Some absolutely incredible shots of California’s Rim Fire.

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My thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. A few years ago I did some research on various off-site backup services and went with Backblaze. I’ve been using their service for years now, and I highly recommend it.

If you’re planning to do some backyard grilling and/or smoking this upcoming weekend, we’ve got you covered. I wrote this Tools & Toys guide myself, giving my best recommendations for gas and charcoal grills, smokers, and all the ancillary tools you’ll need (like this awesome instant-read thermometer that’s just $20).

Federico Viticci, in response to my article from last Friday where I wrote some ideas about the future of “news aggregation”:

My primary concern is that a feature such as the one envisioned by Shawn — which I’d love, by the way — would require a tremendous amount of scale, data, analysis, time, and, ultimately, resources, which I’m not sure an independently developed feed reader could ever have (or pull off properly).

He’s right. The companies I used as parallel real-life examples my “news aggregation” service were Pandora, Netflix, and Amazon. These are huge companies with vast resources and enormous user bases to aggregate and analyze their data.

Stephen Hackett gives a quick overview of all the new stuff we just might see this fall from Apple. Sheesh, there’s a lot. And I’m also holding my breath for new Thunderbolt displays.

Curious what my most interesting iPhone apps are these days? Well, be curious no longer.

From the lessons he learned during his app store experiment, and how he saw a massive boost in downloads and daily revenue once he went from a paid app to a freemium model:

IAP increases revenues – For better or worse for the ecosystem as a whole, it’s been proven over and over again it makes more money.

Stuart’s experiment is just one data point, but it seems more and more developers I’ve talked to are seeing the same thing and feel that .

Like Moltz, I much prefer to pay a few bucks for an app, than to buy an “upgrade” through an in-app purchase. But, what I prefer even more is for my favorite apps to stay in active development over the long run.

Also — just putting this out there as food for thought — but here’s a zinger that really stood out to me from the aforelinked Gary V. talk:

The quickest way to go out of business is to be romantic about how you make your money.

Some great thoughts and insights about business and marketing.

James Hamblin, writing for The Atlantic, about John Mayer and his excellent new album, Paradise Valley

If you’ve never seen Mayer play blues guitar — and I say this because it’s true, even though I think superlatives are the worst — you’ve not seen the man who is objectively the most talented guitarist in popular music. Anyone who’s not in some way attracted to or impressed by his talent does not understand music. Or, or — and it really seems this does happen — they hate him too much to hear it. They hate him personally, or they get lost in the too-often sappy lyrics, or his period of faux-gravely vocal experimentation.

My pal Myke Hurley asked me to be a guest on his interview show this week. We talked quite a bit about the behind-the-scenes story and work that went into writing and self-publishing my new book, Delight is in the Details.

Also, Myke managed to find one of the worst pictures of me there is on the internet (those aren’t my glasses, and I don’t wear my sweater like that).

I’m still with AT&T because their coverage in Kansas City has always been fantastic.1 But in Colorado, AT&T was limping along. Last year I nearly switched Anna and I over to Verizon (because we visit Colorado at least twice a year) but it was in the middle of both our 2-year contracts and so I decided to wait until this fall to switch.

But in the meantime AT&T’s LTE coverage along the Front Range has gotten pretty great. So good, in fact, that we’ll be sticking with them when we next upgrade our iPhones.

A great update to one of my iPhone’s three docked apps. I wrote a short review of Scratch a while back, explaining why it’s in my Dock.