512 Pixels

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Adam Savage:

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving. This is counterintuitive, because complaining about deadlines is a near-universal pastime.

[…]

We’re conditioned to believe that the deadline is working against us. But I’m not so sure.

Kyle Hill:

You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo’s famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs” may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel?

There are two stories going on here. The first is that Solo’s famous line of dialog was simply a mistake of terminology. The second — the one I choose believe — is far more interesting, because it means that when Obi-Wan sat down across from the wryly smiling Han Solo in that cramped cantina, he met a time-traveling smuggler born at least 40 years before the events of The Phantom Menace ever took place.

Sadly, @JayRay is probably right about Han just wanting to sound impressive.

Well, I’ll be spending some money on Lego’s website tonight.

Viticci, this morning on Twitter:

PET scan came back negative. Like I said, cancer:

I kicked your ass.

When I read Viticci’s tweet this morning, I teared up. He and my buddy PJ spent most of 2012 fighting back against their cancer, and for now at least, they are victorious over it.

However awesome these guys are, they are in the minority. Not everyone gets a second chance. While I’m overjoyed that my buddies are doing so well, it breaks my heart to think about all the little friends we’ve seen succumb to cancer of the course of my son’s treatment.

Fuck cancer. Fuck it right in the eye. We have a long way to go until we really kick it’s ass.

Scott Forstall should get drunk and do one.

Linus Edwards:

While the internet of today is very open and one can access anything at anytime, the 90’s internet was a fairly closed off place. The vision for how people would use the internet was more akin to a planned community, where everything would be organized and you would interact with everyone in one consolidated location. Nothing exemplifies that concept more than Apple’s ‘dream’ for the internet in the 90’s, eWorld.

The Macintosh SE was perhaps the most successful compact Mac. It was the first to support ADB, come with an internal hard drive an an external SCSI port.

I own two of them. One still works, but the other (which is in far better physical shape) died back in 2005.

1. I just linked to it on my popular blog.
2. I signed up for an account.
3. I probably won’t ever use it, because OmniFocus Mail Drop works well for me when it comes to reminding me to deal with my email.

Adi Robertson at The Verge:

Some of the best citizen journalism has relied on picking a few moments from long reels of video or snapping reams of pictures in short succession, an approach that doesn’t really work with Vine.

Shocking.

Be still, my heart.

Apple:

By early last year, Apple’s cash balance had built to a point beyond what we needed to run our business and maintain flexibility to take advantage of strategic opportunities, so we announced a plan to return $45 billion to shareholders over three years. As of next week we will have executed $10 billion of that plan.

We find ourselves in the fortunate position of continuing to generate large amounts of cash, including $23 billion in cash flow from operations in the last quarter alone.