Thursday, April 11, 2013
What Bad Customer Service Costs Your BusinessBuffer, the service that will schedule your social network posts to go live throughout the day, also happens to have a wonderful blog. They focus on productivity and customer service. Buffer’s customer service is excellent: I emailed them asking why I …Thursday, April 11, 2013
This post is exactly what it says on the tin: I’ll share two recipes from if this then that (IFTTT), the service that connects otherwise unconnected pieces of the internet together in epic productivity bliss. Did I oversell that? IFTTT is truly amazing. One of its most useful functionalities is the …Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the CrimeRichard A. Oppel Jr. reports at the New York Times: But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without …Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Philadelphia councilman introduces bill aimed at improving health insurance prospects for life partners and transgendered peopleThis is an encouraging development. The bill introduced by Councilmen James Kenney and W. Wilson Goode would establish a: 6 percent tax credit for businesses that did not …Wednesday, April 10, 2013
California law school grads suing schools; neither party has a good pointAttorney Michael C. Sullivan, representing California schools in a spate of fraud suits brought by students over shady job-placement numbers: "What I find most ironic is that those individuals advertised themselves to law …Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Apple removes app curation app from App Store"Yes, you can live here," Apple seems to say to developers, "but if you ever break one of our vague rules, or if we ever decide for any reason or even for no reason at all that you must go, you will be evicted. No appeal, no questions asked, no …Sunday, April 7, 2013
Select YouTube partners exempt from fair use policyYouTube’s well within their rights to refuse to leave a video up, or to re-post it after fair use has been reasonably well-defended. But it’s another reminder that when stuff is free for consumers, the interests of the producers providing the …Friday, April 5, 2013
Google fighting National Security LetterThe letters, issued by federal authorities investigating national security concerns, prohibit recipients from disclosing that they have received them, let alone what they’re asking for. The Judge in Google’s case1 struck down the law’s gag order provision as …Friday, April 5, 2013
Twitter Arrives on Wall Street, Via BloombergInteresting news, but someone call the design police: there’s a crime being committed at every Bloomberg terminal on Wall Street. It’s 2013 and it looks like financial professionals are daily being punished with truly awful interface design. Don’t believe …Thursday, April 4, 2013
Facebook announces Home, an Android launcherI was right. Oh, and in case you were worried, there will eventually be ads in Facebook Home.Wednesday, April 3, 2013
The trolls are now trolling themselvesThis great post by Seattle attorney John Whitaker sums up the state of affairs in the absurd debacle that is Prenda Law’s trainwreck porn-infringement trolling.Wednesday, April 3, 2013
I originally posted this to one of my old blogs, The Rotten Word, in April 2009. I wanted to publish it here as well because I plan to write a follow-up soon, having graduated in January of this year. Many thanks to Philadelphia litigator Max Kennerly for his advice and kind words about this post …Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Want to learn to code? Start here.Zack Shapiro offers some great advice for those interested in learning to code as a means to build something. I’m one of those people he mentions who are using Code Academy but I make it a part of my weekly routine and it’s helping. I wrote a post almost a year ago …Tuesday, April 2, 2013
HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of ‘Game of Thrones’HBO programming president Michael Lombardo, speaking to Entertainment Weekly's James Hibberd: The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that …Monday, April 1, 2013
2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn’t violate copyright lawThe Second Circuit has held in WNET v Aereo (PDF) that sending a unique stream of over-the-air TV signal to customers via the internet isn’t a copyright violation. Aereo assign each of …Monday, April 1, 2013
China is very serious about cyberespionageGoogle apologists like myself often answer concerns that the search-and-advertising giant can scan your email with something like “yes, but they’re doing it with robots and scrubbing it clean of all identifying information.” China, however, is not so …Friday, March 29, 2013
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android”I predict Facebook will announce a custom Android launcher — a “home” screen. Update April 4, 2013: I was right.Thursday, March 28, 2013
Amazon acquiring GoodreadsMakes sense.Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Abortion’s inevitable return to the Supreme CourtAbove the Law’s Elie Mystal is right: thanks to medical technology and laws that ignore their own consequences, abortion is going to return the Supreme Court. I hope it’s sooner than later.Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Make Feedly look more like ReaderIf you like Feedly but prefer Reader’s white space and width, grab this handy script. Chrome users like me should install Tampermonkey first.Monday, March 25, 2013
OUYA and EmulationDarrell Etherington, reporting at TechCrunch: OUYA forum admin and owner Ed Krassenstein said in a post on his site that EMUya, a NES emulator, has been submitted to OUYA for review and should definitely be available at launch, and a couple of SNES emulation options are confirmed, …Monday, March 25, 2013
Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer TurnaroundJean-Louis Gassée consistently provides insight and, perhaps even more importantly in today’s tech-writing landscape, truly elegant prose. This is a great write-up, but I recommend you make Monday Note one of your weekly reads. He and Frédéric Filloux are often …Monday, March 25, 2013
Easily fake a tweet from anyone’s accountI wonder whether Twitter can eliminate the potential for this stuff, because Shawn King of The Loop is right: it definitely raises concerns for journalists, not to mention anyone whose account lends credence to the crazy things you might say with this …Friday, March 22, 2013
HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscriptionThis is progress, although MG Siegler is right to doubt whether cable companies, many of whom are also internet service providers, would even consider such a deal. At least HBO recognizes that the math won’t hold up against a la carte …Thursday, March 21, 2013
Dropbox isn’t a feature, it’s an infrastructureCollin Fletcher of The Tech Block makes the solid case that the acquisition of iOS email app Mailbox by Dropbox signals the latter company’s push to build a “windowed ecosystem” on top of its core file syncing service. It’s worth reading the …Thursday, March 21, 2013
Titles are ToxicMichael Lopp on the anachronism and true uselessness of titles: When a company is small, everyone does a little bit of everything, so titles make no sense. My first title at Netscape was “Bitsifter”. Sure, there were some titles, but they were titles of convenience so external …Thursday, March 21, 2013
Evernote will be just fine, despite Google’s recent announcement of a new note-taking app called Google Keep, currently available for the web and Android. Keep allows for text, audio, and images to be added to a single notebook and synced between the web and Android devices. You can even add stuff …Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Google and ExperimentationThis is a great article, especially if you don’t know much about the history of Android. However, Adrianne Jeffries of The Verge ends her article with a silly quote from Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. Perhaps analysts have a legitimate role to play in the consumer …Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Actually, it’s not our data at allIt may illustrate your shopping habits and your life events, but the data about what you do online and with customer loyalty cards effectively belongs to the companies that sell it. And it makes them a lot of money. Don’t forget that.Tuesday, March 19, 2013
‘Babble’ to consolidate Google’s chat tools under one brandGeek.com's Russell Holly: Google’s recent decision to block non-native XMPP requests is the first step towards building their own closed communications platform. In order to use Google’s chat service, especially the new …