This is Platitudinous.com

The Barbarism of the Health-Care Repeal Crusade -- Daily Intel

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 14:47:05 -0400

The Barbarism of the Health-Care Repeal Crusade -- Daily Intel:

In every other advanced country, the provision of universal access to medical care is a public responsibility. In every other advanced country, this principle has been accepted by the mainstream conservative party. Only in the United States does the conservative party uphold the operating principle that regular access to doctors and medicine should be denied to large chunks of the population. This sort of barbarism is unique to the American right.

Daring Fireball: iPad (3)

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:36:31 -0400

Daring Fireball: iPad (3):

(via Instapaper)

Just launched! Brand new Corbis images contest mini site,...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:49:00 -0400

Just launched! Brand new Corbis images contest mini site, featured on http://corbisimages.com

Check it out, pick your favorite photos and get a chance to win a Macbook Air!!!

http://photovs.corbisimages.com/

Boy Genius Report posted this chart today as evidence that both...

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:13:22 -0500

Boy Genius Report posted this chart today as evidence that both the Kindle Fire and the Blackberry Playbook had “better” holiday sales than the iPad.

There’s so many things wrong with this chart that I hardly know where to begin. The numbers used in the chart are the % increase in web traffic, day to day. So this chart is saying that the kindle fire had 120% more web traffic on christmas morning then it did the day before, while the iPads number seems to be close to 0%.

The problem is that the kindle just came out, so its “growth” as a percentage would obviously be huge. An overly simplified example might make this even clearer. Lets say that on December 24th there 100 kindles surfing the web, while the iPad, which has been out for more than 2 years now, had 1,000,000 users browsing. If 100 people got a kindle for christmas that would lead to 100% growth, while Apple would have to sell 10,000 more ipads just to get 1% “growth”.

It reminds me of the “analytics” that Gruber talked about a lot over the holidays on Daring Fireball. In both these cases the authors of the reports deliberately distorted the information to mislead the readers. The difference is the John called them out on it while the Boy Genius Report went with the headline, “Web traffic patterns suggest Apple’s iPad was a dud this holiday season”

This is the worst kind of reporting. It makes me embarrassed to be a regular reader of the Boy Genius Report.

About Advertising on Facebook

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 11:25:36 -0500

About Advertising on Facebook:

I really appreciate them trying to be honest about this stuff, but somehow it still feels a bit nefarious.

But I guess advertising always does.

Big day for twitter

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:19:55 -0500

Let’s Fly! blog.twitter.com/2011/12/lets-f…
— Twitter (@twitter) December8, 2011

"Long story short: Google wanted to put Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus — the “clean install”..."

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:09:01 -0500

“Long story short: Google wanted to put Google Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus — the “clean install” Android that everyone loves so much — and Verizon said “no”.
Guess who wins here? Well, the software will not be available to Verizon Galaxy Nexus users.
Verizon issues a release saying they’re not blocking it — which is likely the biggest load of bullshit ever. No, they’re not blocking it specifically, they just won’t let Google release the Galaxy Nexus if it’s anywhere to be found on the device. Nor can users download it after the fact. Why? Some hardware claim that seems to be a flat-out lie. Long story shorter: you get in bed with the devil, the devil fucks you.
Long story shortest: “open”.”

- parislemon: You Get In Bed With The Devil…

Just Launched http://www.slowandsteadywinstherace.com Built with...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 00:20:00 -0500

Just Launched http://www.slowandsteadywinstherace.com

Built with Shopify

Helped Familiar launch a site last week for Strong Economy for...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Helped Familiar launch a site last week for Strong Economy for All: http://www.99percentny.org

So I recently got a new macbook air, and I set it up with...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:11:00 -0500

So I recently got a new macbook air, and I set it up with iCloud. For the most part it was great but when I looked in Safari I saw this!

I’ll be the first to admit that my bookmarks were never perticularly well organized, but after I started to use iCloud betas, my bookmarks started to look like this!

Hundreds and hundreds of “untitled folder”s with nothing in them, on top of countlessly repeats of my actual folders…. ugh

I expected this kind of thing from the beta’s and hoped the public release would fix itself but, alas, no.

So I finally took the time to manually try and delete all these folders. I spent a good hour and a half on the laptop pressing the delete button as fast as I could to delete the folders one by one (shift click wouldnt work).

Finally I got through it and I felt so proud of myself for putting in the effort to clean it all up, and thinking that iCloud would sync up all my other devices with the newly cleaned bookmarks.

But its now been a week since the clean-up and my iMac, iPad, and iPhone all still have the mess of nothingness!

There’s got to be a better way?!?

UPDATE: After some digging I found that the best solution was to delete all the bookmarks on the machine by renaming the safari bookmarks plist file… then flipping icloud off back on again and it downloads just the good bookmarks… whew!

Sync Coda with Dropbox

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:09:00 -0500

While there are a number of articles out there on how to do this, they all felt overly confusing for what should be a pretty simple task.

