Inspiring, chilling, and fascinating.

Seems familiar.

It’s not just tech nerds.

Neven Mrgan, responding to the notion that you can’t succeed running 2 businesses at the same time (or at least, you can’t be great at both):

The hardest thing for humans to persuade each other of is priorities. Should you be an exercise freak? A computer wiz? A classical-literature buff? A badass hiker? A game maker? A dedicated volunteer? A great cook? These are all worthy activities, each enriching your life and likely the lives of others. Our pasts lead us to a mix of a few obsessions, and hopefully we keep our minds open to many more. Those of us who commit to honing that one art may index [sic] excel at it. But for my doomed attempt at convincing you of how to arrange your life, I suggest a solid interest in, oh, three or five Big Things. They will compete for your attention, and the vagaries of fate will lead you toward one, then another. Things you learn in the first will improve you in the second, then bring you to a whole new third. You will be a happier and better person for branching out a bit.

Hats off to M.G. Siegler for noticing this:

Yes, Rubin for some reason has deleted his most famous tweet. His first tweet! One that led to stories by myself and others.

That tweet no longer exists. His first one listed is now from December 2010, trumpeting, what else: Android activations!!!!

Where did the initial tweet go? Who knows. But it sure looks like he deleted it. Deleted it in an “open” way, I’m sure.

UPDATE: Looks like it was a mistake on the part of Twitter.

I use my iPhone in my car. A lot. If I’m not using Maps or making a hands-free call, I’m at least listening to music almost all the time. And while I don’t always need to charge when driving, it helps to have the option. My fixation about this goes back to my 2003 Altima where I cut out a hole in the front spare change compartment to install a custom made iPod cradle, complete with an a Dock and lineout running to the stereo auxiliary input. The door would close, and the iPod would be out of sight, out of mind, but still keep charging and playing. In the age of the iPod, it was ideal.

In the age of the iPhone, I’ve tried a few new things. The first was just a 3.5mm mini-jack plug from the iPhone’s stereo jack to the car’s aux input on the front of the stereo deck for audio. For power, one of the common coiled cigarette-lighter-to-30-pin cables. But man, those coils suck. They tangle with themselves and other cables, they increase the bulk without letting you neatly wrap them up, and are ugly. So I tried mounts.

First the Belkin Tunebase.

The Good:

The Bad:

These 2 minor inconveniences made all the difference in me actually using the thing for what I intended. Getting the iPhone in and out was a pain. And having to plug in a separate audio cable for music sucked. And when not in use, the whole getup looked terrible in my otherwise uncluttered car, dongles dangling about.

My ideal car mount would have 3 qualities:

The Griffin Tuneflex meets all 3 criteria, but not the one Griffin currently sells, which cannot do line out (why?). But the older one that comes with the useless remote does, and the included “iPod photo” adapter fits the iPhone 4 almost exactly.

I wanted to love it. But after months of trying it just didn’t do it for me.

Overall a maddening experience.

This weekend I decided: no more mounts. They all suck. I hate the way those mounts look when not in use anyway. Now I’m using the Incase Mini Car Charger. I chose this one over cheaper ones for its build quality. It’s quite compact, covered in a rubber coating so there are no seams to split, and it has a subtle status LED that doesn’t get too bright. And with Incase, I have no worries about my iPhone being damaged by shoddy components.

Audio is back to a plain 3.5mm cable, and the iPhone is usually in the passenger seat. Charging is done as needed, and when it’s not, I can remove store the 30-pin cable and close the cover door, completely concealing the USB adapter without removing it. I will never use that socket as a lighter, and it’s like my car has a built in USB port now. I’m aware there are adapters with audio and USB combined, and then you use the iPhone’s line out and run your aux cable from the adapter to the car. But I really like being able to close that little hatch door when not in use, and for speed and wear-and-tear, the mini-jack is way better than the 30-pin Dock connector.

Just like you didn’t see 27 Dresses when it came out, begin avoiding 95% of writing that uses personal pronouns, which means almost everything online. It doesn’t matter if it’s written by someone you’ve met in real life, or in a publication you’ve read any liked before. If it’s someone who claims “my ‘I’ gives me transparency,” they are playing football and you want to be watching Nadal. Their way is not wrong, but it’s certainly not to your taste.

The whole thing is just great advice.

