mbrd

I've been trying to read more books in 2017, and it's been going well so far and I've read 24 books since January.

The two things that have made the difference for me are:

* use the library! I only paid for 1 of those 24 books. Of the others 1 was a physical book from the library and the other 22 were library ebooks. I rarely find things I want to read that they don't have in ebook format (although often you need to 'request a hold' and wait as they can only loan out each copy to so many people at once). For context, I'm in Austin, TX

* make reading a deliberate evening activity. I used to only read when I was in bed and then be frustrated with my progress. I've started reading on my lunch break at work, and also in place of other evening activities (TV, internet, guitar etc). If I do 30 mins at lunch, an hour in the evening and then some in bed I can finish a reasonable length book per week.

There is also the Unix Humble bundle available at https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle

Does anyone have recommendations for any O'Reilly books that are especially good?

I know you're joking, and I'm not agreeing with the headphone jack decision, but the dongle is $9.

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35-...

> Northern Ireland is even holding talks with the Republic of Ireland to unite the island. Protest Northern Ireland frantically scrambling to join the Catholic Republic of Ireland, and receiving a tepid response, is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.

Not true, see http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36621822

The cached version is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVkhl9b...

I did wonder whether there was some batch of "fake" Twitter accounts that all had the same password. That is the most plausible thing I can think of.

Does anyone know the significance of the date 9-11-1961? The password list has 10,444 matches for "9-11-1961" and 10,231 for "9111961".

From Wikipedia, I see that Hurricane Carla hit Texas that day but that doesn't seem noteworthy enough to warrant two instances of the date in the top 20, It would be surprising if it was only due to date of birth too, given I can't spot any other date-like entries.

You might be interested in this guy from my home town: http://onestep4ward.com/

He travels the world, but without the trust fund!

What happened to the API searches around mid-January? They seem to drop off from ~11m to ~7m over the space of a week.

I enjoyed doing this but I got a sore neck from reading diagonal text!

If you haven't already read it, "Getting Things Done" by David Allen is one of the best known productivity books.

Some people I have spoken to say his method isn't for them but I've found it useful, even if I haven't implemented everything he suggests.

I'd also recommend "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. It starts at simple circuits and builds up a picture of how computers work. It has really helped me get my mental models of what's going on inside a computer straightened out!

Anyone else get the impression that the head of PR at Apple was on vacation and returned this week to put out all the fires?

Seriously though, this seems like a consumer-friendly decisions, as was the iOS backdoor/San Bernadino press release yesterday and it's nice to see.

> In Hearthstone, on the other hand, there's no practical reason that Blizzard couldn't keep selling its entire line of cards directly for as long as the game exists.

There's no _technical_ reason why they can't continue to sell all of the types of cards however they aren't introducing scarcity for the sake of it, or as (just) a money grab.

When they design a new card they have to ensure that it fits with the other cards in the game, tweaking the effects it has so that it isn't too powerful when combined with existing cards. This becomes increasingly difficult as the number of cards increases. The "Standard" mode changes announced today make their job a lot easier as they only have to consider the last 2 years worth of cards (+ classic + basic cards) when designing new cards.

IMHO this will be a net positive for the game.

My wife is a medievalist and has been an attendee and session organizer at Kalamazoo multiple times. She has always enjoyed the variety at the conference, with academic topics during the day, and more "fun" topics in the evenings (constructing a medieval sextant, discussions on the language of Elvish etc).

I read it as implicitly approving of Snowden's capital but not wanting to lose the political points for calling him a hero.

I agree, weak stance from a politician who appears to avoid that kind of thing more than others. At least that seems to one of the points he's campaigning on.

My Fastmail web access is currently taking 60+ seconds to load. The DDOS in the blog was last month so I'm not sure if it's related.

"The program segfaulted. So it goes."

Are you sure about that?

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/monument-valley-developer-...

It was always amusing to visit the Apple store and see a jailbroken iPhone on display when this vulnerability worked.

I had similar problems with a 2009 MBP about a month after AppleCare expired and they repaired it free of charge. They seem to be pretty good about that.

It has the same problem on Windows 7 + Chrome.

"Dr. Drang, a consulting engineer well known amongst nerds on the Internet" (from http://5by5.tv/systematic/57)

It looks like the mockups, particularly the tablet one, were made in MS Paint.

edit: Also, is the "tm" really necessary? Surely they can defend any future trademark infringement disputes successfully without it? Perhaps I'm being naive about the world of intellectual property rights.

I guess what I was trying to saw was not that Dan can/cannot control the amount of time his co-hosts spend orating, but that he gets them to come out of their shell and say what they truly think on topics. I think it's fair to say that the majority of people on the 5by5 network are not the stereotypical, media-friendly, smooth-talking celebs that we might be used to on traditional radio, but they are very knowledgeable about their topics and speak with conviction - something which is very important. Through various means, including playing dumb at times and asking 'obvious' questions, Dan does an excellent job in getting these 'geeks' to open up and talk at length about things that they are passionate about. I don't see what he does as a being passive and not contributing - I think he is very consciously getting the most out of his co-hosts.

I don't think Dan's ability to "move the topic along" should be underestimated. It's a real skill to be able to give a discussion somewhat on topic and on time and he is excellent at it.

I can't imagine trying to get even 20 minutes of useful content from Merlin Mann but Dan does it every week on Back to Work!

Viewed on Marco's blog, the title is a direct link to the Mashable article of the same name.