Before one can communicate with unknown future societies about deadly nuclear waste, it is important to consider with whom precisely one is trying to communicate. Such people may be part of a highly advanced civilization, they may be a society much less advanced than our own, or they may have comparable technology to that which we have today. Further, they may not be directly descended from local cultures. Messages will thus need to communicate to anyone– regardless of their culture, technology, or political structure– that intruding upon the repository is not in their best interest.
Because of the nature of digital simulation, and the finite limit of the sample, calculating analog feedback paths is by definition slower than the original. This latency quickly becomes audible, and we hear it in various ways - either as a ‘smear’ in some of the top resonant ranges, or perhaps as a slightly harsher, thinner tone. U-he have created programming that by trial and error, tried to predict the feedback path, adjusting all the way, to have the same feedback paths as the modules they’re emulating, without the usual digital delay time.
The Atlantic magazine published an interesting article exploring the concept of loneliness and social isolation in the context of technology and social networking.
I have not used Facebook since 2008, but much of this article applies regardless of what platform you use to communicate online.
A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.
I haven’t thought about this in these terms before. I don’t have very many friends, locally or remotely, but the friends I have are close and trusted. However, if I were asked what aspect of my life I am least satisfied with, my response would relate to this loneliness.
“When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.
It’s fascinating that something on such a base level as DNA replication can be affected like this. This takes psychosomatic responses to a new level I wouldn’t have thought possible.
Valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions, the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance, psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depression symptoms.
The more you try to be happy, the less happy you are. Sophocles made roughly the same point.
The article calls this a “disturbing conclusion,” but I find it rather obvious. If you don’t care about being happy, then you remove a huge potential stressor from your life, thus increasing your overall happiness. Oxymoronic as it sounds, it’s only logical.
Unfortunately, this problem often relates to people’s genetics:
A 2005 analysis of data from a longitudinal study of Dutch twins showed that the tendency toward loneliness has roughly the same genetic component as other psychological problems such as neuroticism or anxiety.
I am a firm believer that our mental processes are fully under our control, but such genetic predispositions can be hard to combat. If you’re predisposed to feel depressed, you have to have the desire and the willpower to struggle through your own emotional state, or else you will get stuck. I know people who are stuck here. They feel trapped and helpless and miserable and tell you there’s nothing they can do and that everything is the fault of circumstances outside of their control.
There is always something you can do, though; you just have to really want it, and it’s my opinion that the people who suffer from chronic depression, on some level, don’t want to break out of a cycle that, though painful, has become familiar to the point of comfort. This is something I went through myself from 2008-2009 (when my depression was at its most severe), and I know now (as I knew on some level back then) that a significant part of me did not want to break out of my depression. I found ways to justify it to myself. “You should feel depressed, because life is unfair and keeps throwing bad things at you. You’re justified in feeling the way that you do. Hiding from it would just be lying to yourself.”
I’ve come a long way since then. I’ve come to the conclusion that my happiness or unhappiness affects no one but me in any meaningful way, and we all have good things and bad things in our lives. There is no reason to perpetuate your own unhappiness when the only person you are hurting is yourself. Life sucks, in a whole bunch of ways, but it’s also pretty great in a bunch of other ways. Don’t get worked up over this stuff. Live within your means, do what you have to do for as long as you have to do it, and do what you want to do for the rest. It never seems that simple, but it often is.
Both computers are a joy to use and even more so for sitting at the extreme ends of the spectrum: the iMac for its ridiculously huge screen and connectivity; the Air for its über-portability. This is — without a doubt — the best computer set-up I’ve ever had. If you’re thinking of doing something similar, do.
He has the same setup I do, and I recommend it just as strongly. Also worth a look is Shawn Blanc’s followup:
My MacBook Air is now my “desktop” and my iPad is now my “laptop”. I’ve spent the past month using and testing different apps so that my iPad can function as a work device when I’m away from my desk. This is, primarily, so that I can travel without the MacBook Air. As light and thin as the Air is, it still doesn’t match the iPad.
I agree with that too. Especially in the office, the MacBook Air becomes my desktop and the iPad becomes my laptop. Even if I had the 11” Air, I don’t think it would make me want to walk around the office with it like I want to have the iPad.
Consistency across apps I use a Mac instead of Linux on the desktop for a reason: because I think that the design and consistency that Apple’s UI brings is extremely valuable. I don’t buy computers based on how fast they are, I buy them based on how easy it is to get things done with them, and Apple is the hands-down winner on this pretty much across the board. (Oh, also because I want my audio card to work, but that’s neither here nor there.)
A great article that sums up why I love Linux, don’t like Windows, and use a Mac.
