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Archive for the ‘craft’ Category

Better than an “email vacation”

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Better than an “email vacation”:

Much like inbox bankruptcy, simply running away from email overload doesn’t solve the problem. What does work is to engage email as described in Bit Literacy (free Kindle ebook, free iBookstore ebook). To summarize: move your action items to a todo list, and archive or delete everything else. The inbox should be empty at least once a day.

[Mark's been talking about this for as long as I've known him. Just do it already. You can thank me later. BTW, the email client I've been using for work has an setting that shows only unread mail. Very useful.]

Source: Creative Good

Written by Daniel

May 15, 2012 at 7:27 am

Posted in advocacy, agile, craft

When to call bull****

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When to call bullshit:

If I had one bit of advice to someone thinking of a startup—including myself, at times—it would be this. Solve a genuine problem, even a trivial one, that you actually have, and that isn’t being adequately solved by an existing solution. Then think about how you can get money for solving that problem. Be wary of scenarios in which your revenue base and your customer base have no overlap.

If I had a second bit of advice, it would be this. Is the elevator pitch for your new startup—no matter how sincerely you believe in its fantastic future—at its heart a variant of, “Think [well-known service name] but with [added feature or new twist]”? If it is, you’d better know somebody willing to call bullshit.

[Seems like right fine advice...]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Written by Daniel

February 28, 2012 at 1:11 pm

Posted in craft, news

Teller Reveals His Secrets | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

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Teller Reveals His Secrets | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine:

Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries.

[Awesome.]

Written by Daniel

February 26, 2012 at 11:14 am

Posted in art, craft, design

On Fixing the Sandbox

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Daniel Jalkut on Fixing the Sandbox:

I toss all my Mac app ideas that require more than the default sandboxing rules — no matter how cool the idea is.

The sandbox has a chilling effect on at least one developer. I’d be surprised if it were just me.

[This is quite a mess.]

Source: inessential.com

Written by Daniel

February 20, 2012 at 8:01 am

Posted in craft, news

Espresso machine art

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Kees van der Westen:

Kees van der Westen Speedster
From 1995 till 2004 we built the Mistral series of espresso machines, using boilers and groups from La Marzocco. During those days we also were the official importer of La Marzocco machines for the Netherlands. Through the years we acquired some of the old type paddle-groups from the GS machines. As we could not bring ourselves to dump these we eventually decided to use these in a fun-project: building a small series of one-group machines, especially designed to use these groups for their proper purpose. This machine was called Speedster. A total of six were built in 2001 and sold remarkably quick to friends and relatives.

[Fortunately, I don't drink the stuff… but wow for the design, and apparently it is beloved by the people who care.]

Written by Daniel

January 9, 2012 at 7:46 am

Posted in craft, design

The best American wall map

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The best American wall map: David Imus

The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America”:

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

[snip -Ed]

This object—painstakingly sculpted by a lone, impractical fellow—is a triumph of indie over corporate. Of analog over digital. Of quirk and caprice over templates and algorithms. It is delightful to look at. Edifying to study. And it may be the last important paper map ever to depict our country.

[Beautiful, and loaded with visual information. If you love design, maps, or geography this is amazing. Available here, and there's a downloadable explanatory text here. The index and other stuff are available as well. Wishlisted.]

Written by Daniel

January 3, 2012 at 8:15 am

Posted in craft, imaging

House Industries & Richard Sachs

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Richard Sachs Piccoli Gioielli dropouts

House Industries – Blog:

Neutraface No. 2 Display Titling makes an impression for Richards Sachs’ Piccoli Gioielli dropouts.

[I use the Neutra series all the time. It's a personal fave. House Industries rules (There's a joke in there somewhere.) Just in case anyone from HI notices, I think their Koi fish design would make a most awesome jersey…]

Written by Daniel

January 2, 2012 at 7:26 pm

Posted in craft, cycling, design

The artificiality of time

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The artificiality of time:

The web is asynchronous. Time frames have accelerated (started/funded/built/sold!) at the same time they have slowed down. It’s up to you to decide how long your time horizon is–perhaps you’re willing to invest five years into building a solid reputation on a web platform. The decision to work at a different rate than others can be a significant competitive advantage.

[The part I struggle with is the change between building things that I expect to last centuries, and things that I think will be gone in a few short years (if that).]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Written by Daniel

January 2, 2012 at 10:05 am

Posted in craft

Smoked Out: Bill Strickland

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Bill Strickland:
But the sport demands obsession – at least at the level in which I like to write about it. And that makes it impenetrable. And much of what we love about it stems from that impenetrability. You show up for a ride, and right away you get dropped, or you can’t figure out why everyone swings off to the right sometimes and the left sometimes, or how everyone knows to shift all at once without having to talk about it, or how they all just automatically swoop out wide at the same spot before a corner – a hundred thousand little impenetrable acts in a single ride. Maybe you stick through that, then you confront the true, profound impenetrability at the core: When the shit gets tough, all becomes inscrutable.

[Some of the best cycling writing comes from this dude. And some of the best bikes come from the folks that hang out here. It's a place where magic is born.]

Written by Daniel

December 28, 2011 at 1:47 pm

Posted in chronicles, craft, cycling

Redis for win32 and the Microsoft patch

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Redis for win32 and the Microsoft patch:
When dependencies provide a lot of added value it is worth adding them. Instead when you need to switch to something bigger and more complex without any gain, why to do it?

Ah, and about the gain being some kind of feature only exciting for we code nerds and having zero effects on how a system works, please read my next article in a few days, we are programmers and we need a revolution.

[Stay tuned. There's more of this scintillating tech stuff coming. (It is important if you're a developer, but otherwise it's totally in the weeds, and should remain there atmo.) There is a larger lesson to be gleaned from the dependencies issue. If something requires that you do something complex for little or no gain, it's probably the wrong thing to do. It should be noted that we often completely organize our lives in this complicated fashion for little gain. Worthy of more thought.]

Written by Daniel

December 9, 2011 at 8:12 am

Posted in advocacy, craft, tech

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