“…and try to knock some science into people.”  

The web is a mess. I’m this close to disabling JavaScript by default and turning it back on only when necessary.

There are many good reasons for getting rid of Flash, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing against it. What concerns me is that if browser makers decide to set a “killbit” which prevents any use of Flash, what happens to all the Flash-only content created over the years? Many projects aren’t worth rewriting in HTML5 or whatever just to avoid their delivery mechanism. That doesn’t make them worthless. Is anyone thinking about this?

Seeing mtov‘s post, Truck-Factor reminded me that many of the apps I’ve used regularly for years are susceptible to a small number of buses (I prefer “Bus Factor” to “Truck Factor). My most-used apps, typically, are these… Tinderbox DEVONthink Curio TheBrain BBEdit Each of these is developed by a very small team, sometimes by only one person. I don’t really worry about this.

I upgraded both my Macs to the El Capitan beta and could no longer convert Org Mode or Markdown files to PDFs. My scripts were returning an error: “command not found: pdflatex”. Where could it be? I soon noticed that I had lost the symlink to the TeX distribution, which is usually /usr/texbin. Easy enough to recreate it, I thought, but was wrong. Apparently, in El Capitan you’re not allowed to write to /usr, even using sudo.

Another issue after installing the El Capitan beta yesterday: Emacs became slow and had font issues. Recording my fix here for future reference. Upgraded to Xcode 7 beta and installed the latest command line tools The beta application is named “Xcode beta” so I deleted the original and told the system to use the new one. Updated the app using homebrew and emacs was back in action. sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode-beta.

Kottke People on smartphones are not anti-social. They’re super-social. Phones allow people to be with the people they love the most all the time, which is the way humans probably used to be, until technology allowed for greater freedom of movement around the globe. People spending time on their phones in the presence of others aren’t necessarily rude because rudeness is a social contract about appropriate behavior and, as Hermann points out, social norms can vary widely between age groups

Gail. (2015). Leica M4, Tri-X My favorite from yesterday’s trip to Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp

Reddit’s Terrorists Have Won: Ellen Pao and the Failure to Rebrand Web 2.0 – The Daily Beast This is the face of Web 2.0, folks. This is the boondoggle they’ve been selling to all the Web 2.0 investors—that the “social web” is an untapped oil well when in reality it’s a seething underground pool of excrement and bile.

.@Twitter. Who Do You Think You Are? – NYTimes.com It’s utterly insane that you still need to put a period before a person’s Twitter handle, such as “.@twitter,” if you want everyone to see it. Could you imagine Facebook doing that? Twitter still uses “favorite” instead of the more universal “like.” And Twitter still expects people to use Boolean search commands. Bilton describes all of the best things about Twitter as if they’re flaws.

The Awl If you strip the Internet of its ability to mock things that might be based in bereavement and despair all that will remain is intersectionality, optical illusions and idiot teens tweeting “SLAAAAAY” every ten minutes. Oh, and also transient manufactured outrage. Always the transient manufactured outrage.

Jared Sinclair If your goal is only to learn, then write clean code. But if your goal is to build a successful business, then stop trying to impress your heroes. Learn as you go. Be messy. Don’t use new technologies. Don’t use new languages for their own sake. Don’t waste time trying to think of the most elegant way to break an egg. Just smash it on the counter and leave a FIXME: comment and move on.