June 2011
45 posts
Boston Meetup Tonight
Reminder: Minimal Mac Boston Meetup tonight. Lir on Boylston at 6pm until close. Come as you are. Leave forever changed. Or something…
Embracing the zeroes →
bobulate:
Sam Anderson on the art of seeing, or what a physical almanac can teach us about our physical selves under the crush of nonphysical information on the Internet:
We need to remember the value of nothing. It’s like breathing: you can’t inhale all day. We need to learn to make peace with the information we don’t know, to embrace the zeroes, to relearn the pleasures of hunger, need,...
Agenda » savvy apps →
Agenda is a great looking new alternative to the built in iPhone calendar app. The feel is meant to be similar to that of an old style paper desk calendar but all of it tappable and with tons of gestures and smarts. A nice blend of the best of the old and the new.
Ben Brooks did a very nice review of it and it is currently ranking very well on the app store.
Gone fishin'
Well, not exactly. That said, you may notice a slowdown and general irregularity of posts around here for the next ten days. I’m, on vacation with my family on our way to Boston by way of many other adventures.
Until then, be curious. How else will you know the answer if you don’t ask the question?
One Week to Minimal Mac Meetup – Boston
The Minimal Mac Boston Meetup is only a week away! If you are in the Boston area, swing on down to Lir on Boylston next Tuesday. I would love to meet you. There will also be some other folks you might know like Uri from Minimal, Dave from TUAW and 52 Tiger, and Author and Designer Aaron Mahnke. I will have a few Minimal Mac T-Shirts to give away as well as some signed copies of my book for sale.
...
Why I Don’t Backup — Deanacus: Smoke Signals →
Trust me, it is not as crazy as it sounds. And that is from a card carrying member of the International Brotherhood of You-Be-Crazy-For-Not-Backing-Up.
As with data security, it is all about balancing convenience and risk.
Five Predictions About Your Future – #1: You Will... →
How will this come about? Hardware, for what it is, will sometime soon become irrelevant. You will have secure access to your personal data and your media from anywhere you are. You may buy a device, like a phone or a tablet, but they will be very inexpensive, almost disposable (and certainly recyclable). There will be no benefit from buying newer hardware. It will not be faster or have more...
Subtle Patterns | High quality patterns for your... →
Actually, these patterns also make some very fine desktop backgrounds if downloaded, selected, and set to tile. The site itself is really well done as well. Love the way the preview works. Thanks to reader Daniel Beck for the find.
Bird Bell on the Mac App Store →
Bird Bell sits in your menubar and notifies you of things happening on Twitter that most clients don’t. Such as when you get new followers, unfollowers, when someone favorites your tweets and retweets.
In a further effort to turn the happy back on, the developer gave me some promo codes to give away on a first come, first serve basis. Enjoy!:
FX3T4P3X49PF
9R64ENPK3HFH
HFL4AE3FXAX3
...
Palimpsest for iPad - Read hand-picked magazine... →
I’d like to thank Palimpsest for iPad for sponsoring this weeks RSS Feed. Palimpsest delivers multiple long form magazine articles to your iPad that are hand picked by actual human beings and catered to your tastes and preferences. If you like good, long form narrative and journalism as I do, then this app is a must have. Get it in the app store today.
nvALT as my database for everything – 52 Tiger →
Some great tips on using nvALT, the Notational Velocity fork I depend on. That said, one tip really stood out to me because I was surprised I had not seen it before:
Equally important is the subtitle. Merlin Mann posted this trick once and I’ve used it since. Once you create a note, format the first line like this: “Subtitle: Description” (for example, “Subtitle: NYC hotel information”). That...
What you may have missed on Enough — The Minimal... →
Are you listening to Enough – The Minimal Mac Podcast? If not, you have been missing out. Recently, it has been the “blog beyond the blog” where we are further discussing posts, news and ideas originally only written about here. Recent examples include:
MicroSocial – Further commentary and thoughts on the new MicroSocial trend I am noticing.
…and…
iCloudy – Here we are joined by...
DoublePane on the Mac App Store →
Time to turn the happy back on.
I’ve mentioned DoublePane before. It’s a great little window management utility that does mainly four things: Make a window full screen, make it fill the left side or right side, and restore a window to it’s previous state. All of these are triggered with user-definable keyboard commands. I use it quite a bit for editing when I want to see two...
patrickrhone / journal » Remembering Rodney →
Rodney O. Lain passed away a few days later on June 16th, 2002 – six years ago yesterday. He took his own life with a gun to the head sometime in the late night/early morning of the 15th and lived for one day more (I imagine just as a final “Fuck you” to the gun – He was that type of guy). There is rarely a day or two that goes by that I do not think of Rodney. He was my friend. I miss him. I...
...the deadline - What I Learned In Joplin →
Absolutely fascinating account of one New York Times reporter getting the story out about the devastating tornado in Joplin, MO using nothing but an iPhone.
Forkbombr — Size Doesn’t Matter: My Review of the... →
As of this writing, I have 42.4 GB free. I have no music or movies on this machine. The few dozen photos I keep in my Dropbox are the only images around. My iPhone is always in my pocket, and it’s loaded with media, so why duplicate it on a machine I want to keep lean?
That was my thinking going into my purchase of the same. My iPad and, sometimes, iPhone hold all of the music and video I...
