Friday, July 7, 2017
Some notable passages from today’s 3rd Circuit opinion in Fields v. City of Philadelphia, holding that there is a First Amendment right to record police officers in public, written by Circuit Judge Thomas L. Ambro: the District Court focused on whether Plaintiffs had an expressive intent, such …Saturday, December 17, 2016
I’m in a bookstore, Joseph Fox in Philadelphia, and there are people here in the cramped sometimes hallway-narrow store with me. Many of them. People I mean. Some smell like rain. That’s how close they are. It’s raining outside and they’re coming into the store and I can smell the rain on them. You …Tuesday, July 12, 2016
A beloved relative recently included me on an email forward that I simply could not ignore. I’m not the first person to write a rebuttal to this email. It has been making the rounds since at least 2009, as the screenshot below illustrates.
[caption id=“attachment_2525” …
Monday, January 11, 2016
Look up here, I’m in heaven I’ve got scars that can’t be seen I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen Everybody knows me now
– David Bowie, Lazarus
David Bowie died surrounded by family at his New York home Sunday, January 10, 2016 eighteen months after being diagnosed with cancer. He …
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Today Joshua Goldman of CNET reports that the FAA recommends requiring drone pilots to register instead of registering every single drone: On November 21, the FAA task force made its registration recommendations, and instead of keeping track of each and every drone out there, it suggested …Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Dan Goodin reports over at Ars Technica on the development of technology which can use inaudible frequencies to tie together multiple unconnected devices. He explains: The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. …Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Most of this article is an extensive discussion of my hunt for the best ad blocker on iOS. It isn’t exhaustive and, given the pace at which the App Store moves, probably won’t remain current for long. That’s why I want to open things with my own thoughts on ad blocking, because I …
Saturday, June 27, 2015
This week I devote the entire newsletter to the Supreme Court decision declaring bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. I try to provide a variety of viewpoints despite the fact that I agree with the general assertion that the Constitution does not permit bans on the marriage of two consenting …
Thursday, April 30, 2015
This story about a U.K. court ordering Popcorn Time blocked has been knocking around in my brain for a couple of days now. When stuff knocks around in my head for days, chances are it will end up in written form, right here. So here we go.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson, reporting a fascinating story at Bloomberg: In the U.S., companies are prohibited by the 30-year-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act from gaining unauthorized access to computers or overloading them with digital demands, even to stop an ongoing attack. The act …Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Photo of Pike County Courthouse by the author Several excellent writing professors have told me throughout my life that you start by starting. Introductions, caveats and excuses delay your goal and bore or confuse the reader. Don’t tell people what you’re going to do. Do it. But they also advised me …Thursday, December 11, 2014
This is another post that began as a mere link post and became, by the time I was done writing it, an article in its own right. When I’m doing more than brief commentary, an article of my own feels more appropriate. There’s more room for opinion in a full article, and I like few things more than …Saturday, October 11, 2014
I’ve heard from many people who insist their iPhone or iPad “can’t handle” or “doesn’t fit” iOS 8. I read an article about a slow-down in updates to iOS 8. John Gruber of Daring Fireball first posited that some well-documented software bugs were making people reluctant to update. But his follow-up …Friday, September 19, 2014
My iPhone 5 recently stopped charging, unless I propped the phone upside down against an inclined surface like a lamp stand or a keyboard. I’m not in a position to buy one of those fancy new iPhones, so I shopped around in the internet’s DIY isle. I found a well-reviewed set of iPhone surgery tools …Wednesday, August 20, 2014
The Economist wrote in 2011 about the end of the legal industry’s lofty heights, saying of one large but ill-fated American firm: Howrey’s boss, Robert Ruyak, blamed two new trends for his firm’s demise. Howrey had begun acceding to clients’ demands for flat, deferred or contingent fees, causing …Wednesday, July 2, 2014
