Song Exploder - The story of "The Commander Thinks Aloud", by The Long Winters
From Episode 28 of the Song Exploder podcast - The Commander Thinks Aloud by The Long Winters:
On February 1st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart while reentering the earth’s atmosphere. John Roderick, singer and songwriter of The Long Winters, wrote “The Commander Thinks Aloud” about that fateful moment ...
Move-O-Scope
I've been using the Moves app for a little while to have a bit of fun with recording where I visit, when, and how I get around. At this stage I don't know exactly what I'll do with the data, but I've just come accross the ...
The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk
The New York Times, on The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk:
A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.
[...]
On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic ...
Self-Hosted Server Status Page with Uptime Robot, S3, and Upscuits
For quite a while I've had a public "Status" page online for WhisperGifts via Pingdom. It basically just shows uptime over the past few days, but given my site is relatively low-volume and not ovely critical to my customers, the $10/month for Pingdom was actually one of my ...
How I use HuffDuffer as "Instapaper for Audio"
I like to listen to podcasts. There's the big names I listen to such as This American Life, their spinoff Serial, and Radiolab - but I also like listening to ad-hoc pieces of audio that I come across without subscribing to a whole podcast feed.
For a while now I ...
2014 In Review
What a year 2014 was. I know we're already a week into the new year, but there's a few things I wanted to list out - however terse some items are - so at least I can tell in the future what happened, when.
I won't go into details ...
Being a Problem Solver
David Cramer, in Be a Problem Solver
For me the best thing that happened to our generation was Google. Not necessarily Google itself, but the idea of search. The Internet is a sprawling amount of unstructured information, and products like Google Search empower people like myself to solve problems they ...
Serial - We're listeners, not detectives
I love listening to Serial, the podcast you've already heard about where This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig revisits the 15-year-old murder case of Hae Min Lee, uncovering details week by week. Today in The Guardian, Jon Ronson, published an exclusive interview with the family of Adnan Syed, the ...
Please Offer An Excel Export Option
Evan Miller, writing in Please Offer An Excel Export Option:
Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people. This may come as a shock, but most people are not computer programmers. They are not going to read your CSV with Python and process it with Pandas or Numpy. They ...
Kano - Make a Computer
Kano:
Kano is a computer you build and code yourself. Lego simple, Raspberry Pi powerful, and hugely fun.
US$149.99, free shipping worldwide.
I really wish my kids were a bit older - this is exactly the sort of thing I cannot wait to use to introduce them to computers ...