Former Amazon engineer Andrew Munn:

From the moment you pick up the strangely weighty slate and press the tiny and awkwardly placed ON button, the user experience is abysmal. The swipe-to-unlock gesture is laggy. Let me repeat that, the swipe-to-unlock gesture is laggy. This is the first interaction a user has with the device and Amazon couldn’t even get it right. Adding insult to injury, it’s an extremely simple and ugly unlock-gesture, just the sweep of a mono-color bar from right to left.

It always feels like there’s a comedian willing to address contemporary concerns with insight and honesty for each moment in time. All the greats had their focus: Richard Pryor and Chris Rock had race, George Carlin had absurdity, and I think Louis has hit on some sort of subterranean undercurrent of emotion that I didn’t realize might be swelling until I listened more closely: shame.

The last line should be read twice.

Bruce Schneier in Vanity Fair:

“It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

The Apple Blogs vs Brooke Crothers:

I’m a fan of Apple’s work because it’s great. I suspect my peers he would criticize would say the same thing. I’ve been a fan of Apple’s products for about 6 years now. Before that, I didn’t own one. You could even say that I hated Apple products back in the 1990s when I was going to midnight launches of Microsoft products. Why did that change? It’s not some spell or some bullshit marketing. It’s all the hard work and attention to detail Apple put into their products during the second Jobs reign. I wanted the best, Apple made the best.

If Apple’s products start slipping again, I’ll drop them again. The loyalty isn’t to some magical unicorn tear voodoo — it’s to the best products.

http://eliainsider.com/2011/11/08/an-unbelievably-awesome-retail-experience/

I don’t say this very often but buying at the Apple Store tonight was an amazing experience. I had the new Apple Store (version 2.0) app on my iPhone and needed to buy an external DVD/CD player. I grabbed one off the shelf and pulled up the app. It immediately recognized that I was in an Apple retail store and brought up a bar code scanner. I centered it on the barcode and, ching, it registered the product without me hitting a button. I hit check out, it asked for my iTunes password, and showed me the final receipt. It also emailed it to me.

I didn’t have to wait for someone to check me out, I didn’t have to pull out a credit card and repeat all my info painstakingly slowly to an Apple sales person. I was literally in and out of the store in under 2 minutes.

Way ahead of everyone else. What other retail store can you possibly imagine doing this?

Interesting take on why so many people call the iPod touch the “iTouch”.

Wolf Rentzsch:

What we’re witnessing is massive tacit cognitive resistance.

I would add to that: iWorks, Mini Mac, and of course MAC.

Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard:

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

I’ve always said people who rely on a free webmail account for anything serious are nuts.

Gruber:

You either see it or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool, enjoy your Nexus. But I think the reason Apple Stores are so crowded, and getting so big, is that there are an awful lot of people who do see it.

http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2011/5

Hi Folks. I’ve just discovered that C|Net’s Download.Com site has
started wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software
like VLC) in a trojan installer which does things like installing a
sketchy “StartNow” toolbar, changing the user’s default search engine
to Microsoft Bing, and changing their home page to Microsoft’s MSN.

The way it works is that C|Net’s download page (screenshot attached)
offers what they claim to be Nmap’s Windows installer. They even
provide the correct file size for our official installer. But users
actually get a Cnet-created trojan installer. That program does the
dirty work before downloading and executing Nmap’s real installer.

Download.com is software hell.

Adam Lisagor:

As we learn to speak to Siri, we’ll learn more about how we formulate ideas into words, how to express those so that they may be understood with less margin of error, ultimately shortening the gap between intention and comprehension.

It’s safe to assume that as we learn to talk to Siri, Siri learns to listen to us. So we’re not simply assimilating with the robot culture, we’re fostering a new understanding between our vastly different types of intelligence.

Which is to say, Siri will teach us how to talk to Siri but maybe more importantly, how to talk to each other.

http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/264

I’ve shipped a number of platforms in my time — platforms are different. You need to make sure that you can guarantee the functionality you expose is something you can support going forward for months, years, and decades. Once you promise to support something, you’re locked in.

Great research and speculation by Guy English.

Google Reader co-founder Chris Weatherell:

I suppose sacrificing pet projects, public responsibility, and transparency could be worth it if the end is a remarkable dream fulfilled. But what if the thing you’re driving everyone toward isn’t the iPod but is instead the Zune? So just make sure it’s not that.

However, saying “no” to projects doesn’t make you Steve Jobs if you say no to inspiring things. It’s the discernment that’s meaningful, not the refusal. Anyone can point their thumb to the ground.

Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).

(via Brent Simmons)

http://parislemon.com/post/13628164301/surely-theres-an-apple-ad-in-here-somewhere

The best customers choose white.