Wow, I’m late to this small piece of feel-good… here’s Caine’s Arcade. It’s the story of a young boy in LA, who built a games arcade out of cardboard, in his dad’s auto repair shop one summer. Just brilliant.
Since Time Immemorial
Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and for ever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude.
Related Posts:
Just your standard day in Semuc Champey
What did I get up to today?
Swimming and climbing through an underground cave, riding an inflated tube down a fast moving river, doing a 2km hike to a lookout over the most beautiful spot in all of Guatemala, jumping off a 12m bridge into the very same river (barefoot), then swimming and climbing my way all around the amazingly clear, cascading pools of Semuc Champey.
Wow.
Semuc Champey is a natural monument, which consists of a natural limestone bridge, underneath which a river flows, on top of which are a series of stepped pools cascading water. If that doesn’t sound spectacular to you, I don’t know what does. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I spent the better part of two hours swimming, exploring and climbing the pools from bottom to top. Simply spectacular.
[photos to come!]
Related Posts:
iTunes or bust
John Gruber on iTunes;
Scott P. Hall:
Like I said above: Apple is choosing to use one app to manage our digital lives, excluding photos. I wonder how many would scream if they had to use, say, four apps instead. One for music, one for movies, one for iOS sync…you get the idea. That would be a mess.
You can’t please everyone, but it sure seems to me like there are more Mac users who wish Apple would break iTunes into a set of smaller tighter-focused apps (like on iOS) than there are iPad users who wish the Music, Video, App Store, and iTunes Store apps were combined into a single app (like on Mac and Windows).
I can’t think of a single reason why iTunes should be split into separate apps. Maybe this bugs someone like Gruber (tech blogger, programmer of sorts, highly technology-literate), but I would say 9 out of 10 users are nothing of the sort – especially on Windows. Tabs make sense, columns make sense – we’ve been using these metaphors for years now. Maybe iTunes is bloated, but it’s still so much better than most alternatives. I personally don’t use iTunes all that much anymore, since I’m on an iPad primarily, but when I do I find it simple, quick and easy. I see no reason to change (except perhaps the name, but to what? iManage? iAdmin? iStuff? I’ll let the cleverheads at Apple work that one out).
Related Posts:
Not evacuating, yet
I’m going to re-link something from the other day, Andy Inahtko over at the Sun Times;
Instagram’s 30,000,000 users aren’t evacuating yet. Many are justifiably worried, though. For the past two years, they’ve been building up this detailed and valuable portfolio of connections and photos. Maybe they even joined Instagram specifically because they wanted some of the features of Facebook sharing, without most of the worries.
For me, it all comes down to the amount of control you have over decisions like these, as a user. This applies to everything, from the likelihood that a service will change hands, right down to how many people can see my I’gram pictures. It covers the data I’m uploading, the (happily small) social mix I’ve concocted, and any other data points they could collect from me. It’s a big deal, this one, and it’s not cool. I’ve fluctuated from indifference to confusion over Facebook’s privacy controls, which is one reason why I don’t tend to post much to my profile on there. I’ve never been completely comfortable sharing most things on there, given the rapidity of change and the unlikelihood of that change sitting well with me. As with most things that come for free, in the end, they don’t.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how much I’ve written here criticising freemium business models, given the argument that ultimately they turn their users into the product itself. Why do we still put up with this? We get to watch companies stumble through years without so much as a whiff of a business model. 27M users doesn’t even cut it, for a viable business, says Instagram. It’s a lottery we’re witnessing here, and Instagram just won.
Evacuation commencing.
Related Posts:
Hard pressed to find an alternative
Matt “Mr WordPress” Mullenweg, on the phenomenal success of WP (running 49 of the top 100 blogs in a recent Pingdom poll) and how they see the future:
WordPress’ biggest challenge over the next two years, and where we’re focusing core development, will be around evolving our dashboard to be faster and more accessible, especially on touch devices. Many of our founding assumptions about how, where, and why people publish are shifting, but the flexibility of WordPress as a platform and the tens of thousands of plugins and themes available are hard to match. We might not always be the platform people start with, but we want to be what the best graduate to.
The success WP has seen is incredible, even more so given its’ rather humble origins (scroll to the bottom of that one, it’s well worth taking a glance into a bit of self-publishing history). Even with all my niggling irks and minor blogging pains, WP is a rock solid, open-ended blogging platform and I’m happy to say I don’t see myself putting myself through the mill with any other platform in the near future.
That being said, the challenge as I see it isn’t only in the mobile/touch space – it’s in the simplicity and ease of use in all manners. Given the ease of sharing in the social space, the main contendors for platforms like WP aren’t Moveable Type or Blogger, they’re Google +, Tumblr and Facebook. Twitter even almost made that list, given how much it’s changed the way we think about creating and sharing things online. WP has made it a long way so far, and it has a long way to go to make up some of the ground the other players have claimed, but I’m 100% behind them.
Here’s to the next 50.
Related Posts:
Updating…………
By my estimate, I’ve spent about 50% of my time spent with iPhoto for the iPad (around 2 weeks now), staring aghast at this image;
I’m not talking about a 10 second delay in using the app – this is more in the realm of ‘go brew yourself a cup of coffee’ time for the app to update – and it will do this almost every time you open the app.
Some smart-alec forum posters will tell you that the less photos you have, the less time you’ll spend updating your photo library – but I can’t buy that when the app decides to update the library, even if you haven’t added, deleted or modified any of the underlying images it would be updating. It updates the library, even when no conceivable changes have occured.
I don’t even have that many images in my library! All I have are the images I’ve taken since going on the road, and even then I’ve culled repeatedly to keep the library small. I’m very close to throwing in the towel and going back to the Photos app, but then it’s hard to keep track of the images I’ve uploaded to flickr.
iPhoto for iPad? Not yet ready for the big leagues.
Wrapping up on Instagram
It sure seems like I’m not the only one surprised by the recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. It would seem also that it’s not all positive news – once again the bane of any freemium services is that the rug can (at any point in time) be pulled out from underneath you. The rules can change, the service itself can change, it can disappear almost completely or perhaps worst of all – pivot on you. Here are a few choice responses regarding the move;
Daniel Jalkut, on Twitter:
Andy Ihnatko, over at the Sun Times:
Ben Brooks, responding to a short post by Om Malik:
Paul Ford, over at New York Magazine:
Matt Webb, on his site Interconnected
Perhaps the best of the lot has to be Shawn Blanc, from just a few days before the deal was announced, reflecting on the lack of direction shown by Kevin Systrom when interviewed by Pando Daily – a well kept secret for more than one reason, it would seem:
Shawn Blanc:
Facebook is not well known for respecting or acknowledging the privacy needs of their users. This doesn’t bother many people either, and I daresay many of the people who loved instagram were already Facebook users – so to them it may not even figure. I’m not so sure about this move. I liked Instagram as it was a new social network, one which grew only in accord with the quality of the images you chose to share. It wasn’t one which let me (at least, I didn’t choose to) add all 5 million of my existing fauxbook friends in one fell swoop. I had to grow that pool of images, and maybe some of them were popular amongst a small but cherished group of co-conspirators. But that’s just me. I get the feeling like my time with Instagram was short lived, but good while it lasted.
Related Posts: