December 2011
1 post
2 tags
A proposal for a readable web
A lot’s being said around the Daring-Fireball region of the Web about the failure of most sites these days (with a few notable exceptions like the Boston Globe redesign) to make content reader- rather than advertiser-friendly.
I have a proposal:
A consortium of pro-reader organizations should get together to distribute and promote a customized adblocking plugin that works exactly like...
June 2011
1 post
February 2011
4 posts
January 2011
1 post
1 tag
WatchI keep listening to the Sleigh Bells album over and over, and I’m not sure why. Probably my favorite two-person noise rock duo since Death From Above 1979. Also I think it’s always a good fallback music video to just have your band walk down the street in Ray-Bans while stuff explodes behind you.
December 2010
1 post
August 2010
3 posts
5 tags
“Tycho replies that he would order additional moose, and he would have sent his...”
– Exciting incidents in the life of Tycho Brahe, including getting his nose cut off in a rapier duel and replacing it with a gold one, and his pet moose that drank too much. Wikipedia seems to back most of this up, too, although written less awesomely. Also see Hirsute History’s t-shirt:
1 tag
Blog post: Three Common iPhone to Android Pitfalls... →
A blog post I wrote for Localytics on what you need to know before you port an iPhone app to Android, particularly when it comes to design, UI/UX, and QA/testing.
1 tag
Watch(video - link) School of Seven Bells - Wired for Light (acoustic version). Going to see them in Sept. at the Middle East in Cambridge.
July 2010
1 post
Cadiz to Tel Aviv by kayak →
My old (elementary-school-in-rhode-island 1990-1996 old) friend Dov is going to kayak from Spain to Israel via France, Italy, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. He leaves August 5th. Here’s wishing him the best of luck (especially with that Turkey part, given recent politics). Wow. Just wow.
June 2010
1 post
The Anosognosic's Dilemma and Passover flashbacks →
Summary from BoingBoing; the full read at the NY Times is a good one.
The Jews in the room will recognize the discussion of the nature of our meta-knowledge has several parallels with differences between the Four Sons (ארבעה בנים) of the Passover seder: the Wise Son (חכם - known questions, known answers), the Simple Son (תם - known questions, unknown answers) and most importantly, the Son Who...
May 2010
2 posts
"finders keepers, losers weepers" →
“Jason Chen did not “find himself in possession” of a prototype iPhone. Jason Chen and Gizmodo bought a prototype iPhone from someone whom they knew had stolen it.”
I really love Gizmodo, but I seemed to be the only tech geek I knew who was really troubled by the whole iPhone 4G teardown/photo shoot… it’s nice to know Gruber feels the same way.
That’s not to say...
“We were at the bar, and Bruce was talking to Paul, and he turned to me and said,...”
– Melissa Etheridge, to Rolling Stone about a night at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony a few years back
April 2010
2 posts
The Many Faces of Null
“It is sometimes more convenient and less ambiguous to have a NULL object than to use Java’s null value. JSONObject.NULL.equals(null) returns true. JSONObject.NULL.toString() returns “null”.”
from the JSONObject Java documentation.
This doesn’t make much sense to me, though; JSONObject.NULL is an Object, and therefore logically can’t be equal to null,...
February 2010
2 posts
1 tag
January 2010
1 post
November 2009
2 posts
Droid camera bug caused by monthly cycle... →
Google engineer Dan Morrill, on why everyone’s Droid’s camera issues seem to have mysteriously fixed themselves this week:
There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.
The 17th...
Watch(video) Stephen Colbert shaving Woody Harrelson’s head to show support for the troops. While singing a remarkably good two-part harmony rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Pretty fantastic.
October 2009
3 posts
“The healthcare bill is out of committee — hip hip, replacement!”
– Stephen Colbert
(mp3) 30 years after the great but...
September 2009
2 posts
August 2009
3 posts
the Davis Square Tiles Project →
In the Davis Square T station in Somerville, there are 249 tiles created by area schoolkids in 1978/79.
The Tiles Project is an attempt to track down the tiles’ creators and get some of their recollections and impressions about how the area’s changed since then.
Billy Cunningham, for example, recalls 80s Somerville as “A mix of working class people, gangsters and lawyers, all...
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
mp3: Death Cab for Cutie - Coney Island
not much...
May 2009
3 posts
2 tags
Awesome vinyl day down at Goodwill in Somerville...
April 2009
9 posts
4 tags
1 tag
mp3: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Rockers To Swallow (off...
2 tags
“To be politically relevant, liberty in our era must be experienced as positive...”
– Benjamin R. Barber, “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.” The book overall so far is hyperbolic, repetitive and rather condescending (the subtitle should make that clear), but there are a few nuggets of nice material in it.
3 tags
1 tag
The Decemberists - When The War Came (from Crane...
4 tags
WatchBaker Tweet is a combination of some of my favorite things, ever: European pastry shop + Django admin on a mobile phone + Arduino + stainless steel rotary knob + Twitter = something incredibly neat, if not necessarily practical.
Of course, this could just indicate that I really miss leavened products since it’s smack in the middle of Passover.
3 tags
It’s a rainy Friday and I’m wiped out,...
March 2009
6 posts
“I work in a nursing home and I use it to rock out with 3 of my residents…...”
– Tamera, in an Android Market review of RockOut
1 tag
RockOut (free) reviewed on AudioJungle →
“RockOut is the most fun Android app to play music with. The application contains two guitars (one mellow and one distorted). You strum the strings with your finger, and hear a realistic guitar sound played. The screen is divided into three sections, one for each available chord. The app feels very responsive, and each chord is sampled twice so that you can play upstrokes and downstrokes....
