New Simplenote App Updates for iOS, Android, and Mac, some nice iterations. Update: Simplenote for Android was just highlighted by The Verge as one of the best Material design apps.
Category Archives: Asides
Within your heart keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go, and sheltered so, may thrive and grow where doubt and fear are not. Oh, keep a place within your heart, for little dreams to go.
— Louise Driscoll
Not the Only One
I know I’m like a year late on Sam Smith, but his voice on this is so amazing and haunting, it’s a perfect song.
He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?
The Guardian on Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches. Definitely the coolest pope in my lifetime.
Oil prices have fallen by about half since June, making it much cheaper just in time for drivers to fill up their cars for Christmas travel. But the decline in oil prices has had made no perceptible difference on the cost of flying.
New York Times: No Relief for Air Travelers.
“Fasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as ‘remarkable’.” — Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds.
Harper’s had a great article on fasting a few years ago it’s not online at the moment but here’s a PDF of it. It’s also common in yoga and folks trying to live longer. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but perhaps will at some point this year — I like the idea of doing something by doing nothing.
Working on the right problem is more important than working hard. — Caterina Fake
Found via 84 highlights from The Startup Playbook by Automattician Dave Martin.
The hardest thing in the world is spending the most time on the most important things.
For the best explanation of what’s going on with capital markets now it might be best to look to Venture Capital in the 1980s.
Yesterday’s post was a bit of a downer, so here io9 lists The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True In 2014, including technologically-assisted telepathy, 3d printing in space, laser weapons, and landing a robot on a comet.
“They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. […] The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash. So were they right?” The answer lies in Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.
I think it’s good to show both sides of what a distributed organization is like, here are two essays by different Automatticians. Steph Yiu writes Still figuring it out: communicating remotely with lots of people and Chris Hardie writes on Distributed vs. In-person Teams.
Thirty One
The first year of my thirties was both incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding. I started a new decade and a new role as CEO at the same time, and at Automattic we grew to over 300 people and raised money for the first time in a while, both of which I couldn’t have predicted five or even two years ago.
My big takeaway from the year was the importance of habits and small actions for accomplishing big things. To be productive I don’t need any fancy setups or project management software, just a well-groomed todo list and a pomodoro timer. This year on my birthday I find myself in Egypt which is an awe-inspiring place in many ways, but most striking to me has been the enduring beauty of craftsmanship with access to only the simplest of tools.
In running, which I started this past summer while in Italy, I was able to slow down to go further and without injury, and ended up putting in about 140 miles which took my fitness to be better than it’s been so far in my adult life. At least half of those miles were with friends and you can’t underestimate the importance of friends in helping you overcome mental blocks. (Also flew 425k miles in 2014, a new record. You can run anywhere and with minimal equipment — it’s a great way to explore a city.)
Reading and writing, two of the activities still most important to me, benefitted from a “just do it” philosophy of putting one foot in front of the other. I published more words on ma.tt than any year since 2007, and I find blogging one of the most rewarding pastimes in my life. It was also a year of not trying to be all business all the time: I started reading fiction regularly after a decade away and letting the topics here drift wherever my interest is at the moment. Last year I talked about balance, and I think this is what drove many of the accomplishments I’m looking back on fondly now.
I’m proud of how 2014 went, and I hope to build on that foundation to be a better person and reach even more ambitious milestones in the year to come. Here’s to slowing down to go further, and tackling big tasks with friends.
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
Did you know the NFL is a non-profit? Slate says the NFL should lose its tax-exempt status: The league is not a “nonprofit.”.
Speaking of PGP and security, this self-described best PGP tutorial for Mac OS X, ever actually lives up to the promise. Check it out, makes encrypting and decrypting things on the fly super easy.
There’s a simple, unattributed site called Decent Security which has very nice common-sense but effective advice on security. I believe it’s from the same person as behind the Infosec Taylor Swift account. It’s refreshing like reading Bruce Schnier’s blog.
This article on the amazing rise of bacon was one of my favorite articles I read last year. About bacon.
Developing an API is hard. Here’s Automattician Demitrious Kelly On API Correctness.
Avleen Vig wrote a great case for distributed teams that covers many of the high-level highlights I’d agree with.
Over on the BruteProtect blog they have a look at the Jetpack Bloat Myth, and find that counter-intuitively even though Jetpack has more comprehensive functionality it’s faster than using individual plugins to do the same things. There are economies of scale to Jetpack’s approach, and it doesn’t even include the impact of doing things more advanced and complex like Related Posts. There’s a reason why some web hosts like WP Engine ban most related post plugins but encourage the use of Jetpack.
The performance of the plugin code, though still faster, is still a small difference when compared to the benefit of offloading certain tasks like image resizing, related posts, stats, video transcoding, and more in the future to the WordPress.com cloud (which is now across 11 datacenters worldwide).
Of course if you don’t need the functionality at all it’s always faster to have nothing, but that’s a shrinking minority. There are still more optimizations to be had, and in line with a performance focus in 2015 look for more improvements to come in the future. In the meantime, check out the Jetpack benchmarks.