Quit Coda on your “master” machine, the one that has the coda settings you want to share.
In dropbox create a new folder called “Library”, and a folder called “Preferences” inside that
Move the Coda preferences file into the new Preferences folder you just created
mv ~/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Coda.plist ~/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Coda.plist
Create a symbolic link connecting the old location to the new file in dropbox wiht this command in terminal:
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Coda.plist ~/Library/Preferences/com.panic.Coda.plist
Create another new folder inside the Library folder you created in step 2, and name this folder “Application Support”
Move all the contents the Coda file inside the library -> application support folder to this new application support folder inside your dropbox
Create another symbolic link for this folder:
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/Application\ Support/Coda ~/Library/Application\ Support/Coda
Repeat steps 4 and 7 for any macs you want to share the Coda Preferences with

That’s it! your synced and ready to go

Having some fun with Mixel, the new social collaging app for...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:21:00 -0500

Having some fun with Mixel, the new social collaging app for iPad from Khoi Vinh

I was skeptical but it’s loads of fun, and its free so what do you have to lose?

Amazon "fires" the first shot, but it's not aiming for Apple

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:53:11 -0400

While most people walked away from today’s Kindle annoucements thinking this was Amazon starting a war with Apple and the iPad, there was a little part of the annoucments that suggest they may have a different target in mind

Turns like amazon had a little trick up its sleave that it showed everyone at todays much anticipated Tablet annoucement. Amazon Silk is a web-kit based browser for their new Kindle Fire tablet. The big difference with this browser is that it works with amazons cloud infrastructure to speed up the rendering of web pages.

This sounded really revolutionary at first but the more and more I think about it its really not much different that what google page speed service or cloud flare are already doing, except flipping it around a bit and removes the control this caching away from the web developers.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for this innovation and I am glad Amazon is trying to push the limits of how mobile web browsing works. But as Gruber mentioned, if this takes off this would give Amazon a gold-mine of data (even in aggregate) about peoples browsing history an habits and as Chris Espinosa puts out them in a position were they could really take on google in a whole new way, using what started out as android code.

Big day for amazon..

Are Facebook's announcements what lead to Qwikster?

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 22:20:00 -0400

We’ve all been reading a lot about Netflix plans to spin off there DVD by mail business into a new company called Qwikster. Everyones talking about their theories as to why they would make such a drastic move. Yet, no one seems to be talking about what I think is the biggest reason for this change, Facebook.

This didn’t really occur to me until I saw Reed Hastings get up on stage during the keynote at Facebooks, f8.

One of the most important features of netflix has always been the recommendations, and as Hasting’s himself said on stage, sharing is 100 times more powerful than machine based recommendations.

The problem with keeping the DVD by mail business integrated is that the account model for that business is a household account. But sharing and syncing with facebook demands an indivdual accout model.

If netflix has its way, in this new streaming only model individuals within one household will each have their own account and your netflix account will be synced with your facebook account from day one, sharing everything you watch with all of your friends automatically.

Sharing is that important to Netflix, so important that they are willing to go through this transition that they know will anger their users.

So important that they know, without it, they don’t stand a chance.

Writing tool

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:10:14 -0400

I think it’s a lot like photography, “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The best writing tool is the one you have with you

-written on the new Tumblr iPhone app

Dean Martin's burger recipe

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:01:00 -0400

Dean Martin's burger recipe:

From The Celebrity Cookbook (1967), Dean Martin’s recipe for hamburgers:

No ice. TV tray. Classy. (via @lettersofnote)

Tags: burgers Dean Martin food

dear-photograph: Dear Photograph, I looked good in a tux. @TJ

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 18:52:40 -0400

dear-photograph:

Dear Photograph,

I looked good in a tux.

@TJ

It's the data, stupid!

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:55:51 -0400

I get excited when I saw a nice long post in my google reader on daring fireball and quickly added it to Instapaper to read later. I thought finally someone is going to articulate all the ideas I’ve had about apples latest and greatest offering in a way I was just not capable of. Sadly like so many before him, gruber falls just a tiny but short on this one.

I don’t care if it’s coded to run in web browser or in a so called “native app”. Focusing in to much on that misses the more important difference, the difference about where data is stored.

The way I see it this:

Google’s approach to data is, there’s just one copy and it’s stored up in the “cloud”. When you run a program like google docs your reading and writing directly to the cloud.

Apples iCloud on the other hand has many copies of the file, one for every device. The core of their offering is a clever set of Apis that makes sure all these local copies stay in sync with each other.

The main reason for the two approaches in my mind comes down to just one word…Flash! No, no not the web plugin Apple loves to hate, what I’m talking about of course is flash storage. Take a look at the differences in hardware from apple and google. At first the obvious differences between a chromebook and an iPad revolve around touch, apples got it googles doesn’t. But what I think is more telling is the storage space, iPads have at least 32 gigs, and chromebooks have almost nothing!

Apples bet its future on the importance of big and fast flash storage built into its machines. If iCloud allowed you to work with copies of files directly on the server there would be no need for all those gigs.

Forget about touch screen this, web based that… If you want to know the real difference between Apple’s approach and Google’s, it’s the data, stupid!

The biggest announcement

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:33:50 -0400

One of the biggest features mentioned for the new feature of iOs received little more then a listing on the screen during the keynote was the enhancements to airplay.

While some people have begun to put the pieces together, there hasnt really been enough stories about this feature which makes the Apple TV the ulimate iPad accessory (or is it the other way around).

While we dont know much, and some of whats known is covered under NDA suffice it to say that apple’s opening up the flood gates on this one. Its not as simple a feature as it might sound, and at least one game developer has the right idea.

Its nice to see that even the big boys can have...

Fri, 13 May 2011 09:21:23 -0400

Its nice to see that even the big boys can have problems…..

#nothingsperfect