I think in a few years books will be written about Snakes on a Plane and the fantastic (WP-powered) blog which is following it.
Comcast Cable
I finally got internet hooked up at my house today. I ended up going with Comcast mostly because MJ sweet talked me into it. I just ran the speed test from DSL Reports on it and it came back 3469 down and 230 up. That’s over three megabits downstream, crazy! I could get used to this. Now I can finally get start getting things done from home again. (I had internet before but it was a patchy wifi connection that wasn’t reliable.)
Stuff
My things are finally here. Thankfully the movers were pretty good, I’d heard some horror stories from people that had me anxious. The Comcast guy gets here tomorrow, and then I should be able to really settle in at home. Things I missed most: bed/pillows/blankets, camera battery charger, shoes, and vanilla candles.
Good Morning Switch
Good Morning Silicon Valley, one of my favorite blogs, has switched to WordPress. 🙂
Apple’s Challenge
If I was Apple I wouldn’t be worried at all about Windows, I would be worried about the next generation of Linux desktop software. The main reason I’m considering a G5 for my next desktop purchase is that I want a powerful machine that Just Works when I plug stuff in and can still run all the open source tools like Subversion, rysync, PHP, MySQL, etc etc that I rely on. It’s also interesting that all the software I regard these days as truly essential isn’t desktop software, it’s server software. I can survive switching text editors or graphics programs or even operating systems, but if I had to use ASP and SQL Server instead of Perl/PHP/Python and MySQL I’m not sure what I would do. I can function without these things on my desktop, but having to access them remotely (if it’s pretty transparent) prohibits some pretty cool stuff and diminishes my productivity.
Windows and OS X are tools I use to get things done. Linux desktop software (X, KDE, Gnome, etc) is a hobby. If I could focus on getting work done instead of getting my wireless card to work I could consider as a serious and cheaper alternative to a OS X desktop. (No matter what I want one of those new Cinema displays though.)
To preemptively clarify, my comments do not at all apply to Linux in the server space, where it by far the most mature and capable platform out there and I would hardly consider anything else.
Eric Links
Eric does a linklog. In for a penny, in for a dollar. The one thing that bugs me about this type of link blog with the commentary in the title attribute is that Mozilla and family cuts off the title tooltip when you hover over the link. To see the entire message I either have to view source or right click and chose “Properties”, which also has a set length and I usually have to select the text and move my mouse to get it to “scroll.” Is there a better solution?
TechCrunch writes WordPress.com Has Imported 15M Posts In The Last 30 Days, Remains A Top Safe Haven For Nomad Bloggers. I’m very proud of the 8+ years we’ve been a home for, and protected, our users blogs. Protection covers many aspects: backups, scalability, security, speed, permalinks, mobile versions, forward-compatible markup, clean exports… the list goes on. We’ve done the same with other internet-scale services, like Akismet, Gravatar, and Jetpack, and I hope to earn the same trust in the coming decade with VaultPress and Simperium.
Extraordinary Machine
“I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” The latest from the unreleased Fiona Apple CD. Hat tip: Jess.
New Sphere
Sphere, which I’m an adviser to, has just re-aligned. What do you think? Update: They also have a WordPress plugin.
Post by Voice
The voice feature is now live on WordPress.com, using Twilio and implemented by Nick. Check it out: Phone Your Blog.
Meebo IM
Meebo is IM Chat 2.0, and in the tradition of many Web 2.0 ventures they have a WordPress blog. Hat tip: Derkilicious.
AJAX Commenting
This AJAX commenting looks pretty neat, has anyone made this into a WP plugin yet?
Web Storage Sites
Web storage sites loom as next big thing says CNET… in 1999.
Cumulative Advantage
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? An interesting series of tests where they show that commercial success is mostly a function of chance and early adoption, not quality. I wonder if the same holds true for software and websites? (Youtube?)
Landed
Paris has the most confusing airport, although I suppose any airport is confusing if you don’t speak the language. Franck was right. I ended up chickening out and taking a taxi, and I’m not checked in and settled. First order of business: find an adapter for these weird plugs. The weather seems to have cleared up so I’m going to venture out and explore a bit.
Scotch Whisky Guide
Note to Self
Two things I’m going to blog publicly to get myself to finish them faster: First off, I really need to finish up the Automattic site so you guys can see some of the cool stuff we’re doing there. Second, I’ve been playing with some cool gadgets lately and developing some pretty strong opinions about them which I’d like to start posting and sharing.
Unsubscribing from Newsletters
When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.
There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:
@photomatt unfortunately there's no mass unsubscribe option at this time, though we are seriously considering it for the future!
— Unroll.Me – Easy Email Cleanup (@Unrollme) May 5, 2015
I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.
https://gist.github.com/m/f27ae57113e34392c6d5
Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah everybody.
Due to some distractions and mishandling of scheduled posts on my part, I broke my blogging streak. I got up to 198 days, which isn’t bad, and I’m looking forward to beating it next time. A lot of people might not know this, but if you’re on WordPress.com or run Jetpack when you start a posting streak it will give you a notification high-five every day you continue it, this was the last one I got:
