Learning to Fly

nevver: Bechet Benjamin

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:28:06 +0530

nevver:

Bechet Benjamin

via brycedotvc

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:17:49 +0530

via brycedotvc

Doobie Brothers - Listen To The Music (From “Live at the...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:25:07 +0530

Doobie Brothers - Listen To The Music (From “Live at the Greek Theatre 1982” DVD & CD) (by eaglerocktv)

Those of you who recognize the tune - this is the song on which the All India Radio FM signature track is based.

nevver: Up in smoke

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:22:20 +0530

nevver:

Up in smoke

VH1: The Drug Years This is the best documentary I’ve...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:27:43 +0530

VH1: The Drug Years

This is the best documentary I’ve ever seen. In four parts of about 40 min each, it traces the rise and fall of LSD-inspired counter culture of the sixties.

A rare cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson by...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:24:00 +0530

A rare cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson by Kurt Cobain, to mark his birthday.

His famous last(ish) words in his suicide note:

I’m too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

nevver: Charlotte Cramer

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:12:38 +0530

nevver:

Charlotte Cramer

photojojo: Daaaang, that’s talent! San Francisco band Wildlife...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:02:55 +0530

photojojo:

Daaaang, that’s talent!

San Francisco band Wildlife Control made a time-lapse and stop-motion video in one! They awesomely used our tutorials to make it, too!

Wildlife Control’s Time-Lapse/Stop-Motion Video

The Ultimate Guide to Time-Lapse Photography

How to Make Stop-Motion Digital Shorts with Your Digital Camera

photojojo: Korean photographer Ho-Yeol Ryu made this digital...

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:59:29 +0530

photojojo:

Korean photographer Ho-Yeol Ryu made this digital multiple exposure of planes taking off at Hannover, an airport in Germany.

It’s one of those project ideas that takes a lot of time but pays off in the end.

Multiple Exposure of Planes Taking Off

marksbirch: You Know You’re Right by Nirvana - An obscure...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:50:24 +0530

marksbirch:

You Know You’re Right by Nirvana - An obscure acoustic demo of a song that was released post-humorously after the passing of Kurt Cobain. It is all Kurt on this version with all the angst and pain laid bare with his voice and a guitar.

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:01:05 +0530

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I.

Don’t forget my gift Soon via nevver

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:41:36 +0530

Don’t forget my gift

Soon

via nevver

[52] Twenty-eight (by Alex Belyaev) via black-and-white

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:36:55 +0530

[52] Twenty-eight (by Alex Belyaev)

via black-and-white

In 1980, Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:05:14 +0530

mentalflossr:

Saddam had made donations to the city’s Chaldean Sacred Heart church.

flavorpill: Biopics recast with Jar Jar Binks (via Buzzfeed)....

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:00:58 +0530

flavorpill:

Biopics recast with Jar Jar Binks (via Buzzfeed). Oh, god, no.

Consumer internet and privacy: Weighing in on the Path controversy

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:22:01 +0530

A few years ago when I was in Oracle, our entire product team got a mandate to make the an older version of an application “accessibility compliant”. This included a huge number of super boring tasks like adding alternate text to images so that the visually impaired who rely on screen-readers could better understand the web page contents. In the consumer tech world, where our everyday engagement with personalized socially curated content relies heavily on cool and awesome sounding buzzwords, compliance is dirty word. In the enterprise world however it is taken seriously, even though developers hate the boring tasks and processes surrounding this concept.

