“Many of the patterns can only be seen in their entirety from the air, last only for a few days at the most, and can require up to 60 volunteers to complete. Hinrichsen encourages volunteers with hot coffee and camaraderie, the only requirement being a pair of snowshoes. After the walking is done she tours the site with a pilot, shooting photographs of the snow drawings. ”
Incredible.
Like the previous version, this podcasting equipment guide is very thorough and addresses which rigs to shoot for based on the type of podcast you intend to run. There's also a place to sign up to be notified about Dan's upcoming book, which will go into even more detail about setting up a podcast and even making a business out of it.
One of my favorite apps just unveiled an upcoming feature that will allow you to publish any of your journal entries to a unique, responsive webpage. This is so cool.
Although I probably wouldn't publish any of my entries in their current state—mainly because I don't edit them very vigorously—some of them do contain the nuggets of ideas that end up on Unretrofied. I can imagine that other people who put more effort into their entries are going to publish some excellent stuff.
I'm excited to see where this feature goes. If you'd like to sign up to be notified of its release, head over here.
John Siracusa nails it:
“Geekdom is not defined by historical entry points or even shared experiences. A geek must possess just two things: knowledge and enthusiasm.”
MacStories invited Alex Guyot to write a gigantic guide to understanding iOS automation:
“This article will attempt to centralize all of the necessary information for a complete beginner to quickly and easily go from little to no prior knowledge of the subject to being able to understand and build their own complex workflows with Drafts and URL actions. I will only be focusing on Drafts here, but the skills learned throughout this guide should be easily transferable to other apps.”
It doesn't get much more nerdy (or awesome) than this, folks. Keep it bookmarked and study up.
The guys at Studio Neat put up a video showing the step-by-step manufacturing process of the wooden muddler that comes with the Neat Ice Kit (an item I wrote about on Tools & Toys a while back). I love getting glimpses of how awesome things are made.
Dave Munson, CEO of Saddleback Leather, made a funny, 12-minute-long video showing the best and cheapest methods competitors should use if they want to copycat his products. This might just be the cleverest form of advertisement I've ever seen.
Tonx Coffee is a favorite service of mine, and for good reason. Coffee fuels a lot of the writing work I do, and having a fresh bag delivered to my door every two weeks is a godsend. I also appreciate the company as a whole, from the excellent customer service to the branding.
Now they're running an awesome promotion where you can put Starbucks gift card balances towards your Tonx subscription, dollar for dollar. As someone who received a few Starbucks gift cards for Christmas, this is perfect for me — and I assume the same is true for a lot of others too. (More info about the promotion can be found here.)
If you're one of those few people who haven't given Tonx a shot yet, I'd sure appreciate if you signed up using my referral link. Think of it as directly contributing to more writing getting published around here :)
Craig Mod's Goodbye, Cameras was an excellent piece, but he still had a lot more to say about the ongoing cultural and technological shift away from dedicated cameras — so now we have the even more wonderful Photography, Hello:
“The shift to a smartphone for photography scares me because I love the boxes. Love their purpose. Their simplicity. So dearly love knowing I’ve captured all that detail. Love their constraints and all the potential packed within them. But in the end, for me, photography has never been about a box. The box was always a means.
[...]
“From physical to digital film editing, from physical to digital graphic design, from anything to the iPad, and from physical to digital photography, we’ve heard it before: Craft is lost!
My belief is is much simpler: craft inhabits whatever medium or tool you work with, if you let it.”
You'll want to grab a cup of coffee before reading the whole thing.
Seinfeld did a Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") and told a bunch of great stories about the making of Seinfeld and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (which is one of the best things on the internet right now). All the answers are worth reading through, but the best of the bunch was this one:
Q: “How do you deal with writers block?”
A: “Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.”
Evernote CEO Phil Libin has responded to Jason Kincaid's complaints:
“I got the wrong sort of birthday present yesterday: a sincerely-written post by Jason Kincaid lamenting a perceived decline in the quality of Evernote software over the past few months. I could quibble with the specifics, but reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right. We’re going to fix this.”
Jason Kincaid loves Evernote, but the service has been letting him down as of late.
“This strategy is tolerable for a social network or messaging app (Facebook got away with atrociously buggy apps for years). But Evernote is literally aiming to be an extension of your brain, the place to store your most important ideas. Its slogan is “Remember Everything”. Presumably the integrity of its data should be of the utmost importance.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that has encouraged me to start moving my archived articles to Pinboard and my other notes to Simplenote.
Federico Viticci has assembled a series of lists for his favorite apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that came out in 2013. Lots of good stuff in there, and he's also put together some interesting stats concerning the series.
As usual, Michael Lopp has perfectly articulated some thoughts that have been rolling around in my head for a while. We should all be considering this question for ourselves:
“Why am I spending so much time consuming other people’s moments?”
I always enjoy Craig Mod's pieces (a previous example being Subcompact Publishing) and this latest one is no different. In it, he talks about his transition from manual cameras to digital ones, and then to the iPhone — and the iPhone is quickly doing away with the old methods.
“Yet if the advent of digital photography compressed the core processes of the medium, smartphones further squish the full spectrum of photographic storytelling: capture, edit, collate, share, and respond.”
He's totally right. I've been longing to buy a mirrorless camera to replace my decade-old DSLR, but it's getting harder all the time to justify such a purchase.
The camera I carry with me every day – my iPhone 4s – is already capable of handling most of my photography needs, including editing. If I upgrade to a 5s, I'm sure it'll be even more difficult to justify carrying a dedicated camera. And so on, and so on.
Harry Marks gives some advice on writing dialogue in fiction:
“Dialogue isn’t easy to write well. It takes time and practice and above all else, the ability to listen. Also, it helps if you don’t feel like a creep for eavesdropping on the people around you.”
Sid O'Neill on the increasingly aggressive nature of the internet:
“I’ve worked out that I couldn’t stop thinking about that almost-fight in the woods because my unconscious mind had drawn a parallel with current events that it took me a while to understand. Each time the outrage machine rumbles to life I hear a much more subtle version of that old childhood cry: "Fight! Fight!"”
I urge you to go read the rest. It's a fantastic piece of writing, with a lesson we should all take to heart.
A perfect example of what makes Field Notes so great.
Shawn Blanc tasked Chris Herbert and I with putting together a list of our all-time favorite iOS games for The Sweet Setup. The list has a little something for everyone and I had a lot of fun putting it together, so go check it out!
John Dickerson hypothesizes that capturing the moment and living in the moment are not mutually-exclusive ideas:
“It's also true, though, that for some people, talking too much or taking a thousand photographs is the way they experience the world. They are not interested in your Zen moments. A life of frantic self-interruption may be their therapy.”
Although I do appreciate having those "Zen moments" myself from time to time, I never feel like I'm missing out on something just because I've taken out my iPhone to film or photograph it. Capturing these moments allows me to later revisit and relive them all over again, and I think that's just as valuable as the memory itself.