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"No" is the New "Yes": Four Practices to Reprioritize Your Life - Tony Schwartz - Harvard Business Review

blogs.hbr.org

I was sitting with the CEO and senior team of a well-respected organization. One at a time, they told me they spend their long days either in back-to-back meetings, responding to email, or putting out fires. They also readily acknowledged this way of working wasn’t serving them well — personally or…

Jan 25, 2012

Morality and Persecution - Matt Gemmell

mattgemmell.com

I recently read the Pope’s latest homophobic statements with disgust, though not with surprise. Pride of place [among proper settings for the education of children] goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell…

Jan 25, 2012

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

nytimes.com

People flooded Foxconn Technology with résumés at a 2010 job fair in Henan Province, China. Donald Chan/Reuters When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of…

Jan 25, 2012

How I Test Ideas (Or: Discerning Good From Great) — Shawn Blanc

shawnblanc.net

The Web is the most empowering tool for organized, creative folks in the history of the world. If you have an idea and you are willing to work hard, then you can ship something. Between the inception of an idea and its advent there is a great deal of hard work and many opportunities to quit. It…

Jan 20, 2012

An interview with Notational Velocity developer Zachary Schneirov – Surat Says

suratlozowick.com

For those who use it, Notational Velocity needs no introduction (and for those who don’t, trying it out is the best way to really understand why it has such an ardent following). It’s a simple application for taking, storing and searching text notes. Its range of features does not extend far beyond…

Jan 16, 2012

Is Too Much Plus a Minus for Google? « StevenLevy.com

stevenlevy.com

Is Too Much Plus a Minus for Google? Thursday, January 12th, 2012 On Tuesday, Google announced something called Search, plus Your World (SPYW). It marked a startling transformation of the company’s flagship product, Google Search, into an amplifier of social content. Google’s critics—as well as some…

Jan 16, 2012

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

blogs.hbr.org

How much time do you spend each day getting better organized? Cut it in half. When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper. IBM researchers observed that…

Jan 14, 2012

Writers I Read: Jim Dalrymple â 512 Pixels

512pixels.net

For this interview, I had the pleasure of talking with Jim Dalrymple from The Loop . Well-known among the Mac-savvy, Jim has been writing about Apple since 1995. I was nine years old then. Stephen: Jim, Thanks for taking some time to chat. I suppose we should jump right in. Mind telling the lovely…

Jan 14, 2012

The iPhone: Five years later... | Macworld

macworld.com

Steve Jobs after introducing the original iPhone at Macworld Expo 2007. Five years ago, Steve Jobs stood on stage at Macworld Expo and unveiled the iPhone. At the time, it seemed like a big deal. In hindsight, it seems even bigger. At this point, sadly, we’ve seen all the Steve Jobs presentations…

Jan 10, 2012

parislemon • Why I Hate Android

parislemon.com

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.…

Jan 10, 2012

Dropbox Squares Off With Apple's iCloud | Epicenter | Wired.com

wired.com

In early 2009, just months after Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi launched Dropbox, a service that promised to sync users’ photos, music, and documents across computers, Apple’s MobileMe team suggested the pair come by for a chat. The two MIT-schooled twenty-somethings knew they were in for some…

Dec 23, 2011

A Conversation with Jim Dalrymple — What Blag?

whatblag.com

Last night, I had the privilege of speaking with The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple over the phone. It was the first time I had ever spoken directly with a big-time writer, let alone, one who I commit to read on a daily basis. We spoke for nearly 45 minutes, and I must say that Jim is one hell of a guy. Our…

Dec 22, 2011

Macworld Siri features we'd like to see | Phones

macworld.com

Upon first blush, Siri, the virtual assistant built into the iPhone 4S, is certainly impressive. You speak naturally, and Siri figures out what you’re trying to say , and then does just what you want it to. Well, most of the time, anyway. The more you use Siri, though, the more obvious its…

