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 adrenaline sports. You just need to get a taste, that first moment when a pair of headphones make you sit up and go, "
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 driver's license and main credit card. In India, I just carry two credit cards since I don't have a valid driver's license.
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 services that feed ad networks. In the case of my personal sites, this means Google Analytics (GA).
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]
So far, I’m really happy. The services are relatively inexpensive, and the features compare well with Google, both in terms of space as well as functionality that I used.
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 everything. Instead, I’ll hit on a few specific things that matter to me.[footnote]Two reviews that I’ll highlight, in case you missed them: Marco Arment’s review (he hated it) and Rene Ritchie’s review.
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 been seeing the number of India-focused brands here in the smartphone market.
In the US, there are global brands like Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and LG and then a spread of other smaller brands.
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. Unlike most other noise canceling headphones I've tried, these don't give me a headache. I've used them on a few long haul flights at this point (17-20 hours in the air each trip) and they're comfortable enough that I sleep with them on.
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 tracking. A few add some extra dimensions of motion capture, or have some additional functionality like sleep tracking, or online tools for food tracking.
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 whatever. I actually found it helpful to my gameplay, and it was mildly entertaining. Most of you are probably rolling your eyes now, but you can kind of think of this like watching the Golf Channel.
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 really get into it. I felt like I either needed to spend to get an advanced quadcopter that auto-leveled and could correct for novice piloting, or really dedicate more time than I had to do the fly, crash, repair, charge cycle required to practice.
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 keep an eye out for a case that I could live with.
(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 context, go read that first.
So, I've been staring at that essay for a good 30 minutes trying to figure out what my thesis is here.
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 and our particular organizational inertia (such as it is for a small company like us), but here it is:
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 wrapped into this wax ball of a topic), was the demographic differences between CT and NYC or San Francisco.
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 for toys for my son for Christmas. I wanted to find something that would teach him simple cause and effect relationships where he could cause something (e.
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 loss... of fears and nightmares past and future.
I keep imagining what it must be like for the parents of the victims today, especially of the young children.
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 2010 to police and fire department personnel, according to data released under a Freedom of Information request.
…
Town administrators this year combed through expenses, trimming nearly $1 million from the original proposed budget before approving a 2012-13 spending plan.
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, everything is on Github.
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 photos. While the photos will still be hosted on their respective services, you can now get one read-only API to see a normalized view of them all.
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 the way of explanation or comments. So, I decided the best way to get familiar with the nitty gritty of building a Node/Express app was to write one.
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 people to move to CT.
Let's be honest. It's hard. Harder than it should be, quite honestly, considering how nice it is to live here.
(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 this most recent storm. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but there are a few things I wanted to open up to a broader conversation.
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 making robots, others building home mesh networks that can control all your lights, and yet others working on all sorts of crazy gadgetry.
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 pounds.
2. Why did you decide to do this?
When we realized we were going to have a kid this fall, I figured out that I'm going to be over 50 when he graduates high school.
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 filmmaker behind Waiting for Superman & An Inconvenient Truth Lily Eskelsen, VP of the National Educators Association (NEA), the largest teachers' union Joel Klein, the current and outgoing chancellor of the New York City public schools Deborah Gist, Rhode Island Commissioner of Education Jon Schnur, CEO of New Leaders for New Schools The panel was moderated by MSNBC correspondent Norah O'Donnell.
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 rise of the political blogs is as much about a shift of power as it is about technology. Having a panel of elites decry the rise of blogs is a bit one-sided.
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 and the nursery wing. They tell you about the amenities, the security, and medical technologies they have available.
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, though, is how accessible and easy it is to explore. The park is crisscrossed with miles of easy to ride carriage roads and easily reachable trails.
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 near our house and I've been messing with them here and there.
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 had or seen an McDonald's Egg McMuffin, you know exactly what this machine makes. It's a combination toaster and egg maker that has a special cycle that poaches the egg and pops the toasted bread at exactly the same moment.