson
William Gibson interviewed by Vice Magazine →
“I think that I am kind of functionally incapable of staying absolutely true to genre or form. Sometimes I feel sorry for somebody in the Atlanta airport who’s just bought one of my books when what they really want is Ludlum or Clancy. They get on the plane to the other side of the world and all they’ve got to read is this screwy shit about designer blue jeans.”
“The great irony and tragedy of “intro econ” is that it is at its introductory...”
– The Trouble with Principles: Or, How to Not Lose Friends and Alienate People When Learning Economics (#OccupyWallStreet, #OWS)
Perhaps the most interesting bit,
To casually label economics a science is at best aspirational, at worst manipulative, at a minimum misleading. At the introductory...
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is...”
– From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
May we fight the things that reduce us for the company and truth that make life big. Happy new year, everyone. Here’s to 2012.
(via viafrank)
December 2011
21 posts
This is a bad year for dictators.
Seduction techniques
Detail from Less and More, The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at the Design Museum.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man...”
– Teddy Roosevelt (from his “Citizenship in a Republic”
speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910)