Listen now . When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.
— Ernest Hemingway
Bill McKibben writes from Among the Marchers of the climate change march the other week. Hat tip: Chip Giller.
With the relaunch, NewYorker.com runs on WordPress, a more robust, user-friendly CMS. “We’re looking at almost total upside there,” Thompson tells me. Because the tools are no longer getting in the way of producers doing their job, NewYorker.com is now able to publish a greater volume of stories every day. The site used to top out at 10 or 12 stories each day: now, it publishes around 20 per day. “It’s a lot easier to be productive now, and we can now make the site fresh a lot more quickly than we used to,” says Thompson.
How The New Yorker Finally Figured Out The Internet in Fast Company. Still my favorite magazine in the world. Also the reason I started spending more time in New York. Hat tip: Kelly Hoffman.
I listen to music pretty much constantly, and it’s not unusual to see me on the road with just a carry-on and still have 3 or 4 headphones on me that I’m testing.
First off, Bluetooth changes everything. It’s so nice to not ever worry about cables, or even proximity for the most part, like having your phone charging by the laptop and still able to walk around the room. Audio quality is great now, only downside is having to charge something, but they’re all pretty good about battery now.
I’ve been enjoying a category I’ll call: Bluetooth, over ear headphones that let people know not to bother you, that you feel kind of cool wearing, that are great for planes, and cost around $300-400. The pioneer in this category is Beats, and I bought a pair of their Studio Wireless (in matte titanium, natch) after Apple bought them because I wanted to see what the fuss is about. More recently I got some horribly named but well-reviewed Samsung Level Overs, so this is a comparison of those two. (Another contender in this category would be the Parrot Zik ones, but just skip those. Great idea, annoying in practice.)
Let me start with how the Beats are better: they fold up, look cool, sound pretty decent on calls, and everything works nicely with the iPhone. For me they have two fatal flaws: comfort and noise. The earcups are kind of small, or my ears are kind of huge; whichever it is, sometimes after wearing them for a few hours my left ear starts to become quite sore. Second is they have active noise cancellation (ANC) that causes what can only be described as a constant hiss you can hear both while music is playing and while it’s off, it’s like like noise addition rather than noise cancellation. The fit and finish of the Beats are nice, as well as the accessories like cables, how it indicates how much power is left, et cetera.
The LEVEL overs (wow that’s awkward to write) are big, and they don’t fold, but they float around in my backpack pretty much the same as the Beats, especially if you don’t use the included case. The battery seems to go forever. The ANC can be turned on and off (battery goes longer with it off), and when it’s on it’s good, like miss-the-announcement-for-your-flight good. For me this is the deal-maker — I didn’t realize what I was missing with mediocre ANC before on the Beats, I’m now able to concentrate and relax much better on planes. I’ve flown every third day in the past month, so this is a big deal to me. They also feel like they’re better made — less plastic feeling than the Beats. The have a touch gesture control on the right cup like on the Zik, but it actually works well. The cups fit completely over my ears and in general it feels more comfortable on my head, I can wear it for hours at a time and it’s totally comfortable. I don’t think they look as cool, but that’s probably because I haven’t been conditioned with pictures of my favorite musicians and athletes wearing them. (Though not in football anymore.)
Main downsides: the cable it comes with doesn’t “work” with an iPhone or Mac as a mic or control device, and is also clunky. (Bluetooth control works fine.) This is apparently because the remote control resistor on Apple-targeted cables work differently from everyone else’s, which I think we can all agree in 2014 is ridiculous for both sides. My fix for this was to use the cable from the Beats, which you can also buy online, which looks cooler, is smaller, and works great with my Mac for G+ Hangouts and Skype calls. Perhaps related to this is when the Beats or many other Bluetooth headsets I’ve used are connected to the iPhone there’s a battery indicator and the Samsung doesn’t support this, but since the battery life is so good I don’t worry about this too much.
Too long; skipped to the end: The Samsung sounds better, is more comfortable, and is better made. Try it out if you’re considering buying headphones in this category. I don’t expect this to be a long-term advantage because I’m fairly certain Apple will do amazing things with Beats in the future, even if that just means a lightning connector, but I’m guessing that’s a 2015 thing.
