Sigh, here we are again. It’s been 10 months and I’ve been reading a lot and unfortunately didn’t link to any of my favorite things. This is a reminder that I really need to carve out 30 minutes every day to write but I’m constantly interrupted by people who require my time. Time is insanely valuable these days and I don’t have a lot of it.
- Christopher McQuarrie’s advice to screenwriters applies to all of us and while I bookmarked and wanted to link to this guy’s Twitter thread on it. His thread no longer exists so he deleted it? Link Rot on a 1 month old array of Tweets? Sigh. I’m linking to a blog that has screen shots of his text
- Getting started with security keys by Paul was timed perfectly as Lightning / USB – C keys are now supported on iOS in Safari. Paul hit this one out of the park. His writing and blogs are something I seriously look forward to. He writes 2-3 times a year at most and is my favorite blogger right now.
- Catalina Vista on Michael Tsai’s blog makes me sad. I more importantly feel for all of the very talented Apple engineers who are suffering through a systematic failure of management to address issues, innovate and drive the desktop OS. “No new features” for the next 3-4 years of MacOS would make me so happy. More:
- Catalina System Issues
- Photoshop and macOS Catalina (10.15)
- Lightroom Classic and macOS Catalina (10.15)
- The Planet Needs a New Internet covers nearly every year we’re suffering from today when it comes to the virtual connectivity in our world
- Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable is a dramatic narrative but has some truth to it. As someone who works on the inside of navigation, this does a nice job of summarizing to blight of real time traffic built by algorithms, not people.
- Apple locked me out of its walled garden. It was a nightmare is worth reading so you are aware of the issues of going all-in on one platform. Apple is by far the best for us but when it turns on you, be prepared to feel helpless for a few months.
- Serendipity v algorithmy by Patrick T on Kottke is a good summary of a lot of what I read this year. I focused a lot on pieces that highlight how AI is ruining us and this article also spoke to me because I use the word serendipity on a daily basis to explain the beauty of social networks and AI and algorithms but the reality is never that idealistic when you’re building web applications at scale
- Photographers, Instagrammers: Stop Being So D*mn Selfish and Disrespectful is another bleak of our shitty present.
- Is Your Journalism a Luxury or Necessity? Good inside-baseball introspection on the world of news and free press. Journalists need to be paid but paywalls keep poor people from reading good reporting and news. Newspapers turn into class warfare where the poor people get fake news because they can’t afford to pay for a newspaper.
- Revisiting the iconography of Apple Maps was a nice walk through memory lane of Apple Maps since inception in 2012.
- The Land Where the Internet Ends had me Googling this place to figure out if I can visit there for a few days. There has to be a decade long study already happening that compares cancer and depression rates being lower in this area versus the rest of the world. Seriously, light and radio silence is better for us.
- OM Malik has been on a roll this year. His writing is something I look forward to every day and I wonder where he finds the time:
- A Technical and Cultural Assessment of the Mueller Report PDF really awesome different take on a document almost everyone knows about but barely anyone actually read.
- Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show was a report and leak that I’m surprised didn’t actually lead to anything changing for Facebook. It was business as usual a week later.
- Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good a bit too dystopian but it does highlight some real programs that would end up becoming everyone’s reality in a few decades
- Why there’s so little left of the early internet discusses mainstream link-rot and one thing lately is in Google’s goal of always having fresh content and ensuring your search query on current events, sports and things like scandal means that they make thoughtful reports and news stories so de-prioritized that you have to use their search tools and specifically put 2002 only when searching for Iraq War data because the queries are about the now, not the yesterday. If you don’t know what year something was published, you have to click back to page 20 to find it. It basically feeds the beast of link-rot.
- The case of the 500-mile email was just a fun read
- Two Fundamental Things Wrong with Social Networks – Nothing new here but well written
- Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories – great lessons on Medium which probably won’t exist in 10 years and this link will probably be gone forever. I hope the author held on to the text to post elsewhere when Medium goes away
- Young people still love Twitter — as screenshots on Instagram I actually thought of this last night when going out with some friends of my GF. Heather mentioned that I don’t mind gossip as I have no one to tell it to implying I don’t really have a big social circle (true) but my response was, “Yeah I don’t even have a Twitter account”. Saying that in 2019 I guess was a joke but I didn’t intend it to be. I wasn’t joking but they laughed anyway. Oh well, but as someone who frequents reddit, I can attest that this is reality.
- Hanoi by Anthony Bourdain (on Medium) was a great read and the first thing I read after hearing of Bourdain’s passing. This continues to be my favorite episode in Bourdain’s catalogue. I try to watch it every few years.
- Apple killed fun is now 1.5 years old but is still true today. Where are the colors? The Whimsy? The fun?
- In Newark, Police Cameras, and the Internet, Watch You – AdamsBlock was too early and would have done well if launched today
- Computer latency. I LOVED finding this via another blog. Our phones are thousands of times faster than our computers in the 90s but things don’t actually happen any faster. Software latency is a metric we need to track when building applications.
- Text-only news sites are slowly making a comeback. Here’s why. – June of 2017 is the publish date. Unfortuatnely this awesomely optimistic future hasn’t really happened outside of independent bloggers like me who still have lightweight sites.
- Tech is upending the ways we write, speak, and even think
- Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry starts with “Nerds, we did it” I was hooked from that line.
- The Theory of Visitors Loved this particularly this bit below. I aimed to write more about this at length but never found the time.
“All relationships are transient,” she said. “Friends who stab you in the back. People you network with at a fancy party. Relatives who die. The love of your life. Everything is temporary. People come into your life for a limited amount of time, and then they go away. So you welcome their arrival, and you surrender to their departure. Because they are all visitors. And when the visitors go home, they might take something from you. Something that you can’t ever get back. And that part sucks. But visitors always leave souvenirs. And you get to keep those forever.”
That’s it for this year. It’s a lot. Sorry I’ll try to do better next year.