Posts
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Everything I know about photography I learned from Ken Rockwell (part one)
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I walked outside on a spring day in 2018 and saw this great sky above me. I didn’t have my camera so I just used my iPhone. I shot literally straight up into the air. I turned it into black and white afterwards using Apple Photos. Nothing fancy. View on 500px -
Urban density is more complicated than you might think
Density is often seen as the cure for what ails our cities, our mental health, and the environment, and rightly so. Density is great for all those things. But density is also complicated. There is good density and not-so-good density. Staying in an Airbnb on the 37th floor of a Toronto highrise last week reminded me of why.
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A textbook example (Semacode)
My first startup was Semacode, the world’s first downloadable QR Code scanner. When I tell people my entrepreneurship story, I tell them that my first company was a technological and press success, but a business failure. We were covered in Wired and the Economist, and we did make some money, but not that much. Ultimately, we never figured out how to make a business out of it. That was a big mistake. I thought I had a product, but actually what I had was a technology.
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My very own CVE - Safari Security Update 2017-03-27-2 Safari 10.1
I’m famous!
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How to make emacs understand nginx files
I started using
Read the rest of How to make emacs understand nginx filesemacsabout 20 years ago, but I never mastered it. I learned most of the text editing keys, but I never bothered to understand modes, commands, modules, or how to use it to read email, surf the web, or emulate videogames. -
Stephen Elop, Nokia, Microsoft, and the Trojan War
“What happened to Nokia” I was just wondering. Obviously the answer is like BlackBerry they were blinded by the magnificence of their own operating system and didn’t realize that they are a hardware company and can’t write an OS for shit.
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Awesome totally enclosed sets in Sci-Fi movies
All the best sci-fi movies built fully enclosed sets. What’s a fully enclosed set, you ask? Imagine the Firefly, the hero ship from the cult series, and you imagine walking around inside this beautiful, grungy interior, staircases, ladders, the bridge, the kitchen. The actual firefly set is exactly as you see it. If you climb up the stairs from the med station you get to the kitchen. If you go back from the bridge you pass the crew quarters. The actors and crew spent their days inside this magnificent and fully built set that occupied several floors of a massive soundfloor.
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Augmented Reality devices = Broadcast narcissism
Long ago, Ivan Sutherland created a head-mounted display for pilots. It was clunky and bulky, but for shooting your enemies it got the job done. Fast-forward 50 years and we’re now talking about using similar tech to shoot pool or possibly pick out the best hotties at the bar. It can’t be long before some reasonably OK-looking AR glasses are available on the open-market.
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Me: "We terrified engineers into secrecy"
A lazy article to be sure, since it's all taken from Quora. There's some variation in the perspectives, because different people worked in different parts of the company. If you were in engineering, you had individual power even as a lowly coder. In any other department, not really.
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xRIM: The Virtuous Cycle
What would happen if a handful of ex-RIM employees started up new companies? Food for thought. Thousands have been laid off, we could get dozens of new startups. The groups would be experienced, knowledgeable, compatible, the ideal for a founding team. They would be connected to former colleagues wealthy from stocks from RIM's early days, making it easy to raise seed capital.
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