512 Pixels

Thanks for the tip, Josh!

Here’s the Might One, on his Supersite for Windows, [discussing the iPhone 4S](http://www.winsupersite.com/article/ s-wininfo/apple-sells-4-million-iphone-4s-phones-launch-140916):

There’s a long-running joke that Apple’s fans would buy anything the company sold, no matter the quality. But this past weekend, the joke became reality when the Cupertino consumer electronics giant sold 4 million units of a smart phone, the iPhone 4S, which even its most charitable supporters have described as an evolutionary update over its predecessor.

On Friday, my wife and I closed on our first house. It’s a nice place in a great neighborhood here in Memphis. We’re super pumped, and a little scared.¹

As most people do who buy 56-year-old houses, we set to work immediately on our new property. One of the biggest tasks on our list is to re-build a shed in our backyard that is currently in pretty bad shape. We hadn’t spent a lot of time in the shed before closing due to the large amounts of stuff in it.

Oh, and the moldy smell in the air.

Friday afternoon, I set out to help clean out the shed with some construction guys.² We quickly discovered what all that stuff actually was — the makings of an upholstery shop.

The musty room was full of all sorts of equipment. Dozens of rolls of fabric were lined up, side-by-side, sitting on the joists overhead. There were boxes full of yarn and threads of different kinds in nearly-collapsing stacks. Zippers, buttons and velcro were all organized by size. Loads of patterns and books were stacked on a large work station, hand built out of plywood and two-by-fours. The building has loads of power outlets, and its own compressed air delivery system, consisting of pipes overhead.

I don’t know the man’s name who worked in this workshop. I know he had a record player, and several Bible study books on a shelf nailed to the wall. I know he put care in to his work, based on the notebook full of photos, littered with notes and hand-written feedback.

The calendar on the wall hadn’t been turned since October 1985.

Sadly, years of neglect have taken their toll on the building, and just about all of this stuff had to be tossed. Years of someone’s life, someone’s work all gone. The physical things are in a pile in my driveway, but the memories and stories are gone in a far more permanent way.

It makes me wonder how my work — mostly stored as ones and zeros on hard drives — will ever last until I’m gone, let alone after I’m gone.

It’s all sobering as hell.

Joy of Tech has figured our how Siri really works.

Gulp.

This is something to be aware of if you use this great little app.

Ironically, I came across this tip on Thomas Brand’s Newton-themed site.

Staggering.

One of the best iOS apps just got a lot better.

Emily Rapp, whose son Ronan will pass away before his third birthday:

Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

[…]

And there’s this: parents who, particularly in this country, are expected to be superhuman, to raise children who outpace all their peers, don’t want to see what we see. The long truth about their children, about themselves: that none of it is forever.

While I’m sure some of these are Photoshopped, this is my new favorite tumblog.

Douglas MacMillan and Adam Satariano:

In the weeks leading up to Apple’s Oct. 4 announcement about the new iPhone 4S, Tim Hickman lived and breathed rumors about the device. His company, Hard Candy Cases, makes protective covers for mobile phones, and he was determined to get a jump on production. After three separate manufacturing partners in China sent him detailed 3D models of an iPhone with a widened, pill-shaped “home” button and a slightly tapered back, Hickman decided to roll the dice. He paid $50,000 to make steel moldings to mass-produce cases for the new design and, on the morning of Apple’s announcement, began taking orders on his website. The gamble backfired: Apple’s new iPhone 4S included no major changes to the exterior design. The home button remained circular. Hickman suddenly owned $50,000 worth of paperweights.

The moral of the story? Rumors based on cases created for the “next” iPhone are useless.

Christopher Bonanos at The New York Times:

In the memorials to Steven P. Jobs this week, Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered his hero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

via @viticci