kottke.org · Jason Kottke
Links
Articles, ideas, and references I want to find again.
KK Lifestream
User Manual First
Originally posted in Cool Tools In the old days (before the web) you could not read the operating manual or instructions for an appliance, device, or tool until you got it home and unpacked it. Getting the manual was considered one of the benefits of purchasing the product. In fact, you had to purchase extra copies…
KK Lifestream
The Next Transitions in the Technium
Originally posted in The Technium What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as…
Signal vs. Noise · Noah
Behind the scenes: Giving away the secrets of email delivery
We send a lot of mail for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire (and some for Sortfolio, the Jobs Board, Writeboard, and Tadalist). One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about how we handle mail delivery and ensure that emails are making it to people’s inboxes. Some statistics First, some numbers…
Marco.org
Against the wall
Google dominated search and online ads with a lot of great engineering and hard work, then they leveraged their search dominance and more great work to build a strong presence in webmail, maps, and many smaller categories. Geeks like us commended them for how well they operated their business, seemingly (mostly)…
Both Sides of the Table · Mark Suster
Web Second, Mobile First
ParisLemon
Zuckerberg's S-1 Letter
Zuckerberg's S-1 Letter: The most interesting part: By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the…
Waxy.org Links
Yahoo lays off in-house Flickr support team
from what I hear, it was done with 10 minutes' notice to Flickr management
visualjazz.com.au · Thomas Ruffie
Arduino: The physical to your digital
Marco.org
Review: Sennheiser HD 380 Pro headphones
Sennheiser has outdone themselves with the higher-end sibling to the HD 280 Pro. I’ve written often on this site about how happy I am with the pair of 280s that I’ve had, going strong, since 2005. They’ve always been my office headphones, staying at work through three different jobs, affixed to my head for many hours…
ParisLemon
In Dreams
I first encountered 955 Dreams about a year ago when I came across a magical iPad app called The History of Jazz. When I sat down with co-founder Kiran Bellubbi to talk about the app for a TechCrunch story, it was immediately apparent that his vision extended far beyond just one beautiful app. I kicked off my story…
Boxes and Arrows · Stephen Turbek
Are Design Patterns an Anti-pattern?
Design patterns are generally considered a good thing, but do they actually help run a user experience group? As a user experience group manager and an observer (and sponsor) of design pattern exercises, I’ve come to have serious questions about their actual utility. It’s not that design pattern libraries are bad,…
ParisLemon
The Street Blows At Predicting Apple Part 2,383
The Street Blows At Predicting Apple Part 2,383: Philip Elmer-DeWitt breaks down how analysts — both Wall Street and independent — did in guessing Apple’s lastest insane quarterly numbers. Check out his spreadsheet at the bottom of the page. You’ll note that almost all of the green is at the top (Independent…
ParisLemon
The Brilliant "Don't Be Evil" Bookmarklet
The Brilliant "Don't Be Evil" Bookmarklet: Kudos to Facebook (with some help from Twitter and MySpace) for having the balls to do this. It’s a bookmarklet that replaces Google’s new “People and Pages” area, the hardcoded social search area, and the search completion drop-down, with organic results. In other words, it…
Daring Fireball · John Gruber
Why Apple Products Are Manufactured in China
Quantified Self · Rajiv Mehta
Toolmaker Talk: Eric Gradman (Facelogger)
The Art of Less Doing · ari@lessdoing.com (Ari Meisel)
No You Can't Just Do It Yourself
I was speaking with a friend the other day about using a virtual assistant and he asked "What kinds of things do you have them do?" I started telling him about some specific-to-me tasks that I like to outsource but than mentioned that I also have them do some very basic quick tasks like google searches and phone…
Schneier on Security · schneier
Recovering a Hacked Gmail Account
Long (but well-written and interesting) story of someone whose Gmail account was hacked and erased, and eventually restored. Many interesting lessons about the security of largely support-free cloud services.
Neil Gaiman's Journal · noreply@blogger.com (Neil)
On New Year's Eve Where I Am.
How on earth did that happen? I promised a blog tomorrow, and that was over a week ago. I wrote an essay, and I wrote a short story, and I went to Sydney and did a reading with a string quartet, but I didn't blog. And now I'm sitting backstage at Revolt in Melbourne preparing for a New Year's Eve Party-…
I Will Teach You To Be Rich · Ramit Sethi
Make art, make money — at the same time
Google Analytics Blog · Google Analytics
Advanced Segments for Holiday campaigns
Quantified Self · Ernesto Ramirez
Quantified Self 101: Keep It Simple
Quantified Self · Alexandra Carmichael
Rob Portil on Weight Loss and Muscle Gain with FitBit
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report · Jeffrey Zeldman
Selling Design – an online reading list
KK Lifestream
Making Holes in Our Heart
Originally posted in The Technium [CES Image by Jaymi Heimbuch] I know the feeling. You are wandering around a huge harshly-lit hall full of tables displaying electronic stuff, new devices that all look the same but claim to be different. It is the CES show, the largest consumer electronic show in the world. The hall…
Waxy.org Links
The Verge's best tech writing of 2011
any list that starts with Paul Ford is solid, in my book
Marco.org
Designing “Mute”
An iPhone alarm disrupted a Philharmonic performance: Actually, [the iPhone owner] said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally…
Bustr Bensn
My problem with listing 3 things I'm grateful for
Almost every recent book on positive psychology (Flourish, Redirect, and The Happiness Advantage to name a few off the top of my head) mention one exercise that has been proven in studies time and again to have not only immediate positive effects, but also effects that last for months after the exercise has ended.…
Daring Fireball · John Gruber
Tim Cook on the Working Conditions at Apple Factories
Marco.org
→ Instagram coming to Android soon
There are two stories here. First, it’s remarkable that Instagram has surpassed 14 million users with only an iPhone app so far — not even a useful web interface. It’s also interesting that the Instagram CEO believes that an Android version will “nearly double” the user count. Given Android’s significantly higher…
ParisLemon
Twitter Keeps Right On Responding To Search+
Yesterday, Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, wasted little time in speaking out against Google+ being fully baked into Google Search — even before Twitter officially did on the record. Today he’s elaborating a bit. Why doesn’t the ex-Google employee like Search+? This is why: Folks asked for…
Daring Fireball · John Gruber
When Did Discover Get So Jackasstic?
Big Spaceship · Benjamin Bojko
Chrome Extensions Are Good for You
Digital Buzz Blog · Aden Hepburn
Google Plus Ad: The Muppets
One of the bigger launch stunts that Google pulled off for Google+ was the live hangouts with “The Muppets” who put on about 40,000 followers in pretty quick time and it looks like round 2 is on, with Google just launching a new TVC for Google+ Hangouts featuring The Muppets rocking on in a pretty [...]Related…
Digital Buzz Blog · Aden Hepburn
JWT Augmented Reality Business Cards
Blippar’s image recognition based Augmented Reality platform is getting more and more popular around the world, so JWT have teamed up with them to issue staff with Augmented Reality business cards, and here is the demo video to give you a quick taste! The Blippar image recognition engine reads the graphics on the…