baronessmusic.com
On August 15th, just before 11 am, Baroness and our crew were involved in a very bad crash while on tour. The brakes in our bus failed completely, on a notoriously dangerous, incredibly steep (12% grade) hill in Monkton Combe, UK, on our way from a show Bristol to another show in Southampton. Our bus went entirely out of control, and we had no choice other than hitting a perpendicular guardrail going about 50 mph at the bottom of the hill. The guard rail and the 20 or 30 trees we ploughed through snapped like matchsticks as we went fully airborne and fell down more than 30 feet off of a viaduct to the ground below.
Whoa!
joelonsoftware.com
It’s hard to believe that something as trivial as taking out the trash is impacted by software, but it is, thanks to a flashlight app I installed on my smartphone. So many aspects of modern life are affected by software. You couldn’t eat a pineapple if there wasn’t software controlling delivery logistics, in the jet airplane that delivered it, and in the supermarket cash registers. Pay for that pineapple with a credit card and you’ve probably caused millions of lines of code to execute somewhere.
Software is everywhere.
Exciting times.
theatlantic.com
The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google’s maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human.
Fascinating read.
This following bit pretty much describes the biggest challenge I had - and still have - with NZ Walks.
“So you want to make a map,” Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
arstechnica.com
iOS 6 doesn’t make the iPhone 3GS any slower or more difficult to use than it was before, which should be good news to anyone who keeps theirs around as a secondary or backup phone—indeed, it’s pleasantly surprising how many of the refinements and improvements make their way down to Apple’s oldest-supported piece of iOS hardware.
Helpful article for all the 3GS users -like me - wondering whether to upgrade to iOS6 or not.
Nicole and I are going to leave New Zealand on October 23rd. We’ve been travelling and living in NZ for four years and we feel like having a change and see family and old friends again.
We will be travelling through South-East Asia for a couple of months before returning to Düsseldorf, Germany some time early next year.
We have had the most amazing four years here and we are definitely going to miss New Zealand.
dpreview.com
Nice new mirrorless camera from Sony featuring some intelligent hard- and software-designs.
They also introduced the first full-frame digital compact camera.
Exciting.
dpreview.com
Seems like more and more point-and-shoot cameras are getting wireless connectivity and a powerful operating system.
I am not interested in these point-and-shoot cameras per se, but it will be interesting to see when and how these features make it into the enthusiast and pro cameras.
I love seeing people use the software I produced. I love immediate and direct feedback. It’s very satisfying to see how a certain feature makes someone else’s live easier.
This is why I enjoy writing company-internal software tools, for example. I can work with the users to create and improve the application. I can see my colleagues use it and can get feedback right away.
When the feedback is negative, I can usually fix it pretty quickly. And, it’s interesting to learn why a certain feature was unclear to them or not that great in the first place. When it’s positive, well, it just makes me happy and gives me confirmation.
Being in the same room gives me the ability to watch over their shoulders from time to time. And when I do, I almost always notice something that I can improve or add, to make their jobs less tedious. Sometimes, even trivial tweaks can go a long way.
This direct connection makes it fun and very efficient to create and improve software.
Unfortunately, this direct connection has always been missing when I was working on the software my company actually sold. So far, customer feedback was usually brief, generic and indirect. And I have never seen a single one of our customers use the software we produced.
unicornfree.com
Amy Hoy:
Until now, [the students have] always worked for approval, abstracted from results: the question has always been, Is this the answer the teacher wants? or Did the committee like it? — not Is it true? and Did it help the customer?
It’s as if Galileo dropped his ball and feather from the top of the tower and, as they fell, sought to convince his audience by argument instead of simply looking.
This is the way most of us grow up to live, learn, and work. And it’s toxic.
inc.com
Jason Fried:
How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to “mess around” with new ideas? How can we afford not to? We would never have had such a burst of creative energy had we stuck to business as usual.
Bottom line: If you can’t spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you’ll never get the best from them.
For some reason my Mac suddenly stopped downloading photos from iCloud’s Photo Stream. The folder at ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub/ didn’t contain any photos taken after a certain date.
The following steps fixed this for me:
- Go to System Preferences -> iCloud.
- Disable “Photo Stream”.
- Wait a few minutes (this seems to be important, because the first time I tried, I turned it back on after a couple of seconds already and that didn’t fix my problem).
- Enable “Photo Stream”.
After this, the Photo Stream folder started filling up again with all the photos my Mac hadn’t downloaded so far.