Dec 22, 2011

REVIEW: Siri is a seriously good innovation - even in beta - Chicago Sun-Times

suntimes.com

On Monday, Wrigley Field will feature fans in the left field bleachers for the first time this season and right field will look different, as well. …Continue Reading White Sox poor play continues on road; Brewers win 10-7 Suburban man critically hurt in Pistakee Lake boating accident Obamas to make…

Dec 20, 2011

Cracking the idea of an Apple TV set | Macworld

macworld.com

It’s that most depressing time of year for any tech pundit: the time just after Apple’s autumn iOS event. That’s it for new products for the rest of the year; it’s a drought that won’t break until January at the earliest. It leaves us feeling all edgy and out of sorts and at a loss for what to say…

Dec 20, 2011

My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too | Tech News and Analysis

gigaom.com

Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed, had it not been for (what else) a blog post from Fred Wilson, one of…

Dec 1, 2011

Simple Social Networks — Shawn Blanc

shawnblanc.net

The apps I use the most tend to be apps that do one thing well. No doubt the vast majority of those reading this opening paragraph are of that same disposition. Instead of using apps which do lots of things fairly well, I much prefer to use apps that do just one thing and do so very well. Simplenote…

Dec 1, 2011

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

calnewport.com

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers November 11th, 2011 · 282 comments The Berlin Study In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to…

Nov 15, 2011

REVIEW: Kindle Fire is no iPad killer - but it is a killer device - Chicago Sun-Times

suntimes.com

On Monday, Wrigley Field will feature fans in the left field bleachers for the first time this season and right field will look different, as well. …Continue Reading White Sox poor play continues on road; Brewers win 10-7 Suburban man critically hurt in Pistakee Lake boating accident Obamas to make…

Nov 15, 2011

Steve Jobs is knocking on my door tonight | Macworld

macworld.com

Halloween is a time for people to dress up in costumes. At comic book conventions, people dress as their favorite movie, comic book, and cartoon characters. Halloween is like one giant comic-book convention. And if over the course of tonight I don’t see at least three people dressed as Steve Jobs,…

Nov 3, 2011

Yield Thought, I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode

yieldthought.com

Update: I’m still using this setup a year later - you can read on at iPad+Linode: 1 Year Later On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud. It all started…

Nov 3, 2011

Old Mac of the Month: the Macintosh SE

512pixels.net

Editor’s Note: This month’s installment of “Old Mac of the Month” is written by Randy Murray. Randy writes at First Today, Then Tomorrow and has written a book titled Writing Assignments, which is a great tool if you’re looking to improve your writing. I don’t think of myself as being overly…

Sep 19, 2011

"For the swarm!" Inside the world of professional StarCraft players

arstechnica.com

Korean domination? Back in the Brood War days, Korean professional gamers were on a different level from anybody else. Foreign tournaments, such as the WCG regional finals, did exist, but non-Korean players were by necessity amateurs as there was no way to earn a living playing the game. The skill…

Sep 18, 2011

The new Apple: The best gadgets, but also the best prices – SplatF

splatf.com

This isn’t a brand-new phenomenon, but it’s worth repeating and re-emphasizing: What makes Apple so successful today — and so threatening to its competitors — isn’t just its design and engineering capabilities. It’s the fact that Apple is beating its rivals on price, too, something that once seemed…

Sep 7, 2011

Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

arstechnica.com

Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson On this long Labor Day weekend in the US, we're bringing you a set of opinion pieces from various Ars writers—and we'd love to have you join the conversation in the comments. On the surface, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up on everything…

Sep 4, 2011

Code Editors for iPad: Textastic vs. Koder — The Brooks Review

brooksreview.net

Last week I asked on Twitter what everyone was using to edit code from FTP sites on their iPads. The overwhelming majority voted Textastic. However a few brave folks mentioned Koder. At first glance Koder caught my eye, but Textastic had such praise that I needed to buy and try them both. Before we…

Sep 1, 2011

Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update | design mind

designmind.frogdesign.com

It seems odd, if not entirely counterintuitive, to find any building on Facebook’s main campus devoid of devices connected to the social-networking site. But inside the slightly grungy old warehouse that houses the company’s Analog Research Lab, there isn’t a single computer in sight. Instead, the…

Aug 31, 2011