Say farewell to the free Wall Street Journal on the iPhone. According to Paid Content, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch announced that readers of the WSJ on the Blackberry and iPhone will be charged $2 per week for the privilege of reading news through the respective apps. Online and print subscribers of the WSJ will only pay $1 a week. No time limit has been set yet, but Murdoch says it will be within the next few months.
Translated: one less app on my iPhone.
Dark and stormy morning ((tages: photography, damn nature you scary)
I love photos of storms – so much power and emotion in them.
Every year, Michigan’s Oakland County is home to the Woodward Dream Cruise, a weekend-long celebration of muscle cars of all stripes. If you have even a passing interest in performance cars and live in Michigan, you will be doing yourself a great disservice by not making your way down to Woodward Avenue.
This year’s Dream Cruise is officially on August 15, but anyone who is familiar with the Dream Cruise knows that the muscleheads start coming out several weeks beforehand. And, as you might imagine, the billboards along Woodward are purchased and changed in anticipation of the 1-million-plus visitors the Dream Cruise draws.
Here are this year’s billboards that will be lining Woodward. As you can see, GM is going all in with some excellent spots. As a guy who believes every car should have 400 HP and at least one turbo, I believe this is advertising at its finest.
Four out of five of you are nerds. On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop.
You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket.
Shawn Blanc’s fantastic review and explanation of Yojimbo, one of the best pieces of software I have used on any platform, ever. Worth the time it takes to get your head around the concept and incorporate into your daily workflow.
Federer is the Tiger Woods of tennis, and I’m convinced he’s a robot.
I am only half kidding.
Snapped with the iPhone, again proving that the best camera is the one you have with you at the moment.
Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.
This is a terrific upgrade for Facebook. I predict this will be massively popular almost immediately. If you use Twitter, you know that Twitter lives and dies by @ mentions.
Facebook is one step closer to marginalizing Twitter. Just another battle in the fight, but nonetheless I can’t see both existing forever.
One of the finer moments in sports ((tages: sports, humor, humans))
The video below has Novak Djokovic and John McEnroe having a hit. The backstory here is the Djokovic did his best Johnny Mac impression after defeating Radek Stepanek in the US Open. McEnroe, in the broadcast booth, somehow found a pair of tennis shoes and came down to not only do his best Djokovic impression, but also hit a few balls with the young star. This is seriously great stuff. If you don’t agree, then you don’t like sports.
I’m still upset at the author for being a thief. Ever been robbed? Like had your house burglarized and your stuff rummaged through and stolen? There’s this period right after it happens when you can’t believe that someone got into where you live, the space where you sleep and bathe and eat, and just took stuff you had bought and taken care of. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still walking around wanting to punch someone. Don’t bother calling the goddamn cops, they won’t do anything.
What an amazing essay, even though he didn’t fulfill this Summer’s best literary project.
r: Refresh view a: Add a new subscription /: Search (moves the cursor to the search box) j/k: Select the next item in the list. You can use this to rapidly scan through a feed. Space/shift-space: Page down/up, which enables you to scan through longer articles and posts easily. Shift-n/shift-p: Select the next/previous feed in the list of feeds. Shift-o: Open selected feed. m: Mark current item read (or unread). Shift-a: Mark all items in the current feed as read. This is handy when you subscribe to as many feeds as I do and are constantly confronted by over 1,000 unread items. v: View original. This is useful for jumping to the web site or blog the item comes from. Note that this opens the original site in a new window, which your popup blocker may disallow.
I forget these too easily and default to lame mouse behavior, and every time I re-discover them I’m amazed at how quickly they allow you to fly around GR.
It is different living up here, among the real Obama voters—not like those posers down South who plastered an Obama/Biden ‘08 sticker to the back of their Hummer—the real kind, not the limp-wristed H2 that General Motors churned out like Rock Crack Cocaine for the masses of The Sopranos Compete Set owning, suburbanized short men.
It’s funny how a sentence’s beauty and poignancy so often go hand-in-hand.
This is a symbolic but real statement of MI’s transformation – we WILL diversify this economy and we WILL lead the nation in green energy.
I’d like nothing more than to see Michigan take a lead role in the (massive and only getting bigger) green energy market. Tweets notwithstanding, this is excellent news in a state where there hasn’t been much. Great to see this, even if the effort is in its infancy.
Class act.
Easily the best freehand map drawing I’ve ever seen. Had I tried this, you’d have something that looks like a cross between a bloated, legless turkey and a watermelon.
