On Meta's content moderation changes: Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads): Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics …

On Meta's content moderation changes: Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads): Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics …

On Meta's content moderation changes: Meta announced a significant change to their content moderation practices yesterday. If you haven’t read it, it boils down to this (from Zuckerberg on Threads): Replace fact-checkers with Community Notes, starting in the US. Simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics …

Uncertainty is going to be the one certainty for 2025: If you remember the first Trump presidency, it seemed like some major news broke every month, either creating outrage or introducing a new avenue for corruption. Things were unpredictable and some level of volatility ruled the day. My sense is that while things will be more stable - wealthy …

Everything my doctor told me was basically right (or lessons from using Stelo for 3 months): Let’s start this post by sharing an embarrassing fact: between leaving Disney in early 2022 and leaving Ohai in late 2024, I have gained about 28lbs (about 12kg). This wasn’t a new trajectory - going back to the beginning of 2021, I’ve put on 40ish pounds. By January 2024, I was a …

Link: Jeff Bezos’ view from nowhere: It’s appropriate that I should revive this site for the first time in years to post about politics, I guess. We are entering dangerous waters as a nation. That’s why Bezos’s decision and editorial this past week was one more disappointment on top of so many others. I was sketching …

New hosting for Fatmixx: Fatmixx has moved from Pair.com to micro.blog for hosting. This also means we’re no longer using Wordpress and are now hosted on Hugo. Old URLs should redirect to the new ones, images should be working if they worked on the old host. If you see anything weird, let me know. If you want more …

Monday links moving to another site: Hi folks - hope you're having a good Friday! I've decided to consolidate the tech things I'm doing onto my other site, UsefulClever, which is where I was putting some of the fun projects I'm working on. There's a little more to this move that I'll share later, but if you're a long time reader of …

Time Should Fade (Almost) Everything...: Update: There aren’t APIs for most of the services that I’d want to use here, so I’m putting this project on pause for now. I’ll probably hack something together for my own use, but trying to turn this into a service doesn’t seem possible given API usage guidelines from …

I Deactivated My Facebook Profile: Just as a public service announcement: I deactivated my Facebook account to see what it’s like to not have a Facebook account. I suspect I’m going to run into places where it’s impossible not to have one, but let’s see what it’s like. Over the past year, especially …

E Pluribus Unum: The motto of the United States is not, in fact, “Fuck you, I got mine.” It was, and should have remained, “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one. We’re all Americans. We all deserve the blessings this country can provide. This one is willing to pay his taxes for the benefit of the many. Source: John …

We hold these truths to be self-evident...: Like many of you who vehemently opposed a Trump presidency, I've been walking around in a bit of a stunned stupor these last few days. I'm gathering my thoughts on what I want to do next, and how I can do the most I can to help bring about a more respectful world. There has to be a better way for us …

Barack Obama And Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview: But I tell you what, though. [Long pause.] I’m named Barack Hussein Obama. I’m African-American. And I’ve been elected twice to this office with the majorities of the American people. So something is working. Vanity Fair Wonderful interview with President Obama. Such a decent man with a deep …

Rethinking the Work-Life Equation:  Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office. NY Times

From Humble Beginnings: the NFL vs. eSports: By most accounts, American Football1 started out with humble beginnings: a college sport that branched off association football (rugby) that spawned a bunch of disorganized professional organizations that eventually coalesced into the NFL and the college football behemoths we know about today. The …

Master & Dynamic MW60 Headphones - Bluetooth headphones that live up to the hype: So, I may have a headphone problem the way some people have shoe problems.[footnote]though my wife swears I have a shoe problem, too…[/footnote] It's not quite as bad as what I see with hard core audiophiles, but still, it's bad. Headphone addiction is kind of like they way people get hooked on …

One year later with the Twelve South SurfacePad: A year ago, I wrote that the Twelve South SurfacePad was my favorite iPhone case. After a year, I'm still very happy I bought the case. I love knowing that I can leave the house with just my phone knowing I have the two most important cards with it.[footnote]Interestingly, in the US, that's my …

Saying goodbye to Google Analytics, Hello Piwik: In my previous post, I mentioned that I was looking at reducing my dependence on free services as an experiment to see if I can improve my privacy. That post was about changing my behavior as a consumer. This time, I’m looking at the services I use in my personal development work, especially those …

