“Prepare like crazy so you can wing it.”
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Link Posts
Aerial Photographs of Joplin Before and After the Tornado →
Zoom out all the way to see the path of the tornado right through all those homes. It’s heartbreaking.
Keyboard Maestro Pipes →
A big tip by Gabe at Macdrifter regarding my new favorite utility program: Keyboard Maestro supports the Boolean conjunction “or” via pipes for arguments.
Making Inconsequential Decisions Can Hinder Your Ability to Make Important Decisions →
Tony Schwartz:
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
“Acts of choice,” the brilliant researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have concluded, “draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.” That’s especially so in a world filled more than ever with potential temptations, distractions and sources of immediate gratification.
I met a man recently who has the same thing for lunch every day because it’s one less decision he has to make. This, apparently, is why.
Blackberry PlayBook Goes Head-to-Head With the Etch a Sketch →
Because some said comparing the PlayBook to an iPad 2 was unfair.
The Burning House →
In similar fashion to The Items We Carry, The Burning House is: “what would you grab if your house was burning down?”
Honestly, Anna and I don’t have anything in this home that we couldn’t do without other than one another and the memories, music, and work we have stored on our computers.
This reminds me that since I began working at home two months ago I no longer have an off-site backup of my digital assets. It’s all the stuff that’s on my computer — photos, journal entries, music, financial information, etc. — that is irreplaceable. I think I’ll be looking into a good online backup service so that if anything catastrophic ever does happen all we need to think about is getting out.
How to Avoid or Remove Mac Defender Malware →
A knowledge base article from Apple themselves.
The Hidden Empire of Amazon.com →
Nice slide deck covering the growth and business model of Amazon.com over the past 16 years. Did you know Amazon.com lost $3,000,000,000 between 1995 and 2003 (see slide 35) and that they’ve introduced a new product category every year since 2000 (slide 16)?
Update On the “Previous Entries” Experiment →
Two weeks ago, as an experiment, I removed the “Previous Entries” link on the bottom of the homepage that would take you Page 2 of the site. In its place I put a link to recent articles, reviews, and interviews.
My reasoning for the experiment was to test my hypothesis that those who wind up at the bottom of the homepage are most likely new readers. And therefore, offering a link to the “best of” content would be more relevant for them and more likely to convert them into regular readers. My metrics for success in this experiment were increase in overall site pageviews and an increased rate of growth of RSS subscribers.
Today I compared the analytics of the site for the past two weeks against the two weeks prior to the experiment.
During the two-week experiment visits to the Reviews, Interviews, and Articles archive pages all went up noticeably. Which was to be expected. However, there was virtually no marked increase in overall pageviews or RSS Subscribers.
As a third metric — reader feedback — the vast majority of feedback I did receive was that current readers missed having a link to Page 2.
And so, I’ve put the link to Page 2 back at the bottom of the homepage.
On a side note: the most-clicked-on link of the recent articles, reviews, and interviews was to the Reviews page. Clearly that’s a hot topic, so I added that as a stand-alone link in the footer in addition to the archives.
Issues of Wired Magazine Are Now Half Price on the iPad →
The “newsstand” price for a single issue of Wired on the iPad is $4. You can now subscribe to Wired on your iPad for either $20/year or $2/month. If you subscribe to the print edition (which is also $20/year) you get the iPad issues for free. I think it’s odd that they are even selling such steeply discounted, one-month subscriptions to Wired considering that it is a monthly magazine.
The “newsstand” price for a single issue of The New Yorker is $5. They also have a monthly subscription for $6/month. But The New Yorker is a weekly periodical, and so a monthly subscription option seems to make more sense.
I read Wired, just not every month. But now I’ll be subscribing on a month-by-month basis.
The New Nook →
Light as a feather the Nook lasts forever.
There is no keyboard, the touchscreen is better.
And the Award for Most Creative Graphics and User Interaction Within an iPad Weather App Goes To… →
“The Best Wire Editor on the Planet” →
David Carr, writing about Matt Drudge and Drudge Report:
A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.
Drudge Report averages 3 million unique visitors and 30 million page views a day.
Managing Twitter Via Lists →
News to me, thanks to Justin Williams, is that you can add people to a list of your own curating without also having to follow them in your main Twitter timeline. Also, if you follow a list that has been curated by someone else it does not automatically add all those people to your main timeline.
For the past few months I have already been experimenting with following certain weblogs via their Twitter account versus RSS, but there are also a few dozen software brands (companies and apps) which I follow so that I can stay aware of any updates or news related to them. Managing your Twitter stream with intentional lists is a great idea. Especially since Tweetbot treats lists so well.
Here are the two lists I’ve curated so far:
By putting these brands and bots into a list it means I can pare down my main timeline — something I am alway eager to do.
The disadvantage (if you could call it that) is that you cannot exchange DMs with people or brands whom you follow only through a Twitter list. But right now the brands and bots I follow through lists are not real people. They’re impersonal and the exist almost exclusively to give one-way updates news.
A side note along these lines: I’m finding it very interesting to see the differences and nuances of Twitter as a news source (by following brands and bots who only give one-way updates) and as a conversation hub (by following friends and strangers whom we dialogue with).