I woke up this morning to the controversy surrounding the Path app’s handling of users’ contact data, and it set me thinking about the state of consumer tech in general. Here’s a brief snapshot of recent controversies which have generated quite a few storms in the tech community tea-cup:

Curebit (YC, 500 Startups): too lazy to design their own app 1
Path, Hipster and a bunch of other iOS apps: uploading contact directory to their servers without permission 2
Facebook ($5 billion IPO): countless controversies, most recently about photographs staying on their CDN years after they were deleted 3
AirBnB: Lead generation on Craigslist; identity and physical theft in a host’s home and stupid handling of the issue subsequently 4
Zynga ($2 billion IPO): blatant cloning of popular games, and whole lot of other ugly stuff 5
Pinterest: non-disclosure of affiliate links 6

This list goes on and on. Name any big or popular consumer company and there’s probably a story from the past year about a transgression that, at best, was a minor “violation of users’ trust” and at worst, completely illegal. What’s interesting, though, and this is just a guess, that all that hate these companies generate on communities like Hacker News doesn’t correspond to any major dent in their growth. I’d love to see some stats if my guess is wrong.

It is quite possible to evolve a compliance framework which certifies apps with ratings across major areas like privacy, security, user experience and so on. The details of this framework are hazy in my mind, but the idea is to have a universally trusted and recognized “badge” which rates apps after a combination of automated and manual checks. Storing passwords in plain text? Poor rating. Dark UX patterns? Bad rating. Great privacy compliance? Awesome. The rating should be analogous to “Verisign secured” for financial transactions.

However, regardless of how well this framework functions, at the end of the day if the market and consumers don’t care enough to punish bad behaviour, then it probably isn’t bad enough to raise such a hue and cry. At the end of the day the ends seem to justify the means for all these companies and if we, the people, let them get away with it, we shouldn’t be complaining.

(CC photo from Dave Makes on Flickr)

Top five regrets of the dying

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:43 +0530

nevver:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
more

dejoejohn: Social Media EXPLAINED

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:29:20 +0530

dejoejohn:

Social Media EXPLAINED

Adventures in TodoLand

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:54:01 +0530

I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir, because I’m not myself you see.
~ Alice in Wonderland.

A long time ago, when I was still in school, I used pen and paper to make TODO lists. Stuff like “copy exercise #4 from V and submit tomorrow”. Yeah, I was kinda using GTD years before I heard the term.

Over the past five years, I have had a string of affairs with all the hottest todo apps out there - from Remember the Milk to Wunderlist, but I’ve remained married to pen and paper (or pencil and paper, just to spice things up every now and then). Nothing beats its simplicity, speed and flexibility, and crossing off items on a paper list is a great feeling.

Last week I think I finally found that one TODO app that’s closest to pen-and-paper. It’s called t. Let me warn you though, it’s not for everyone, but hackers should totally love it. It works in the terminal, and this is what it looks like:

adsahay$>t
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something

Creating a new task is this simple:

adsahay$> t [dev] fix some bug
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
d - [dev] fix some bug

Done with a task? Strike it off the list.

adsahay$> t -f d
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something

Use all sorts of command line goodness to pipe the output of t to count the tasks in the list with wc -l or search by type with grep. Awesome, right? Wait, that’s not all. If you check out the t homepage you can see how to create multiple todo lists. It uses plain text files, so it’s easy to collaborate on a list by sharing a single file (for e.g., using Dropbox). Can you beat that?

Steve, the author of t, says this tool is for those who’d rather do things than organize their TODO list. So far he’s completely correct. Let’s see how long this affair lasts!

A great letter template for acquired startups

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:01:00 +0530

A great letter template for acquired startups:

Dear soon-to-be-former user,

We’ve got some fantastic news! Well, it’s great news for us anyway. You, on the the other hand, are fucked. We’ve just been acquired by:

[ ] Facebook [ ] Google [ ] Twitter [ ] Other: _________________

As you are aware, we’ve always provided a free service, and have never even tried offering a for-pay option. This means we’ve never had any income and have been operating at a loss for our entire existence.

Since any schoolchild can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a few cents per-click, or that we’ve always intended to be an acquisition target. You can do the math on that one.

Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business, will be deleted: [ ] Immediately [ ] Within a week [ ] Within 30 days

We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the moment we genuinely believe this horseshit.

In reality, you will never hear about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up, like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something. Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much larger company with more money than sense.

Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,
Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
— Connecting people with solutions
“Shit.ly loves you!”

(This treasure was found on Git!)

via kfriedson