My Twitter stream was becoming so full of snark, entitlement, and whining that the two back-to-back local news updates above stood out and reminded me that there can also be good news and nice people. I tire of listening to people making fun of everything, or bitching, or just being dicks all the time. When that happens I unfollow anyone who says anything remotely negative more than once in a 24-hour period.

Austin Kleon Reading booksmakes me happy. Being on my phone makes me miserable. So, I made a wallpaper for my iPhone’s lock screen to remind me that I have a choice.

Further evidence that we were right the first time.

I know I'm getting old because I now ask for a woman's Sleep Number rather than her phone number.

Dog sleeping in doorway. Grand Haven, MI (Leica M3) I should probably leave well enough alone, but I never do. Converted baty.net to WordPress last night. I know, right? I was tired of the work involved when publishing with Octopress. A static site is a great thing but not worth the hassle. For now.

Olympia SM3 and SM9 I saw an Olympia SM9 on Craigslist and couldn’t resist. It’s not especially pretty, but it seems to work really well. Rather than writing about it using a computer, I thought I should put the typewriter to use.

Someone recently mentioned their love for (and continued use of) Lotus Agenda. My ears perked up because Agenda was one of those apps so completely loved by the people using it that they’ve been whining about its demise for nearly 20 years. Curious, I thought I’d see if it was still possible to run Agenda, on my Mac, and was surprised to learn that it’s not only possible, but relatively easy to do.

When I type something on my computer it can be easily filed forever into a giant hierarchy of files and notes. When I write something on an index card it gets in my way until I deal with it. That sounds like a disadvantage of index cards and it is — but only if you have the wrong goal. My goal is not to find the easiest possible way to write things and file them.

Lucy Inglis: But what needs to stop right now is ascribing simplistic, headline-grabbing motives to the actions of fragmented and troubled individuals such as Elliot Rodger just because they suit an agenda, no matter how worthy that agenda might be. The evidence left by the killer himself indicates that no one thing or incident led to Saturday’s events but an awful maelstrom of mental instability, social and sexual conditioning, race, loneliness, basic human cravings and rejection.

Marvin Li: As your team and infrastructure grows, shipping code can become either a healthy challenge or an absolute nightmare, depending on the choices you make. If I’m guilty of all of these what do I win?

Arthur Ariel Sabintsev on Medium: Apple explicitly states in their Swift iBook that the String class is bridged seamlessly to the NSString class and can make use of its APIs, however, the length method doesn’t exist. That’s because unicode characters in Swift don’t all take up the same unit of storage in memory, and therefore calling NSString’s length , which is based on 16-bit code units, on a Swift String, wont work.

Launchbar was the first app launcher I loved on the Mac. I’d used Quicksilver prior to that but it was buggy and we never got along well. Launchbar was awesome and has been around forever. However, when Alfred came along I was seduced by how pretty it was and eventually switched. Alfred has been great, but it always felt to me like a pretty-but-lesser substitute for Launchbar, so I was happy to see that Launchbar 6 was released recently.