Goodbye Google Apps (GMail), Hello Fastmail (and MailRoute): I recently moved nearly all of my email off of Google’s services over to Fastmail, with MailRoute in front of it to block spam. [footnote]My @gmail.com address can’t be moved, and I’m keeping it. While I'm shifting most of that email to my main address, I'll still use it for some things.[/footnote] …

On the New MacBook: I’ve been using the new MacBook as a personal travel laptop for the last month or so. I’ve been coding and writing blog posts with it and I wanted to share my experiences. If you care about these sorts of things, I’m sure you’ve read countless reviews of the device. So I won’t try to cover …

Some Observations on the Mobile Market in India: Living in India has given me a new perspective on a lot of things. Professionally, I’m constantly learning a lot just by seeing how differently people use their phones, and how different the market and ecosystem around mobile is here. Intex? Karbonn? Spice Mobile? Oppo? The biggest eye opener has …

OK, I'm convinced... Must have headphones for heavy travelers: I can't believe I'm recommending this, being a Bose-hater for most of my adult life, but the Bose QuietComfort 25 Headphones are now my favorite travel accessory. Overpriced, yes. Average-ish sound quality, sure. But the noise canceling is uncanny. Flip the switch and the silence is surprising. …

Moov: Fitness coaching, not just tracking: We're flooded with fitness oriented wearable devices from the step/activity trackers like the Fitbit and Up to smartwatches like, of course, the Apple Watch. Some phones even have dedicated activity tracking chips. The sad reality, though, is that most of devices are basically the same. They do step …

An iPad, a Mac, and a Twitch.tv: I found myself watching some players on Twitch.tv this weekend playing Vainglory. It's pretty much the only game I play these days and has been for months. This was the first time that I could remember actually watching Twitch streams naturally - not checking it out because it was in the news or …

Practicing RC flying with a simulator: One of my recent obsessions has been RC flying. So far, I've played with relatively cheap quadcopters and helicopters, but I've managed to crash every single one enough times to end up with a pile of damaged copters. So, I basically gave up on the hobby thinking I didn't have the time (or budget) to …

My favorite iPhone case: For the last two years, I didn’t use a case for my iPhone. I really love the look of the 5 & 5S, and didn’t want anything to cover it up. Of course, by the end of the year, the screens had dozens of fine (and one or two not-so-fine) scratches. Really annoying. So, for the iPhone 6, I decided I’d …

Yeah, I got nothing: (Note: This will likely only be of interest to my local friends and social network buddies. It's a response to Concerning The Suburbs, Their Raison D’etre, And How It Is Reflected In Their Planned Public Spaces, prompted by a discussion on Twitter earlier today. If you're curious, or want the …

Why we stopped using Trello, even though we love it: I tweeted this earlier … we’ve stopped using @trello at @fanzter, but I still love the product. The new board view looks great: http://t.co/fhvRuFN87X #fb — Sujal Shah (@sujal) June 18, 2013 … which prompted a few people to ask, "Why'd you stop using Trello?" The answer is pretty specific to us …

I was on the radio: I was a guest on today's episode of Where We Live on WNPR. The topic was on Connecticut Startup Culture. Give it a listen, and let the mocking commence ("Check it out, it's awesome!" groan). One thing we didn't get to on the show (and, let's be honest, there are probably a dozen conversations …

Sensors, LEDs & iPhones, oh my!: Over Christmas, I hacked together my first hardware/software project. It's been a long time since I've picked up a soldering iron, let alone built something worthy of sharing. It turned out to be a fun little project. Cause, effect, agency I got the idea to do a project over Christmas while looking …

A jumble of thoughts: On a normal Friday of a normal December, a bunch of families said goodbye to their kids and sent them off to school. Announcements. Meetings for the Principal. A normal Friday. Then the abnormal sound of gunfire. Of violence. Of death. And now, the sound of tears, of sadness, of remembering and …

We need context, not balance: Like many towns, West Hartford has a advertising supported, free weekly paper that's mailed to everyone. The latest issue arrived today with this as the front page article: Fire, police overtime nears $3 million in 2010 The Town of West Hartford paid nearly $3 million in overtime compensation in …