Let’s hope Apple doesn’t become complacent, that they aren’t blinded by iTunes’ spectacular numbers. Let’s hope they deliver a really Apple-like iTunes experience. Paraphrasing a grand departed French politician, I like iTunes so much I want five of them.
Great perspective on the behemoth iTunes has become and what (hopefully) lies in store for its future.
Apple was right with the idea that this thing — as powerful as a laptop, with incredibly natural feeling touch-based controls — is finally the computer that people will want to carry around with them. And it has been amusing to see the competition fail to understand or replicate the iPad’s magic — not one particular feature or quality, but the entire story — and flop in the market.
“… And just like that Brin stepped up and proved to the world that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.” It was the first thought that entered into my brain after reading a Guardian article that outlined Sergey Brin’s thoughts about web freedom, in which he singles out Apple and Facebook as being the single biggest threat to the Internet.
A great article from Matt Gemmell talking about the evolution of user interfaces on the modern touchscreen canvas. I especially like his bit on Android:
Android, to my eye, lives somewhere between the desktop and iOS, in terms of embracing the promise of touch-screen devices and task-centric computing. It’s much more cemented in traditional concepts of “software”, and its user experience frequently betrays the “geek tinkerer” design mindset.
It’s widget-y and button-y and icon-y. It’s configuration-exposing and panel-centric (rather than iOS’ app-centric or Metro’s content-centric approaches). It’s more of a desktop UI in overall aesthetic, with necessary adaptions for touch-screen and mobile-sized devices.
That’s fine, and a legitimate approach, but it’s not radical and it isn’t going to set the world on fire. It feels like Android has never drifted particularly far from the UI themes we’ve used for years on our Nokias and Sony Ericssons and Motorolas, which have now likely been consigned to the museum of history. The destructive and user-hostile fragmentation of its user experience is also of sad note.
I see these as Apple’s three feasible options: keep the screen as is, bump to 16:9 but retain a 326dpi resolution, or increase the screen size while maintaing the 960x640 resolution. I hope they go with option 3, but chairman Gruber makes methinks option 2 is more likely.
Gruber’s post on this was awfully suspicious. He clearly knows something. But I think it would be better for everyone to move to a new 3:2 aspect ratio than to just elongate the device while maintaining the existing 640px width.
Both computers are a joy to use and even more so for sitting at the extreme ends of the spectrum: the iMac for its ridiculously huge screen and connectivity; the Air for its über-portability. This is — without a doubt — the best computer set-up I’ve ever had. If you’re thinking of doing something similar, do.
He has the same setup I do, and I recommend it just as strongly. Also worth a look is Shawn Blanc’s followup:
My MacBook Air is now my “desktop” and my iPad is now my “laptop”. I’ve spent the past month using and testing different apps so that my iPad can function as a work device when I’m away from my desk. This is, primarily, so that I can travel without the MacBook Air. As light and thin as the Air is, it still doesn’t match the iPad.
I agree with that too. Especially in the office, the MacBook Air becomes my desktop and the iPad becomes my laptop. Even if I had the 11” Air, I don’t think it would make me want to walk around the office with it like I want to have the iPad.
Imagine if Things or OmniFocus or another tasks app opened up a slice of their private syncing API to make the Instapaper of to-do inboxes. Now take other APIs for all of the useful apps we use. Not just to-do apps as Shawn mentions, but RSS, photos, blog drafts, sketches, and more.
iCloud is a fantastic, seamless service, but it very much fits in with Apple’s main goal of syncing between the same apps on different devices rather than different apps. I would also love to see someone like The Omni Group open up their Omni Sync Service so that I could dump tasks directly into the inbox of my OmniFocus from anywhere.
I don’t think that a solution like this has to come from Apple, though, because I don’t think Apple is the best equipped party to implement it.
Please note that I’ve made a change to how the RSS feed handles link posts. Previously, I had been directing traffic to my own site instead of the original post. This was not ideal for readers, and I’ve now corrected this to link directly to the original post.
Apple just pushed out OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3. Some of the known issues are absolutely hilarious. I almost think they’ve put some of these in here on purpose just to screw with people.
Some Apple menu items such as Restart may not work when a sandboxed app is in the foreground
Back to My Mac doesn’t work for the first 5 minutes after rebooting
Brightness settings may change unexpectedly after reboot
They’re so arbitrary. What I find really funny is that they actually know about all of these and pushed out the update anyway. Surely it would take less effort to fix “If Mail is hidden at logout time, it may not be correctly relaunched during a subsequent login but will appear to be running” than it would to type all that out.
MacStories is a fantastic site. They’ve grown tremendously in three years but stayed true to their core. I think it’s safe to say that they’re my number one non-blog source for Apple news and analysis.
