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This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details
Fair warning: this is a blog post about automated cat feeders. Sort of. But bear with me, because I’m also trying to make a point about software. If you have a sudden urge to click the back button on your browser now, I don’t blame you. I don’t often …
Buying Happiness
Despite popular assertions to the contrary, science tells us that money can buy happiness. To a point.
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individu…
Trust Me, I’m Lying
We reflexively instruct our children to always tell the truth. It’s even encoded into Boy Scout Law. It’s what adults do, isn’t it? But do we? Isn’t telling the truth too much and too often a bad life strategy – perhaps even dangerous? Is tellin…
Geekatoo, the Geek Bat-Signal
To understand this story, you need to understand that grandchildren are like crack cocaine to grandparents. I’m convinced that if our parents could somehow snort our children up their noses to get a bigger fix, they would. And when your parents live o…
Will Apps Kill Websites?
I’ve been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and e…
Make Your Email Hacker Proof
It’s only a matter of time until your email gets hacked. Don’t believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale.
When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking…
Learn to Read the Source, Luke
In the calculus of communication, writing coherent paragraphs that your fellow human beings can comprehend and understand is far more difficult than tapping out a few lines of software code that the interpreter or compiler won’t barf on.
That’s why…
Books: Bits vs. Atoms
I adore words, but let’s face it: books suck.
More specifically, so many beautiful ideas have been helplessly trapped in physical made-of-atoms books for the last few centuries. How do books suck? Let me count the ways:
They are heavy.
They take …
Speed Hashing
Hashes are a bit like fingerprints for data.
A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you’re looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 34…
Preserving The Internet… and Everything Else
In Preserving Our Digital Pre-History I nominated Jason Scott to be our generation’s digital historian in residence. It looks like a few people must have agreed with me, because in March 2011, he officially became an archivist at the Internet Archive…