Proxigram supports Facebook: You can now pull in photos from your Facebook account. Right now, it grabs everything, but I have controls in the works to let you choose privacy settings or hide individual photos. There's pseudo realtime support, too. Proxigram should update basically as soon as you upload the photo. As always, …

Proxigram now supports Flickr: Quick update on Proxigram: it now supports Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service. If you're a Pro account holder, it will even get realtime updates from Flickr, just like Instagram provides. The "point" of the app has changed, too. The goal is to build a single API endpoint for all of your …

Proxigram - a sprint using Node.js, Express.js, & the Instagram API: I'm happy to share a little experiment I played with this week. I needed to take a look at Node.js & it's family of technology for a project but found it hard to find good explanations of best practices, etc. There are a half-dozen competing boilerplate/template samples that have very little in …

Incentivizing individual relocation vs. corporate relocation: Where We Live ran a show today on why younger people (25-34) are leaving the state. I ended up missing the show (listening to it now!), but caught a very lively discussion on Twitter. One side conversation (you can see it on storify here) that I joined in on was about how hard it is to convince …

What we have here is a failure to communicate: (I should point out, coincidently, and in testament to how obvious the headline choice is, the Courant chose a similar headline. I started writing this before I saw the Courant article, for the record. :-) ) I had a rather animated conversation with a friend today about CL&P's performance during …

Google I/O: An unadulterated celebration of technological imagination: That mouthful is my one sentence description of Google I/O. The demo floors and tonight's After Hours party are full of whimsy and wonder, literal playgrounds for technology geeks of all stripes. The atmosphere at I/O is all about the possible, the future, and the fanciful. There are companies …

Weight loss FAQ: As most of my friends and coworkers know, I've lost a whole lot of weight over the last year. Folks that see me for the first time ask me a lot of the same questions, so consider this my attempt to answer the most common ones. 1. How much weight have you lost? As of this morning, just under 60 …

'Our Great Education Challenge' at the CT Forum: I attend each Connecticut Forum event hoping to leave smarter than when I arrive. This is usually a slam dunk, no doubt it’ll happen thing for any given Forum event. Except, that is, for last night. The topic was Our Great Education Challenge. The panel consisted of: Davis Guggenheim, the …

Following up on my @ctforum tweet: I wanted to briefly expand on a few tweets I made during last night's Connecticut Forum. The topic was "The End of Civility?" and the panel featured David Gergen, Stephen Carter, Christopher Buckley, and Gina Barreca. It was a good discussion, and what I'll address was only one aspect of it. The …

Nurses make all the difference: It's hard to find time to blog or write or do much of anything aside from take care of our new baby, but I've been itching to write this post since we left the hospital last week. When you're expecting a baby, you can tour the hospital. They show you the rooms in labor and delivery and in maternity …

Acadia National Park: one of my favorite places: For so many reasons, Acadia National Park is special to Heidi and me. If you haven't been, you're missing out on one of the treasures of the National Park system and, really, of the east coast. The beauty of the park is remarkable (just look at the photo on the right!). Acadia's real strength, …

Binoculars for looking at butterflies and insects? Who knew?: A while ago, I was looking at (and tweeted about) some dude's travel gear list and noticed a nice pair of binoculars in the pack, a pair of Pentax Papilio 8.5x21 binoculars. I saved it to my Amazon Wish List and this year Heidi bought them for me for my birthday. We've taken them on a short hike …

The Back-to-Basics Egg Muffin Toaster: I've been remiss in my blogging responsibilities and, for that, I apologize. It's already January 5th and I haven't mentioned the most unusual of my Christmas gifts this year. It's the Back to Basics Egg and Muffin 2 slice Toaster and Egg Poacher. No, really! What is this thing? Well, if you've ever …

One year with the best universal remote I've ever used: Logitech Harmony Universal Remote: That's pretty much the review right there in the headline, but as I continue to stall actually finishing my work for, uh, work (I'm suffering from the coder equivalent of writers block on one problem at the moment), here's a quick endorsement for the Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes. While …

Washed out colors on a MacBook Pro (or any Mac OS X Computer): Another bit of Google fodder, in case others run into this problem. BTW, this applies to a computer running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but I'm assuming similar controls exist in Leopard. I'll know in a day or two. :) So, on my work MacBook Pro, I noticed that the colors were extremely washed out. The …