A whole new generation of computing, where everything can be powered by one device; that’s where Microsoft and Google are positioning themselves. They are platform makers, this is the most obvious and inevitable possible platform play. If you extrapolate a little, it’s quite clear that this goes beyond devices; if we’re talking about dumb desktop shells that you dock into, why not the same for phones and tablets? What if the computer itself is something you always wear - a wristband perhaps. Wirelessly, it could beam its display to a blank shell of a smartphone in your pocket, or the blank shell of a tablet, or a desktop PC, or augmented reality glasses.
I’m a relative newcomer to BBEdit. I started using it with version 9, and switched to it full time with version 10. But there are few pieces of software I’d recommend as strongly. I sometimes do complicated or strange things with my files, and I’ve never once seen it crash, slow down, or even blink. It’s earned so much of my trust that I do all my writing and code wrangling, no matter how insignificant, in BBEdit.
A fascinating, insightful look into the software industry’s major players and the media ecosystems behind them. The Verge, like Ars Technica in some ways, is great at this stuff.
Great interview on MacStories with Justin Williams, the man behind Second Gear (which produces Elements, which I use to publish this very site from my iOS devices). I really love the smaller, more personal nature of the interviews conducted by MacStories (and the general feel of their site).
At some point every service must be paid for in one manner or another. This is true of all free services from Instagram to iCloud. Perhaps Instagram starts flooding your feed with ads, or iCloud requires you to buy the latest gear to be able to use it.
This is why I actually actively dislike not paying for software. I’m happy with just about any form of payment for something I like, but there are two for which I draw the line:
Tasteless advertising. Advertising can be done well, and it needs to be if you want me to use your product/service/site.
Profiting from information about me. This is my big no-no, and it’s why I’ve now permanently sworn off Google for everything, including search. I’m very happy to give you money for a great service. I’m not happy with a service whose entire existence is based on data mining.
Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.
People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.
Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.
No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.
So, so good. Read it, and then read it again. This is why I have tolerance for very few companies aside from Apple.
MacStories is a fantastic site. They’ve grown tremendously in three years but stayed true to their core. I think it’s safe to say that they’re my number one non-blog source for Apple news and analysis.
Schiller deleted his account because he doesn’t like the path Instagram chose (as indicated above), and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think it’s fair to say the Android app is the sole reason why he quit.
Frankly the move to Android would have been enough of a reason for me.
I’m a relative newcomer to BBEdit. I started using it with version 9, and switched to it full time with version 10. But there are few pieces of software I’d recommend as strongly. I sometimes do complicated or strange things with my files, and I’ve never once seen it crash, slow down, or even blink. It’s earned so much of my trust that I do all my writing and code wrangling, no matter how insignificant, in BBEdit.
Seriously, how hard is this to get right? I’m so impressed with the overhaul Photoshop has received for CS6, but they still can’t learn their lessons on pricing. I desperately wish Adobe would stop being so hostile towards their customers.
Here’s all you have to do:
One version of each app (no Extended versions), available both directly from Adobe and through the Mac App Store.
Every app priced at either $99 or $199 depending on functionality.
Offer different targeted suites for $999 each directly from Adobe.
Adobe would make a killing. I would buy these, and I’m not the only one.
Kuo’s prediction comes as Apple is expected to introduce new notebooks that serve as a hybrid between the current MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, offering greater power than the Air but greater portability than the Pro. Kuo believes that Apple will elect to drop the 17-inch size as part of this revamp in order to streamline the company’s product offerings.
I’ll believe this when I see it. That said, it does prompt some interesting speculation about the future of the MacBook line.
They’ve already dropped the “original” MacBook, and now only offer the Air and the Pro. Reading this made me think—do we even need that distinction? When the MacBook Pro adopts the Air form factor (and sooner or later it will), why don’t we just have one big happy MacBook line? The 11-inch, the 13-inch, the 15-inch, and the 17-inch.
Photo Booth is a digital toy. The first version of Photo Booth, however clean and functional, did not look like a toy. It wasn’t fun, and it didn’t encourage you to play around with it. In the new fullscreen mode, Apple uses skeumorphism to invite users to play.
Skeumorphism is about communcating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool. It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables.
Great look at the functional difference a skeumorphic interface makes to an average user.
How did I not realize how awesome Writing Kit was before now? It integrates perfectly with my Dropbox workflow for posting to the site and is without a doubt the most convenient all-in-one solution for publishing from an iOS device.
With all this chatter online lately about mechanical keyboards, I decided it was time to go out and get one for myself. I happened to already have an Apple Extended Keyboard II in my closet, but regrettably it’s in rather terrible shape. Some of the keys are clicky while others are mushy, and the whole keyboard is almost schoolbus yellow at this point.
