2020-01-28
Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.
— Digital Tools I Wish Existed by Jonathan Borichevskiy
2020-01-28
At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web.
I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It’s on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn’t quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and the standard wireless Apple Keyboard.
2019-10-17
This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It’s come along just at the right time for me, as I’m generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more.
I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers. Slightly idealistically it argues that the day then becomes about the basics: seeing friends, hanging out and chatting, playing games, cooking meals.
2016-08-22
Hello. My name is Jack…
[Group: Hello, Jack]
…and I’m a news addict.
In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news.
2016-08-22
I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way.
I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the house, across the back yard. He had his main desk in the corner, three computers lined up underneath with one of those boxy, ninetees monitors on top. His workspace was never clear and minimal; he was always snowed in with papers, and pieces of circuit board. He had slapped together racks of power supplies and oscilloscopes that spouted wires with little plugs and clips on the ends. On the other side of room was a standing workbench with even more electronics equipment: a soldering iron and endless reels of solder that I used to bend into animal shapes, breadboards and bags of loose microchips. Piled up in the warmest corner of the often chilly building was a set of servers, keyboards, and monitors. Somewhere between three and six servers were built into standard PC boxes, linked up by an octopus of Ethernet cables, VGA leads, and KVM switches.
2013-10-04
At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These days there’s very little you can do to hear music without interacting with a third party of some kind, short of listening to a friend play guitar in your living room (as long as he’s lot playing from sheet music, royalties abound). The distributors are gatekeepers, and we’re going to explore how drastically their power is waning in the modern age.