Living as close as possible to your ideal self |... →
Clutter comes in many forms — physical, mental, emotional, etc. — and all of it is unproductive and distracting. Take a few moments to review your ideal self. Decide if the vision of who you want to be is really who you want to be. If it is, do everything in your power to clear the clutter and get as close to that ideal as possible. If it isn’t, let go of those misperceptions and their...
w/ – Blog › Chris Messina →
practicalopacity:
“As we continue our quest to build new types of networks which maintain their quality over time, we have been fascinated by the idea of an interaction network. Or, as we enjoy calling it, the With Graph.”
Chris Messina points us to With, a new iPhone app from the folks who brought you Path. The idea: a fun and simple way to track and are who you are with.
This is another...
Dropp (and the rise of "MicroSocial") →
Dropp is a new iPhone app that allows one to leave location based notes and photos for friends anyplace in the world. I’ve been beta testing it for a few weeks now and it’s well designed and opens up some interesting ideas and possibilities.
I consider it a part of a growing trend I’m henceforth dubbing MicroSocial. In this trend, social network technology becomes closer, highly...
Palimpsest for iPad [Sponsor] →
I love magazines. I always have. There are several that I read, literally, from cover-to-cover every month. I especially a big fan of some of the wonderful long form articles that can be found the likes of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Wired.
Palimpsest is a new app for discovering and reading interesting magazine articles on your iPad. These are hand-picked by real humans and then further...
Mac Mini Vault [Sponsor] →
I’d like to thank the awesome folks at Mac Mini Vault for sponsoring this weeks RSS Feed. If you want to get serious about using your Mac Mini as a server, then you need a place to co-locate it that is fast, trustworthy and affordable. A place that is specifically designed to host the Mac Mini staffed with people who are dedicated to the Mac platform just as you are. Plus, you want...
The Data Is The Computer
I know there is a ton more I could post about Apple’s announcements coming out of WWDC. But I think while all of the details and features of iCloud, iOS 5, and Mac OS X Lion are interesting, there is an idea that these technologies surround and support that is far more so. In fact, it could be perhaps the most fundamental shift in the idea of what a computer is in many years.
The idea is this:...
Minimal Mac Meetup – Boston
The plans are now set. I’m swinging into Boston at the end of this month and will be hosting a reader meetup. If you are in the Boston area, I would love to meet you. There will also probably be some other internet folks you might know there like Uri from Minimal, Dave from 52 Tiger, and Author and Designer Aaron Mahnke. I will likely have a few Minimal Mac T-Shirts to give away as well as...
Steve Jobs reveals Apple's new spaceship campus,... →
Because, why would you expect Steve to put less thought into a building that can hold 13,000 people than, say, a washing machine? (Answer: You shouldn’t)
My Bag is BadAss : Porter Shoulder Bag →
I really like the look of this one. Clean simple lines, just the right amount of storage, looks like it will last a lifetime and still look this good. That kind of thing does not come cheap but, once again, if it’s the last bag you will ever need then spending a lot up front is required for saving money in the long run.
Also, seriously, be sure to follow My Bag is BadAss if you like this...
Convert.it →
A simple app that allows one to quickly convert image formats. For instance, if you have a bunch of JPEG files and you want to convert them to PNG en masse, this will do the trick.
iCloudy With A Chance Of Streaming
Like many of the tech writers in my Twitter stream, I too am simply exhausted from all that there is to unpack in today’s WWDC 2011 Keynote. That said, let me try to break down a few highlights that I think are important to what we believe in here.
I’m going to start with the one I found most interesting:
iCloud
The funny thing is that iCloud is not any one thing but a host of things. Perhaps...
Minimal Mac | iCloud – Conjecture, Magic, and A... →
Perhaps Steve has been reading the site…
“Some people think the cloud is just a big disk in the sky… We think...”
– Steve Job’s announcing iCloud at WWDC 2011
Secure Colocation | Mac Mini Vault [Sponsor] →
I have discussed before why the Mac Mini makes the perfect server. It’s small, affordable, fast, and when running Mac OS X Server, has all of the features you need to offer enterprise-class services in a machine a fraction of the size and price. Not to mention that I think Mac OS X Lion will make it even more attractive for the task.
That said, there are many reasons you may not want to...
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
– Carl Sagan
The Way I Work: David Karp of Tumblr →
Interesting profile of David Karp, founder of Tumblr in this months issue of Inc. Magazine. If you pick it up you also notice some other guy yacking about email.
(P.S. Yes, the some other guy is me.)
Hello Theory, Introducing Hopefully Sunny →
Hopefully Sunny is a really simple web app. You sign up with your email address and zip code, and we email you each day with the forecast for the next 4 days.
So far, so good. I really like the obvious amount of thought put into this. It’s designed around simplicity and putting this information in a place that you are most likely to see it. But wait. There’s more…
If you’re...
Why Windows 8 fails to learn the iPad's lessons |... →
It’s been easy to bash Microsoft lately. The company blew it in smartphones and Apple’s success with the iPad after all those years Redmond spent evangelizing Tablet PCs must really sting. But while it would be so easy to just write Microsoft off as a completely clueless company that’s just living off its former glory, the fact is that there’s some very interesting work going on at Microsoft. It...
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Seeing The Future
Not long ago, at the mall, I found myself standing outside of the Microsoft Store which is strategically built directly across from the Apple Store. I stood at the window and watched the people playing in front of the Kinect demo. I made a point to look mostly at the players and the strange sort of pantomime they were doing as they manipulated the action on screen. One did not have to see the...
“If you look to the lives of others,
you’ll always find yourself lacking.
Look...”
– Leo Babauta – The Comparison Trap | zen habits
