Grid-based design sure is getting popular these days: First map of the human brain reveals a simple, grid-like structure between neurons. Hat tip: Jeff Bowen.
Category Archives: Asides
Watching the Olympics parade thing out the corner of my eye, had never heard of Kiribati and found this snippet from their Wikipedia page interesting:
As sea levels continue to rise, the government of Kiribati is negotiating a deal with Fiji to evacuate the entire population to areas of Fiji that the Kiribati government would buy. The area of Fiji proposed for resettlement is the second largest Fijian island of Vanua Levu. The mass migration is expected to include younger, skilled workers first, and then the rest of the population would follow over a period of years.
That’s something you don’t hear every day.
Plane Thinking
From when you leave the gate to takeoff, your phones (and iPads and Kindles) must be off, but when you land you can use your phone before you get to the gate.
Bat-Signal Heralds Launch of Internet Defense League. Proud to be a supporter.
Mike Hendrickson, Roger Magoulas, and Tim O’Reilly have a new report on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software, which included one of their findings that “WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.”
23 Air Travel Tips From Super Frequent Fliers by Elise Hu, includes two from me.
Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn’t A Failure, It Was A Beginning, by Aubrey Sabala.
In Europe, the Court Shuts Down WordPress Based Pirate Bay Proxy that was running RePress.
An oldie but a goodie: Your New TV Ruins Movies. I’ve been known to do this to TVs of friends and family without telling them.
By selling tickets directly and putting restrictions on them Louis C.K. drops scalping by 96%. This guy is on the very edge, just like VHX is making video sales and distribution available to everyone someone will do the same with this ticketing platform. It’s impressive what a creative mind paired with just a bit of technology can do.
Matt McAlister writes on the The Generosity Strategy after our conversation in London last week.
Well that’s a twist: Megaupload Search Warrants Ruled Illegal by High Court.
Interesting note: WordPress Comes To Chinese Users Via Sina.com’s New Cloud Service, costs CNY1 a month.
Jack Chenge writes on The Slow Web Movement.
It’s a week for coming out of stealth: Livestar, An App For Trusted Recommendations and much more just launched, (an Audrey company). Congrats to Fritz and the team!
VHX has come out of stealth about their funding, it’s a new startup that aims to democratize video distribution, through methods much like Louis CK and Aziz Ansari did those recent online-only special. VHX is an Audrey company.
Some sites, like WordPress, where I’m typing this right now, pushed out retina upgrades right away. The result is amazing. I’m typing this, and it looks like I’m typing out printed words. Text is so crisp.
From MG’s review of the new Retina Macbook Pro. There is more news on the retina-WP front coming soon. My review of the Macbook Pro Retina: best computer I’ve ever used. Amazing screen, great speakers, I’m willing to put up with the extra size and weight after being on 13″ or smaller laptops for… 8 years I think.
A nice article in Techcrunch today about the Unreasonable At Sea 100 Day Journey in 2013.
WP 3.4 and Jetpack Comments
It’s been an exciting week for WordPress so far — version 3.4 was released and already has over 730,000 downloads, and also Jetpack Comments (which I’ve been testing here) are now available publicly. Jetpack comments lets your users comment with their WordPress, Twitter, or Facebook identities, as well as as a guest like before. This has been a top-requested feature, and it works very smoothly. Check them both out!