Making things vs. making the best things

Nice post I discovered on the Orange site today, “I don’t like making the best things.” Short summary, trying to make the “best” things gets in the way of doing things we enjoy. Specifically the author talks about blogging less often after they discovered they “only want to publish...

Time to update your… cable?

Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal....

My new favorite GNOME extension: quake-mode

Guake has long been a favorite application of mine. If you’re new to Guake, it’s a terminal application for Linux that stays out of site until it’s summoned with a hotkey, like the console in Id Software’s Quake games. Hit F12 or whatever combo you set up for it,...

Blacklight: A real-time website privacy inspector

Ever wondered what kind of trackers are on any given site? Check out Blacklight, a web-based tool to reveal specific user-tracking technologies on a site. I stumbled on this via The Markup and thought it might be interesting for privacy minded folks. (See: “How We Built a Real-time Privacy...

Lose the laugh tracks, forever

Two original shows I really enjoyed recently retooled or rebooted, not sure what the proper term is. That ’70s Show and Night Court are back as That ’90s Show and Night Court (again). I get the appeal and motivation of retooling old favorites, and bringing back original cast members...

Loving “The Last of Us”

I have a healthy amount of skepticism about movies and shows adapted from games. Clue was a rare exception, but it’s hard to go wrong with a cast that includes Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, and the amazing Madeline Kahn. The list of bad or aggressively mediocre media spun...

In case your current keyboard is too practical… the Cube Keyboard

To follow up on yesterday’s post about word processors, here’s a new entry for keyboard enthusiasts: The Cube Keyboard. It’s a keyboard that’s… a cube. I don’t think he’s going to win any typing speed contests with this one. Hat tip to Lobste.rs for this one....

My first word processor

This week I took a little trip down memory lane when a friend posted a meme or something about Stephen King’s Wang word processor in the 1980s. That was early for me, but sometime in 1993 or 1994 I bought my first word processor. Not a general purpose computer...

Things they don’t teach, but should: Content review

Writing and editing are taught widely in schools and professional programs, but content review is a neglected and unloved (and rare) skill that I’ve never seen taught or even acknowledged – but it’s widely required in jobs throughout the tech industry. If you’re a product manager, product marketer, comms...