Nerdery
Compare and contrast
Compare. “Suburbs built on top of military/industrial complexes”:infranetlab.org/blog/2009… - intriguing yet awful. Quirky and cute - “people re-enacting Far Side comics”:www.flickr.com/groups/fa…
Contrast. Assaf Arkin notes that the current “recession may bring us more apps that put function over form”:blog.labnotes.org/2009/01/1… Hopefully this means we won’t hear about Rich Internet Apps (blech!) for a while. On the other hand, hopefully we will see more apps that leverage “game mechanics”:bokardo.com/archives/…
On Feeds: Tactics
Ask enough people what feeds they read and you will quickly hear “too many” and “I suffer from information overload.” I’ve been there too; at one time I subscribed to more than five hundred feeds. A lot of people say you can’t really follow more than fifty feeds and do productive things. I’m not the most productive guy, but I’m comfortably following 239 feeds right now. My secrets:
- Man made the “mark all as read” command for a reason. Use it without shame.
- Skim aggressively. If the title grabs you, check out the first few sentences. If it doesn’t, just skim over the content and let the words and images that may jump out grab you. If they don’t, skip to the next item.
- Don’t add feeds out of guilt or peer-pressure. Know what topics you want to read about. Add feeds that align with those topics. If a feed looks really awesome but doesn’t match a topic, subscribe to it and put it in a “Trial” folder. Evaluate your trials every few weeks.
- Unsubscribe if you find yourself consistently skipping all the items in a feed. NNW and Google Reader both have attention readouts that can help you decide what should go. Do this sort of pruning every few months.
After reading feeds for several years, I’m finally starting to feel like I’m doing it right. How do I know I’m doing it right? Because I recently thought, “hey, I haven’t seen enough awesome today.” And then I open NNW and I’ve got awesome all over me.
On Feeds: My History
Ted Leung recently noted his “blog-aversary”:www.sauria.com/blog/2009… This reminded me that I’ve been reading feeds for 6-7 years. Shifting from reading centralized media like CNET, Infoworld and even Slashdot to individuals like “Matt Webb”:interconnected.org/home/, “Brent Simmons”:inessential.com and “Simon Willison”:simonwillison.net was an important event. For me, it was one of those moments where you realize there’s a whole other world of cool stuff to discover, explore and take part in. Certainly I would have a completely different character if I hadn’t discovered people out there on the web, doing their own cool stuff.
When I first started reading feeds, I experimented with some Linux stuff, most notably the crazy “AmphetaDesk”:www.disobey.com/amphetade… I quickly settled into loving “NetNewsWire”:ranchero.com/. It was the first app I purchased when I got a Mac, and I still use it every day, to this day. Call me a feed reading curmudgeon, but I still think it’s the best way to keep up with lots of sites.
I’ve gone through some shifts in the kinds of feeds I read. I discovered feeds and blogging by “Dave Winer”:scripting.com, so I started reading him and the people in his sphere of influence. I quickly figured out that said sphere is an odd social environment that has little relevance to what I do as a developer. For a while, I subscribed to the “must read” influencers, such as Boing Boing. I quickly found that firehose was too strong and, again, not relevant enough.
So instead of trying to figure those worlds out, I started reading more coders. Somehow that lead from reading people who do front-end coding to reading design stuff, which proved quite interesting. These days I’ve been subscribing to people writing about “information design”:konigi.com, “visualization”:www.flight404.com/blog, “open source hardware”:tinker.it/now, “game criticism”:www.rockpapershotgun.com and “urban design”:bldgblog.blogspot.com/. I’m finding lots of awesome there.
The Next Generation meets Reading Rainbow
Star Trek: The Next Generation was, for all intents and purposes, my jam. I was just the right age to enjoy it when it was on the air. Concurrently, I was the right age to watch Reading Rainbow. Ergo, the episode of the latter regarding the former was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
Garrett's life, yesterday
My Day, Yesterday - a glimpse into the world of Garrett Murray. Best ninety seconds of video I’ve seen all week. If you like it and/or my style of humor, you’ll like his Qwick Reviews too.
Vector Prime
Vector Prime. Yeah, I’m that big of a Star Wars nerds, I read these little novels when I need a break from heavier stuff. This one isn’t as good as any in the Thrawn trilogy, but its not horrible action sci-fi and fun for Star Wars nerds, like myself.
Congestion and decongestion
Two really awesome maps: National Traffic Scorecard and undersea internet cables (via Coudal).
Halo Photography
Joshuadamon’s Halotography is utterly amazing:
I’m really impressed with what he’s done with some clever camera manipulation and probably some Photoshop loving. All Halo fans should check this out.
Reverse shoulder surfing
Rands In Repose: Saving Seconds:
This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:
Send a mail to a friend
Find something on the Internet
Save a bookmark or an image.
I would be fixated.
I’ve been independently wanting to do this for a while now. Clearly, Rands was telepathically borrowing ideas from my brain when I met him at SXSW this year :). I’ve been wanting to do something like this at a BarCamp for a while now. Personally, one of my favorite past-times at conferences is to shoulder surf other people. The idea above takes shoulder surfing, turns it around and formalizes it. I’d have a blast watching it, especially if you get a good mix of Windows/Linux/OS X people and GUI/terminal folks.
Aye, ye are a scum!
ScummC: A Scumm Compiler - write your own SCUMM games! Man this takes me back to the first two Monkey Island games. I still think the best examples of the point and click adventure game genre were from LucasArts. (Via _why)
Interviewed by RubyLearning
Ruby Interview: Adam Keys of FiveRuns - Satish’s ability to find an absurd picture of me from five years ago is impressive. The interview focuses on ideas for buddying Rubyists. So if you’re budding, check it out. Really, you should at least check it out for the picture.
Ballmen for Half Life 2
Ballmen Mod - a Half Life 2 mod where you can walk on walls and do all sorts of insane jumping due to weird gravity. Please tell me someone is making a Möbius strip map for this mod. I'd always wanted to make one of those for Quake 2.
Say it quickly
Like everyone on the internet, I’m trying this whole Flickr video thing:
90 seconds is tough, but I love the idea. Chris Griego also had a great idea about the coolness of what’s going on here:
Sweet, just like Flickr legitimized posting screenshots and illustration, videos can be marked as screencasts and animation.
