Tag: featured

  • Facebook is a maze with 850 million mice

    I’m always amazed that something as popular as Facebook has so much wrong with it. It works, sure, in ways that Twitter didn’t for a very long time (like just being available most of the time) and that MySpace never did (still and always ugly, forever and ever). But so much stuff is impossible to figure out or changes at a moment’s notice or simply doesn’t work across all platforms.

    Anyway, you get what I’m saying if you’ve ever been a heavy user (or a slightly-more-than-casual one) over in Zuckerbergville. This week’s Digital Savant column was an attempt to answer some of those nagging, weird questions about how to do things that should be a lot more intuitive on a site that serves so many. I didn’t have answers for all the questions that friends were kind enough to contribute, but I did learn a lot while writing it.

    I also did a blog post this week about PC gaming optimization tips (more interesting than it sounds!) based on the habits of those on the pro gaming circuit. It made me pine for the days when I used to crack open PC cases and install my own mother-ba-boards and Riz-NAMs, but not enough to give up my Apple laptop and go back to those endless tinkering hours.

  • Easter pics

    Carolina discovers that cracking cascarones on herself eliminates the middle-man.

     

    Just a little gallery of images from last weekend’s Easter festivities. Click on any of the images to enter the gallery.

  • Two Spotify playlists: ‘MOVE, SUCKA!’ and ‘Good Stuff’

    Today, Spotify rolled out a Play Button, which allows for embeddable songs, albums and playlists on blogs (like this one!). Back in the day, I used to do an annual CD for the site (the last one went out in 2007), and though I definitely don’t have the time for a project like that anymore, I do miss sharing music in an easy, fun way on the site.

    So, here’s two playlists that I’ve been curating the last few months on Spotify, each with about 30 songs. The first is “MOVE, SUCKA!” which is just songs with a good beat that are appropriate for moving your ass around. The second is just random songs I like that I add to the playlist when I hear them. You can scroll down each of the playlists for more songs.

    Enjoy! If you have your own playlists you’d like to share, please post a link to them in the comments. Spotify is free (it does have ads unless you upgrade to a premium account) and I really enjoy using it.

    I’m also including an album I just started listening to from Wild Flag (featuring Carrie Brownstein of Portlandia and Sleater-Kinney fame) and a song from my favorite band of the moment, Wild Child.

  • Trailers Without Pity: The Amazing Spider-Man


    Something about rebooting a movie franchise (unless you are Christopher Nolan and have the talent to back it up) seems unseemly, like you’re trying to fool someone, or everyone, into thinking that a previous set of movies either didn’t happen or that the world collectively already forgot about it.

    Which is what seems so weird about The Amazing Spider-Man, the Spidey reboot that we just did a video for on Trailers Without Pity.

    Did Tobey Maguire not just do that?  Recently?  Is time passing so quickly that I don’t remember seeing that last movie just as my daughter was incubating in my wife’s belly (she had to keep leaving the IMAX theater as the kid started kicking and thrashing inside from all the noise).  That was only… what… four years ago?  A little more?

    Well it matters not because Andrew Garfield is coming in and, hey, I kinda like the guy.  It might not be so bad.  It’s not gonna be Dark Knight (which will be our next video and our last for this season of videos), but it might still be fun.  Who knows.  Shoot some webs.  Swing and whatnot.  I don’t care, Spider.  Do your thing.  Maybe we’ll see each other this summer.  The video is below. Enjoy!

     

  • Travel gadgets and iPad apps

    Yay, after a very busy few weeks I’m finally caught up!

    This week’s Digital Savant column, which ran in today’s American-Statesman, was a roundup of what some of the newer apps I’ve been using on the iPad are that best encapsulate where we are in the life of Apple’s two-year-old tablet. Slightly longer version ran as two blog entries last week.

    On Sunday, a travel gadget guide ran in the paper. It covers a range of different things you’d want on a plane or road trip as well as a few useful apps. The iPad also made this roundup, which says a lot about how quickly and indispensable the device has become, at least in my family.

    We now have two iPads in the house which seems ridiculous at first, but we really have no plans to buy any new laptops or desktop computers anytime soon and we find that our computers are being used less and less as we rely on our phones and the tablets more and more.

  • Girls hanging out

    (via Instagram). It’s so rare to get a decent picture of the girls sitting together and not moving so much the picture is all blurry.

    We found out this week that registration is opening up for Lilly’s kindergarten class in August. TOO SOON!