Extropy is neither wave nor particle, nor pure energy. It is an immaterial force that is very much like information. Since extropy is defined as negative entropy — the reversal of disorder — it is, by definition, an increase in order. But what is order? Despite our intuitive sense, we lack a good operational definition of order, which seems to be tied up with complexity (see Ordained Becoming). For simple physical systems, the concepts of thermodynamics suffice, but for the real world of cucumbers, brains, books, and self-driving trucks, we don’t have useful metrics for extropy. The best we can say is that extropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information.
Long and complex article, but absolutely fascinating. I suggest reading the whole thing.
Town Hall Investment Research analyst David Eller asserted in a research note this morning that sales of the Pre “are continuing to slow,” and “likely will come in dramatically below” Sprint’s (S) reputed target of 1 million to 1.5 million customers for the year.
I can echo John Gruber’s observation that I have not yet seen a Palm Pre in use in real life.
- Go to about:config
- Right click, select New, select Boolean
- Enter the preference name “config.trim_on_minimize”
- Double click “config.trim_on_minimize” to set this value to true
- Restart Firefox
Firefox will free up memory when the application is minimized.
This is a great tip, as FF memory usage is one of the biggest issues on my Vista PC here in the office.
Three years ago, the debate was that social media was only good for those who wanted to follow what complete strangers were eating for lunch. And there may have been some truth to that, back in the inception days.
Today, people who still believe that are the ones who don’t understand — or care to understand — social media’s role in modern life. It’s to the point that when I hear someone say Facebook and Twitter are just toys for bored kids, it’s not even worth the energy to engage them. Because to maintain that stance today given the massive mainstream attention these platforms have received, there must be a willful, constant vigilance to remain uninformed.
The video was created by Socialnomics, and while it’s likely a self-serving mechanism, the trend it explores is impossible to ignore.
(Via Jeff M.)
I'll be in Arizona next week, so not sure how much I'll be able to post.
If I'm able to post, however, it will be because I'm slowly moving over to posterous as my main blogging engine. In fact, if you're reading this on GracefulFlavor, it's because posterous fed it here. Eventually, the domain gracefulflavor.net might be redirected over to my posterous blog, depending on how the experiment goes. For the time being, however, the domain will continue to point to the WordPress site. Posterous allows posting by email (which is how I'm writing this), which is fantastic and easier than I've ever dreamed. Because of this, I might be able to get some blogging done next week. Then again, I might not, depending on my schedule. So there. A completely circular, indecisive, non-post to tell you that I may or may not be posting much next week. It's like recursive irony, only lamer.A favor to ask.
A good friend of mine is a finalist — and likely the leader — of Detroit’s Vote4TheBest contest in the portrait photography category. The current standings have been hidden until August 31, the final day. As of last viewing, he had a slim lead over the competition.
Paul Manoian is the owner of the aptly-named Paul Manoian Photography, and he’s pretty close to getting his business rolling to the point where he might be able to make it more of a serious gig. He specializes is portraits, especially for families with multiple births — twins, triplets, etc.
If I could ask you to check out his work and vote for him, it would be a tremendous favor to Paul and his family. He’s been working very hard to launch something he’s passionate about, and he’s pretty close to getting off the ground with a splash.
You can see his work here. If I can bother you for a vote in his direction, it’s easy and only takes a second.
Thanks.
Back in the day, when I was young and impervious to hitting trees while flying balls-out downhill at 25 MPH on a bike, I 
thought I was a pretty good rider. I was heavily into mountain biking, and had even traveled to its two Meccas: Crested Butte, Colorado (twice) and Moab, Utah. I had invested a small nation’s GDP into titanium bike bits. We rode several times per week, eventually getting to the point where we could do advanced, technical trails with expert-class race speed. Our clan could out-ride almost anyone on the trail, and we got technically skilled enough where clearing 3’ boulders and 50” drop-offs was something we’d do without thinking. We wouldn’t give foot-deep mud, sand or the heaviest rain so much as a passing thought. We were sorta badass.
We were also young and arrogant, but, if I’m being honest, we did have some skill. At least we did back then when what we had was considered skill at all.
HARRISBURG, PA—According to witnesses who are sweating their nuts off, the line at the Baskin-Robbins is currently 12 people deep, thanks to an indecisive little butterball holding things up at the counter. Sources said the chubster, whose breath has almost completely fogged up the glass display case, already has chocolate on his shirt, and is now regarding the ice cream selection with the sort of glazed look typical of the heavily sedated.
Thanks to @motersho for further illustrating that The Onion is better than any standard newspaper by leaps and bounds.
The results of the largest-ever clinical trial found that omega-3 fish oil may significantly benefit half of all people diagnosed with depression.