Extra credit: What headphones do I use in other categories? (An update to my 2009 post.) For in-ear wired I use Ultimate Ears 18 Pro Custom molded to my ears, but I also recommend Sennheiser IE 8i for friends who don’t want to go to audiologist, for running/exercise or when being discreet like on a subway I use the Plantronics BackBeat GO 2 with charging case, at home I like the Auduze LCD3 usually with a Red Wine Audio amp. I agree with many of the assessments in Marco Arment’s mega-review, and I got turned on to the Samsung’s by Wirecutter’s noise cancelling review.
I got a chance to try the Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 (DK2) the other day, specifically Sightline: The Chair. I’m not sure what to say except it was magical. I don’t think it replaces screens, but Oculus-style VR is definitely the future of entertainment. Thanks to (the newly retired) John Vechey for sharing it with me.
This story about how a man sabotaged a FAA facility is terrifying and inspiring in how people worked together to overcome it, and also includes this unintentionally funny line, “He had worked at the Chicago Center for eight years, according to an FBI affidavit. The company has fired him.”
The Internet’s Most Fascinating Newsletter Writer, Dave Pell. Still one of my favorite reads, though I don’t look at it every day because it’d make me lazy about blogging and you all would get tired of seeing “Hat tip: Dave Pell” on every post.
Introducing The Players’ Tribune, a new media platform that will present the unfiltered voices of professional athletes, bringing fans closer to the games they love than ever before. Founded by Derek Jeter, The Players’ Tribune aims to provide unique insight into the daily sports conversation and to publish first-person stories directly from athletes. From video to podcasts to player polls and written pieces, The Tribune will strive to be “The Voice of the Game.”
The Players’ Tribune, powered by WordPress. Here’s Jeter’s intro. Hat tip: John Gruber.
Our goal is to create a sustainable membership with a large enough base that it will fund reporting and writing at rates that are competitive with the best print magazines in the world.
You might not have heard of a Longreads Membership yet — you join for a monthly fee and 100% of that goes to independent publishers and writers. We’re announcing an update to the program to match every dollar in, so it doubles your contribution. I just joined Longreads at $10/mo, about what I pay for Netflix, and I can’t wait to see what comes out from the editorial team next.
Sarah Gooding of the WordPress inside baseball blog WP Tavern has an interview with me she titled Matt Mullenweg on Ensuring the Future of WordPress.
The ever-creative Childish Gambino has released a new mixtape STN MTN (track by track) which is part of a longer EP Kauai that was just released on iTunes. Donald is a friend and an artist whose work fluently spans much more than music. And I’m not just saying that because, as Techcrunch noted, he shouts out to Krutal and I at the end of Go DJ.
This catchy song has been making the rounds with my friends, see if you can listen and not move just a little bit:
You might have noticed there have been more posts around here lately. Actually until yesterday (Oct 3) there was an unbroken string of at least one post a day since August 25th, 40 posts in total. It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe:
https://twitter.com/cdevroe/status/504630581117063169
Until now I forgot it was only weekdays, so I was doing weekends as well. Friends know I like doing personal experiments just to question assumptions or ingrained behavior, other examples this I’ve tried this year are giving up drinking for a month, going without a smartphone for 40 days, and more recently training for a half marathon with my friend Rene. I thought blogging every day would be a burden, but it actually became a great source of joy. It was more a shift in mindset than anything — every day I read things I think are interesting, share links with friends, have thoughts that are 80% of a blog post, and write a ton privately, it was just a matter of catching those moments and turning them into something that was shared with the world.
The tools besides WordPress that I found super-helpful in this were Simplenote, which was great for capturing thoughts and drafts when I was on the go, and I’ve been using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help me schedule drafts and keep an eye on my progress. The Editorial Calendar plugin is useful but I don’t love it — I wish the calendar view moved week by week rather than replacing the whole table, that it was responsive or worked on mobile, and that it would take over your publish button so you could define a desired posting cadence (in my case every 24 hours) and it would put a finished post in the next free slot, or let you bump something to the front of the queue and push all the other posts back a day. There were a few missteps along the way with timezones but overall I’m happy with how the experiment turned out.
So what broke the streak? It was actually one of the other experiments: running. I’ve never considered myself a runner, and never really done it in my life, but a few months ago I started trying it and have been training up for a half marathon on November 16. (It’s also a great opportunity to take photos.) Yesterday morning I woke up early around 5 AM and as the sun started to come up, and the weather was so nice after I rounded the Bay Bridge (planned turnaround point) kept going to Crissy Field where I saw the Golden Gate from afar and thought it would be fun to cross it. After crossing I was starving by and figured 3 more miles would be a half marathon and also put me in Sausalito. The last mile or two was really tough, definitely beyond what I was ready for and I walked a lot, but I was very proud of the result, finishing in around 2 hours 45 minutes. But I hadn’t planned to stay out that long, and the rest of my day was full of meetings. I had moved my scheduled post for the day out so I could talk about the new Childish Gambino mixtape (post coming tomorrow) but the rest of the day was so busy and I got exhausted so early I totally forgot to post.
So achieved one life goal while breaking the streak on another, which is not ideal, but today is another day and I want to see if I can break the 39 day streak next. Everything happens one day at a time. 🙂
Derek Low on What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class [link removed, see end]. I’ve been on the Emirates First Class A380 with the shower before, but this looks like an entirely other level. I also must confess I think Emirates has rather gaudy design. The best I’ve seen design-wise is actually from Swiss Air, as you’d expect. Update: Apparently the original link borrowed pretty heavily from another blogger, so here are links to the original author’s posts: one, two, three.
I went for a run this morning and ended up with a pretty slow pace because I kept stopping to take pictures of the beautiful scenery around Stockholm. Here’s some of the snaps from that run and afterward. Amazingly, all of those photos are from an iPhone 6+. It blows me away the images you can capture with it.
On Sunday at WordCamp Europe I got a question about how companies contribute back to WordPress, how they’re doing, and what companies should do more of.
First on the state of things: there are more companies genuinely and altruistically contributing to growing WordPress than ever before. In our ecosystem web hosts definitely make the most revenue and profits, and it’s been great to see them stepping up their game, but also the consultancies and agencies around WordPress have been pretty amazing about their people contributions, as demonstrated most recently by the fact the 4.0 and 4.1 release leads both hail from WP agencies (10up and Code for the People, respectively).
I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the WordPress pie (and not just their piece of it) should dedicate 5% of their people to working on something to do with core — be it development, documentation, security, support forums, theme reviews, training, testing, translation or whatever it might be that helps move WordPress mission forward.
Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up quickly. As of today Automattic is 277 people, which means we should have about 14 people contributing full-time. That’s a lot of people to not have on things that are more direct or obvious drivers of the business, and we’re not quite there today, but I’m working on it and hope Automattic can set a good example for this in the community. I think it’s just as hard for a 20-person organization to peel 1 person off.
It’s a big commitment, but I can’t think of a better long-term investment in the health of WordPress overall. I think it will look incredibly modest in hindsight. This ratio is probably the bare minimum for a sustainable ecosystem, avoiding the tragedy of the commons. I think the 5% rule is one that all open source projects and companies should follow, at least if they want to be vibrant a decade from now.
Further reading: There’s been a number of nice blog follow-ups. Post Status has a nice post on Contribution Culture. Ben Metcalf responded but I disagree with pretty much everything even though I’m glad he wrote it. Tony Perez wrote The Vision of Five and What it Means. Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, pointed out his essay Scaling Open Source Communities which I think is really good.
Ben Gillbanks, the co-author of TimThumb, says I No Longer Use TimThumb — Here’s What I do Instead.
I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.
— Ernest Hemingway to Arthur Mizener, 1950 Selected Letters, p. 694.
I got it from Hemingway on Writing which is a short and pleasant read I’m going through right now. It turns out Hemingway was 64 years ahead of me in his advice about who to write for.
If you want to see some of the thought and care that went into the WordPress 4.0 release, check out Scott Taylor’s peek under the hood and Helen Hou-Sandi’s reveal of a 4.0 Easter egg.
