I haven’t had a lot of time to play with the new site, but one thought has come to mind.
I don’t worry if it will be successful. I do worry that it will become successful and Twitter will bring down the hammer on App.net for blatantly ripping them off.
Nice article, but the photo of him on vacation feels a little backhanded.
“What the fuck has NASA done to make your life awesome?”
Adam Mann at Wired has outlined seven plans that have been circulated over the years to get man to Mars:
As every space enthusiast knows, we will land people on Mars within 20 years.
Of course, we’ve been 20 years away from Mars for the last half-century. Between 1950 and 2000, NASA and various independent groups have come up with more than 1,000 detailed studies for manned Mars missions. Yet not a single one has come very close to fruition. At least on paper, Mars remains an eventual NASA goal, with their latest Curiosity rover seen in some ways as a precursor to human missions.
[…]
Despite this, Mars is not really on the agency’s radar. After their Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) probe, set to launch in 2013, NASA has no concrete plans for the Red Planet.
(Wired has more coverage here.)
Oh no.
My parents were born in the late 1950s. By the time NASA put a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, my dad was 13. When I asked him about watching the news coverage, he simply said its something he’ll never forget.
I was born the day that the Challenger exploded, which to this day people still talk about. It shook America to its core. One reason is that the shuttle program had become routine. Boring. (Maybe even at NASA, according to the reports that came out of the investigation.) The world had taken manned space flight (if you can all a low-orbit mission that) for granted.
Earlier this week, we all stayed up way to late to watch NASA’s Curiosity rover land on Mars. Its two-year mission will surely give us more clues about the Red Planet and its history. As advanced as the rover is, we still won’t have samples of Mars here on Earth — the mission is a one-way trip, like those before it.
The problems I have with NASA run deep, but if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it’d be this:
The agency has lost its balls.[1]
Growing up in the early 1990s, there wasn’t much going on with NASA that was exciting to me, as a kid. While the beginning of the Shuttle program was something to behold, by the time I was old enough to pick a meme for my childhood, the space program wasn’t a cool option.
Looking forward, the same is true for my kids. My (almost) four year-old son is really in to cars, and I’d love to see him get in to space stuff,[^fn2] but NASA isn’t exciting. Yes, the new Mars rover is badass, but what we need is a set of heroes, flying equipment right up to the edge — and back.
Things, the GTD app of choice for many nerds has hit version 2.0. From the Cultured Code blog:
Today is a big day in Things’ history. It sees major updates for all our clients, as well as the long awaited Things Cloud release. Many of you have been looking forward to this, and I want to thank you for your patience. We have been working hard on these updates and we are truly excited to be releasing them today.
The cloud sync is really fast, but other than that, Things 2.0 is still basically the same app that version 1 was. And, after some time and dozens of projects, I felt that Things didn’t scale nearly as well as OmniFocus does. All in all, Things 2 seems pretty sweet, if you work the way Things wants you to. If not, there’s not much of a reason to switch back.
As a sidennote, with this announcement, many have been criticizing the company about the length of time since it announced Cloud Sync and actually shipped it. Here’s Shawn Blanc:
Only the team at Cultured Code knows why it took several years to ship their Cloud Sync and updates to their apps. Did they really need all that time to build their syncing engine? I don’t know; and without all the facts I refuse to criticize them for it.
Allan Odgaard:
I’ve always wanted to allow end-users to tinker with their environment, my ability to do this is what got me excited about programming in the first place, and it is why I created the bundles concept, but there are limits to how much a bundle can do, and with the still growing user base, I think the best move forward is to open source the program.
While Odgaard hasn’t declared this the death of the text editor, it doesn’t give me much hope about its future.
Matthew Panzarino puts all the cards on the table.
Marcelo Somers takes the blogging community to task:
The problem is, we can’t all be Daring Fireball – we can’t get away with posting a witty headline and a blockquote 5–10 times a day. We’ve adopted John’s concept of linking, but not the idea that we need to tell a bigger story on our sites.
Marcelo isn’t saying links are in and of themselves bad, but rather that linking should carry more weight than it does.
Here’s Kyle Baxter on the subject:
There’s no reason to link to something unless it’s something readers probably haven’t come across already or you can provide a unique perspective on it.
Those are good criteria. I find myself not linking to something far more than I find myself actually linking.
A link is my way of saying to you, the reader, that I think the article is worth your time and attention, and here on the Internet, those are everyone’s two most important possessions.
The irony, of course, is that this is, itself, a “linked list” post.
Earlier today, Shawn Blanc outlined his backup strategy. I wrote about it back in 2010, and thought that in light of this week’s news, it would be a good time to re-visit the topic.
A good backup solution has multiple layers:
Additionally, as Shawn pointed out, backing up should be easy and automatic. Here’s how I do it for my Mac mini at home. My setup at work is not all that different, however.
For my immediate backup, I use Time Machine with a 1TB Time Capsule. Released with OS X 10.5 Leopard, Time Machine makes backing up a Mac easier than ever. Simply plug in a drive (or connect a Time Capsule to your network), and OS X does the rest. Every hour, any changes made on my system are backed up, automatically, with no input from me or my wife.
Since Time Machine does versioning, I know I can retrieve older versions of a document, if needed, or restore something that was accidentally deleted. In fact, I’ve never had to go further down my backup chain than Time Machine.
As my Time Capsule sits in my hall closet, just a few yards from my Mac mini in the living room, my data isn’t all that secure. If the Mini’s hard drive failed, I’d be covered, but if my house burned down, I’d be in trouble.
To remedy this, I have a set of 1 TB hard drives that I use to keep a copy of my data locked up in my office across town. Every two weeks, I bring them home and update them with the excellent Mac app SuperDuper. One drive is a clone of my Mac mini, the other of my external RAID with our iTunes library and iPhoto libraries on it. If you don’t want to use something SuperDuper, you’re in luck, as Mountain Lion adds multiple hard drive support to Time Machine.
If my house burns down (assuming it’s not when those drives are there), the worst case scenario would be losing 13 days of data. But even that’s not good enough, really.
The third rung of my backup strategy is the cloud. For five bucks a month, Backblaze will backup any data on my Mac and external drives to the cloud.
I don’t ever plan on using this backup, but I also don’t ever plan on using the airbags in my car. If Memphis were wiped off the map, or I had some catastrophic data corruption, I’d go to Backblaze for restoration. Short of that, I’m happy to see the little menu bar item do its thing, updating my encrypted files to the company’s badass servers. Cloud backups might be slow, (especially on limited bandwith connections) but they patch a critical hole in a solid, well-rounded backup plan.
There’s no reason not to have your data backed up. While things like iCloud, Dropbox and even RAIDs are great tools, nothing is as good as solid, tiered backup plan. Sure, it takes a little time and might cost a little money, but in an increasingly digital world, there’s no reason not to have your stuff safe and sound on multiple drives in multiple locations.
Jack Dorsey:
I am pleased and proud to announce that today Starbucks signed up for Square.
Square will be at 7,000 locations across the US. Crazy.
Martin Hering:
We are using a technique known as document storage. Instacast simply saves its state into one single document that is pushed to other devices. Using this document Instacast on other devices can be updated accordingly. That’s the theory.
In practice there are a lot of pitfalls.
This is a great article outlining what it’s like for developers to use iCloud day to day. It seems like the service has a way to go in terms of robustness when it comes to certain use cases.
This week, Thomas Brand joined me on the 512 Podcast, and we talked about Mountain Lion, the Retina MacBook Pro, backups and more.