Specifically, fish oil seemed to help the 50 percent of depression patients who are free from diagnosed anxiety disorders.
Fish oil appeared to help these people about as much as the leading class of antidepressant drugs … that is, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac and Paxil.
Participants for the trial were people diagnosed with moderate to severe unipolar (i.e., not bipolar) major depression who were unable to tolerate antidepressants, who refused them despite a physician’s recommendation, or who were not helped by the drugs.
A good, high-quality, toxin-free fish oil (I strongly suggest Designs for Health) is the most important supplement the average American — no doubt saturated with too many Omega-6 fats from processed vegetable oil — can take.
The result is a Mac OS X update unlike any in recent memory, one that boosts speeds, reclaims disk space, tweaks dozens of features, and lays the groundwork for a new generation of computers that feature 64-bit multicore microprocessors, ultra-powerful graphics processors, and massive amounts of memory. These features, combined with the low upgrade price of $29, make Snow Leopard the biggest no-brainer of an upgrade since Mac OS X 10.1. (And that upgrade, the aged among us will recall, was completely free.)
It seems I’m always out of town when a new version of OSX launches. It’s seriously uncanny.
(I guess on the other hand, I’m an accurate predictor of when things like this will happen. If only I could monetize that.)
As I travel many I talk to are having a hard time keeping up. The digerati at least are breathless and frustrated with their overflowing inboxes – RSS, Twitter, Facebook, email, SMS and IMs. The Attention Crash is worsening. And there’s no end in sight. However, as everything becomes more social I believe there will be a boom in curation technologies that help us find the signal in the noise. These apps will help us spot trends from friends. You can spot these everywhere – the Facebook highlights column, PostRank, Feedly, Alltop, PopUrls, Regator and my6sense.
Rubel nails it: as the ability for information to spider to multiple vehicles increases, our attention spans — already stressed and frayed — need some help. And therein lies the opportunity: smarter, more refined information/news curation tools.
For me, even though I am embarrassingly enamored with the social 2010 web, it all becomes overwhelming to me relatively quickly. The notion of “keeping up” must give way to smarter filtering, because the more you get lost in the noise, the further you’ll be from the signal. And let’s face it: it’s a relatively small subset of folks out there generating the signal. You have a right to be discerning, and smart tools that help you do so will be in high demand.
It’s true.
IKEA abandons ~50 years of Futura and Century Schoolbook for … Verdana.
In an interview with swedish design magazine CAP&DESIGN the reason for the change is to be able to use the same font i all countries, including asian countries. Also they want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the web.For me it’s a sad day.
Why IKEA would abandon 50 years of brand identification and classy typesetting for Verdana is like BMW losing their crest in favor of a Yosemite Sam decal. Befuddling decision, to say the least.
I could read all day about Don Wildman. Susan Casey’s profile of him in Esquire is
equal parts fitness horror:
A deep growl booms out from the center of the room, where Don Wildman, the Circuit’s master practitioner, wearing faded jeans and a Sonic Youth T-shirt, stands barefoot, holding a pair of fifty-pound weights. Muscular, lean, six-two, with a trim beard, he looks like Sean Connery, if Connery had borrowed the body of a U.S. marine. This gym, filled with cutting-edge equipment, occupies a wing of his home. I’ve heard about the Circuit, I’ve heard about Wildman, and I’ve come to see for myself what, exactly, is going on in here.
And life wisdom:
Humans waste a lot of energy worrying about things. Might get cancer, might go bankrupt. Might marry the wrong person or screw up at the office. Emerging from war, Wildman no longer had these kinds of concerns. At twenty, he’d crawled out of the darkest of pits, and in comparison, 1950s America looked like one big, golden party. Anything was possible. And no matter what went wrong now, it wasn’t likely to result in death. “My father gave me a piece of advice once,” Wildman says. “He said, ‘Never walk. Always run.’”
And boy, has he ever.
Having said that, I have only one major complaint with the App Store, and I can state it quite simply: the review process needs to be eliminated completely.
Does that sound scary to you, imagining a world in which any developer can just publish an app to your little touch screen computer without Apple’s saintly reviewers scrubbing it of all evil first? Well, it shouldn’t, because there is this thing called the World Wide Web which already works that way, and it has served millions and millions of people quite well for a long time now.
Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. About the only scary thing they can do outside the sandbox is access your address book, but Apple can easily fix that by requiring they ask permission first, just like they must do to track your location.
Whatever coming-of-age story awaits Apple, it will almost certainly have to do with the App Store and the realization that the tighter you grip, sometimes you really do lose more sand.
A happy balance must be found. It’ll be the best for everyone.