I had a choice between the Das Keyboard and the Matias Tactile Pro 3. Everyone says the Das types like a dream, but that it’s big, bulky, and ugly. With that in mind, I decided to take the safer course and opt for the Tactile Pro.
It arrived yesterday, and I’ve been using it since last night. Here are some observations.
First, it’s loud. Disarmingly so. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, it’s kind of nice. As Shawn Blanc says above, “A mechanical keyboard engages all the senses but smell and taste.” When you’re sitting at your desk just trying to type something out, it becomes an almost soothing accompaniment.
Second, it looks nice. This is important to me. Just because I never look at my keyboard while I’m typing doesn’t mean I want a big, bulky eyesore on my desk.
The biggest problem I have with the Das Keyboard is that the typeface they use on the letters is ugly. I spent some time looking at pictures of the keyboard last night and I figured out why. The Windows version of the keyboard uses Bank Gothic as the typeface for its letters. I like Bank Gothic. The problem is that they made a stylistic choice to use lowercase letters on the Mac variant of the keyboard instead of uppercase letters like on the Windows version. Bank Gothic has no lowercase letters in its typeface, so they had to switch to a different font for the letters. (If you look closely, you’ll notice that keys without letters on them, such as the number row at the top, are identical to the Windows keys and still in Bank Gothic.) I don’t like that new font anywhere near as much. I think they should have stuck to Bank Gothic and stuck to uppercase letters. If Das were to release a new version of their Mac keyboard either with keys matching their Windows keyboard, or with no key labels at all (like their Ultimate keyboard), I would probably buy one of those. (I am considering buying their Silent model for work. I like my coworkers.)
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a wired keyboard at my desk, so the additional convenience of having two USB ports more readily available to me is also appreciated.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the key layout is reminiscent of the Apple keyboard design previous to the current slim aluminum keyboards, so I’m having to adjust to a different function key layout. The volume keys are all the way on the right above the number pad. In order to replicate (and expand upon) the functionality of my old keyboard, I’m using Keyboard Maestro to configure F1 and F2 as brightness keys (with a special Control-Command-F1/F2 combo to jump straight to minimum or maximum brightness).
The bottom line is that the keyboard is very satisfying to type on. It encourages a natural flow to whatever you’re doing, whether it’s writing, scrolling through a document, or even gaming. I played a little bit of Fallout: New Vegas using the Tactile Pro last night and found myself noticing the sound but not bothered by it in the slightest.
I’m very satisfied with the purchase so far. In fact, I think this post is significantly longer than it would have been if I’d written it on my old keyboard, and that’s among the highest praise I can think to bestow.
To Steve Jobs, Simplicity was a religion. He built a company based on its principles, in which the complexities of traditional business were simply not tolerated. Simplicity was also his most powerful weapon—a means of humbling category leaders once thought to be invincible.
Great resource on when to use the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen. I had previously never been sure of where to use an en-dash, so I’d always used a hyphen there. Now I know.
I used to use Camera+, then switched to Camera Awesome for a brief while before ultimately switching back to the iPhone’s native Camera app. The thing I don’t like about Camera Awesome is that it feels like a giant ad for SmugMug. I’d rather pay a couple bucks and not feel like I’m being shoehorned over to SmugMug.
My other concern is that sometimes it proves difficult to just take a picture. I remember soon after switching to Camera Awesome as my go-to camera app, I needed to take a picture of something quickly, and I wasted precious seconds figuring out how to turn off the various effects I’d turned on the last time I used the app. That right there was what pushed me back to the stock Camera app.
This is pretty cool though:
In a clever touch, Camera Awesome’s icon for the pre-record mode is a stylized version of the flux capacitor from Back to the Future.
I agree with Dave that Ben laid it on a little thick. I know that’s kind of Ben’s deal on his site, and I respect that, but name calling is kinda lame. The guys at Realmac are all super, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know a couple of them since meeting at Macworld.
Okay, fine, they’re not dicks. But more to the point, I don’t like gamification being the clear focus of an app’s developers as the app moves forward. To me that means that the app isn’t worth your time, because the developers are more interested in spending their time adding gimmicks than in making their app better.
Macworld Lab found that a 27-inch 3.4GHz Core i7 iMac with an SSD is faster than a BTO 3.33GHz Xeon Westmere six-core Mac Pro, and if a new Ivy Bridge iMac is released before a new Mac Pro, the performance gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro will only widen. Perhaps that’s Apple’s plan all along.
I’m waiting for a new iMac myself, but things are looking more and more grim for the poor Mac Pro. Though somehow I still can’t imagine Apple killing them off. Here’s hoping I’m not proven wrong, especially for those who need it.
I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.