HuffPo and BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti recently said in a long and fascinating interview by Felix Salmon published at Matter: I love metrics and I love thinking about optimization, but I think that the optimal state is being slightly suboptimal because as soon as you try to actually optimize, …Monday, May 5, 2014
When Facebook acquired fitness tracking app Moves, the two said user data would not be commingled. But Moves’ new privacy policy reverses course. First, when fitness tracking app Moves was acquired by Facebook in April, it said: For those of you that use the Moves app – the Moves experience will …Thursday, April 10, 2014
This began as a link post pointing to Joel Achenbach’s Washington Post blog entry Journalism is aggregation. But, like more and more link posts lately, it got away from me and merged into its own article. Achenbach decides journalism is aggregation, and that’s okay. Or maybe he decides it’s not …Sunday, April 6, 2014
Note: I’m not your lawyer, you’re not my client, and nothing in this article is, or should be construed as, legal advice. Companies that don’t sell anything and exist only to enforce patent rights, sometimes purchased from the original patent holder solely for the value of enforcement, are known as …Saturday, March 22, 2014
Here’s what I’ve been reading lately. The Crimea story is easily the most important one in terms of knowing some stuff about what’s going on in the world, but it’s all worth a look. The fellow who put together that Crimea reading list (at the bottom of the list below) is Om Malik, founder of GigaOm …Thursday, March 20, 2014
I want to tell you about one great podcast every week. This shouldn’t be a problem for at least a and a half or so because I am currently subscribed to about 80 podcasts. The first Podcast of the Week is CMD + Space. An interview show by Myke Hurley, CMD + Space typically features a wide-ranging …Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The image above is the first screen you see when you open Popcorn Time. The app, available on Mac, Windows and Linux, streams movies from the peer-to-peer file sharing protocol BitTorrent. The technology is similar to what old school music swapping service Napster used from about 1999 to 2001, …Tuesday, March 4, 2014
A daily post of links I read that day feels too spammy now that I’ve done it a few times. I’ll make it a weekly thing where I highlight the best of what I read that week.Sunday, March 2, 2014
My favorites among today’s reads are the Hari Kondabolu piece, which is actually a video of few minutes of his hilarious standup, and the Tim Cook article, which I posted about earlier. Going Paperless: Automating Repetitive Stuff about Meetings Hari Kondabolu Explains How Weezer Broke His Heart …Sunday, March 2, 2014
I’m a huge fan of apps and services like Instapaper and Pocket, which allow you to save web pages, articles and even videos for later. Whether I’m in line at a coffee shop or sitting in a waiting room, I often turn to tools like Twitter and Feedly to see what’s worth reading on any given day. The …Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Introduction I focused in the first of this three-post series on how I capture information for use at home, work, for study, and in creative pursuits. This article is part two in that series, where I’ll spend about 500 words talking about how I name, organize, and save files across several platforms …Friday, January 17, 2014
This post stems from my recent conversations with a few people I know and care about who are having a very hard time of things these days. Each of us have our own mountains to climb, our own monsters under the bed. Mostly, it’s a different battle for all of us. But there’s a common thread. I notice …Monday, November 11, 2013
Ed. note: This article was originally published in 2007 at Phillyist, the now-closed website about arts and culture in Philadelphia at which I was an associate editor. I’m republishing it here, lightly revised, for Veteran’s Day. It’s never easy to watch friends depart for dangerous lands, but …Friday, November 1, 2013
The National Security Agency, in a mass email to press Oct. 31, presumably responding to a recent Washington Post report on the agency’s direct data monitoring of company’s like Google and Yahoo, goes all third-person self-referential on us: What NSA does is collect the communications of targets of …Monday, August 26, 2013
dbreunig: An astounding story that should be part of the national conversation regarding vaccines. Seems straight forward. However, USA Today doesn’t mention the church’s stance on vaccines until the 13th paragraph. Gawker, on the other hand, essentially reblogs the USA Today piece but moves the …