Life Hack: Put leftovers on top of your Mac Pro to keep them warm.
Aside Archives
I’m as likely to give Twitter a hard time as anyone, but today I want to tell you about something great they did: Twitter open sourced their emoji set for anyone to use. We’ve been working with them behind the scenes on this and launched the emoji for WP.com as well. Support will be coming to Jetpack soon.
OnBeep, an Audrey company, has introduced their first product, the Onyx. It’s a lot like the communicator from Star Trek. (Don’t wear it with a red shirt.) Business Insider covers the news pretty well.
I spoke with Tony Conrad and Laurie Segall at Web Summit in Dublin today and was able to announce that Automattic has acquired Code For The People to join our VIP team. Techcrunch also covered the news.
“We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the web.” — David Fleck, general manager of advertising at Disqus. Translation: We’re tracking everyone who visits a website with Disqus enabled and building a profile of them based on the content of the sites they visit and any comments they leave. “Deeper” than Facebook.
“So I’m particularly excited to announce that we’re bringing our native advertising product, Sponsored Comments, to the world of programmatic and we’re doing it on a global basis. […] Starting today, Xaxis clients, which include some of the best brands in the world, will buy and place Sponsored Comments advertising across much of the Disqus network.” Translation: It’s not comment spam if we’re getting paid for it.
I was just reading some comments the other day and thinking how it’d be great to see some sponsored brand content there instead of users, like there already was on the rest of the page. Glad there’s a solution for that on a global basis now.
The other day I saw and really enjoyed the great Searching for Sugarman documentary, which I’d recommend. While reading more about the entire story of Rodriguez I found that tragically the director of the film, Malik Bendjelloul, took his own life this year. The Observer has a look into his life and his other work, as well as the situation surrounding his death.
WordCamp San Francisco, the original, starts tomorrow and the tweets are already starting to stream in. On Sunday at 11AM I will deliver my State of the Word address, our annual look at where we’ve been and the road ahead, and even if you can’t make it you can livestream the SoTW and the entire weekend for just $10 from the comfort of your own home. 16+ hours of WP entertainment for the price of one movie ticket! (Or might be a sleep aid, depends on your perspective.)
Joe Boydston, the self-described “crazy running guy” who runs as far as 90+ miles from the airport to WordCamps or meetups when he lands, has written a bit about how to run better. At our company meetup he ran running workshops and coached a lot of people including myself, and applying his suggestions I’ve been able to do a lot better.
Fracking company teams up with Susan G. Komen, introduces pink drill bits for the cure, presented without comment. Hat tip: Kristin Grimm.
The Observer writes Happy 20th anniversary to Dave Winer – inventor of the blog. I’ve gotten a huge amount of inspiration, help, and feedback from Dave over the years, and I’m really happy he’s still at it.
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.
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.
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.
Last week in the New York elections my friend who was running for Lieutenant Governor, Tim Wu, lost. However, the New Yorker has a great look at how close the race was. As John Cassidy puts it, “The strong showing by Teachout and Wu was a victory for progressive voters who warmed to their message about tackling rising inequality, political corruption, and corporate abuses.” Hat tip: Cody Brown.
Today we hear from two Automatticians: Nikolay talks about his first open source contribution ten years ago and the path his life has taken since, and Andrea says she “can’t wipe this grin off my face” at the start of a new journey.
Posts like this are why @wordpressdotcom and @jetpack offer LaTeX / Beautiful Math support. http://t.co/rYUbyq2IpR
— george ?ephanis toots on mastodon (@daljo628) August 26, 2014
You can read on the Jetpack blog and the BruteProtect blog about the company, plugin, and service joining Automattic. BTW, BruteProtect has protected this site from 1,663 attacks in the past 28 days.
We have a great Simplenote for Mac client, and a super clean web version, but nothing first-party for Linux. If anyone is experienced with Linux desktop development and would be interested in creating something extremely minimalist like our Mac app please get in touch!
Sometimes you have an idea, and the universe delivers. Hotel WiFi Speed Test let’s you speed test and search hotels by their internet speed, something I was wishing existed just last week. Since I work primarily on the road, I would pick fast internet over pretty much any other amenity a hotel could possibly offer. Speedspot also offers similar info. It’s funny how sometimes the less expensive hotels often have much better internet — I think this is because they try to do less with captive proxies and such.
I’ve been enjoying a new-to-me app called Blinkist, which is basically summaries of interesting non-fiction books. The summaries are really well-written, and I enjoy reading them as refreshers even when I’ve read an entire book already. Many business or non-fiction books I read would have been better as an article, and you can tell when a publisher has encouraged an author to pad the book a bit so they can sell it for more, and the Blinkist version often satisfies my curiosity there. And finally there’s some I read that just whet my appetite for more, and I end up ordering the full book. I ended up subscribing to the service for $50/yr.