Austin in One Day
September 30, 2022
Recently, a dear friend came to visit me in Austin, TX. I had exactly one day to convince him to move to the city.
I wanted to hit as many tourist-y Austin-y spots as possible, so this is exactly what we did, in this order (starting around 6am on a Friday).
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Camera Roll: Distant Utopia
September 26, 2022
A hazy, distant view of downtown Austin from the Pennybacker Bridge overlook. It almost looks like a little utopia from here – but drive once on I-35 and you quickly realize it isn’t.
This was taken late morning, on September 23rd, 2022.
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Camera Roll: Downtown at Dusk
September 22, 2022
The Google building is a fine addition to Austin’s skyline, in my tiny opinion. This was snapped at dusk, on September 21st, 2022.
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Inside the Last Men's Hotel in Chicago
🔗 newrepublic.com • September 18, 2022
They are as old as 86 and as young as 18. At the front desk, they show driver’s licenses, state IDs, and passports. They were born in Cicero, they were born in Ghana, they were born on a table in Cabrini-Green.
What an amazing story.
Industrial literacy
🔗 rootsofprogress.org • July 19, 2022
When you know these facts of history—which many schools do not teach—you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it. You understand that the electric generator, the automobile, the chemical plant, the cargo container ship, and the microprocessor are essential to our health and happiness.
New Masking Tools in Adobe Lightroom
November 14, 2021
Maybe I’ve been living in the stone ages, but up until yesterday I’ve used the brush tool in Adobe Lightroom to make selective edits to photos. Take this photo for example:
It was taken during golden hour – lovely! But the sky feels a little gray. Normally I would whip out my brush tool and, like a caveman, begin a vain effort to select the sky by hand.
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The Tale of the (Almost Failed) Uber App Rewrite
🔗 x.com • June 5, 2021
I'm a sucker for a good tech war story. This one tops the list.
Hiking Hidden Lake Trail, Glacier National Park
May 16, 2021
I wanted to share photos from one more hike at Glacier National Park (taken during a trip last September). Like the Highline Trail hike, we got an early start from Logan Pass (about an hour’s drive from the park entrance).
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Hiking Highline Trail, Glacier National Park
May 12, 2021
Last September, some friends and I made the long-haul drive from Wisconsin to the far side of Glacier National Park. (The East side was closed due to COVID restrictions.) While there’s an album full of images, I wanted to share a few of my favorites from our hike on Highline Trail.
Highline Trail spans 15.2 miles round-trip, with a steep side trail that cost us an additional 2.4 miles (more on that later).
We started the journey around 6am at Logan Pass, where we were greeted with violent winds that nearly knocked us over.
Side note: The pit toilets at Logan Pass had a shared reservoir. Pressure changes in the reservoir (due to the wind) caused strong gusts of air to blast upwards from the toilet. It was a rather unpleasant experience for the user.
We started early on the trail, as common wisdom had it that the Logan Pass parking lot fills by 7am. (If you plan on hiking the full 17.6, you’ll need to start this early anyway.)
The trail greets you with a ledge, as well as a thick cord to hang on (to make sure you’re awake, of course). Luckily, after this, the majority of the trail is smooth-sailing.
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Snowy Landscape
February 6, 2021
Another photo of the snowy landscape outside our home.
Driveway
January 3, 2021
Yup, just a photo of the driveway at golden hour. Living back home in Wisconsin has been a silver lining of the remote-work-pandemic world.
Shoveling Snow and Testing iPhone’s Night Mode
January 2, 2021
I’m always surprised by how much I’m able to suppress. The mind needs space to breath, let things rise to the surface, and be creative. Sometimes it needs freedom from podcasts, work, and endlessly scrolling feeds.
A few hours of shoveling a Wisconsin driveway does the trick! This was also an opportunity to test my iPhone mini’s “Night Mode” photography. This is the road just outside our home:
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The M1 Macs
🔗 daringfireball.net • November 18, 2020
To acknowledge how good they are — and I am here to tell you they are astonishingly good — you must acknowledge that certain longstanding assumptions about how computers should be designed, about what makes a better computer better, about what good computers need, are wrong.
Nova by Panic
🔗 nova.app • September 24, 2020
From the homepage of Nova, a new code editor for macOS created by Panic:
If we're being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they're cross-platform — but it's just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like. Long ago, we created Coda, an all-in-one Mac web editor that broke new ground. But when we started work on Nova, we looked at where the web was today, and where we needed to be. It was time for a fresh start.
These are people that care about craft. I‘ve been using Nova for months, and I‘m certain it will sit in my dock for years to come.
Playing with Pixel Sorting
September 21, 2020
A few years back I wrote a small program to “pixel sort”, or rearrange the pixels of an image to create surreal distortions. This is a photo of a dancer, taken when I was in college:
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Dithering
🔗 dithering.fm • July 6, 2020
Two of my favorite technology writers, now collaborating on a podcast with a fun constraint: each episode must be exactly 15 minutes long. (Something tells me this constraint is more for one of them than the other!)
ARM Mac Commentary
June 15, 2020
We are weeks from WWDC, where we will presumably see a long-awaited tectonic-shift for the Mac.
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Loops
April 5, 2020
I’m up late, and I’m making scrambled eggs because that’s what I have left in the fridge.
Here’s a foggy sunset in my neighborhood; this was on my way to the grocery store a few days back. I’ll need to go back in the morning.
It’s not as apocalyptic as it looks of course – just apt timing for the photo. The following afternoon was sunny, with plenty of folk playing/walking/running in the park (with a safe distance between them).
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Lake Michigan This Evening
March 4, 2020
Just a nice photo of Lake Michigan this evening.
Lyft Conversations: John McAfee
February 1, 2020
My Lyft driver, a few weeks ago, paraphrased:
“In order for society to work, people have to act a certain way. There’s a norm, there’s behavior we consider normal, you know? There are expectations.
“You are young, so I expect something different from you than someone who is older. But you are educated, yes? Then I expect you to speak as an educated person in society.
“Someone who is older, well, we expect wisdom from them.
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