Author: Joshua

Here’s a rolling list of posts, blogs, and links that I’ve been enjoying. Links that roll off (after 30) will be highlighted in my Week Notes for posterity purposes. What a beautiful idea. I’ve never had a blogroll myself, but I’ve occassionally benefitted from others. Its such an old thing I didn’t realize it was…

I see this experience a bit like what happens after an intense fire burns a stretch of forest down to ash: seeds that were dormant and waiting for just that moment suddenly germinate and stretch up to the clear, bright sun. Years ago (less than I wish) I was part of a company that had…

The rise of remote work and, in turn, employee-monitoring software sparked a boom in mouse and keyboard jigglers and other hacks to help staffers fake computer activity—often so they can step away to do laundry or a school pickup. Now some companies are cracking down on the subterfuge, deploying tools that can better spot the…

Brown noise. It’s essential to helping me sleep. Even though iOS has this built in now I still prefer Dark Noise and just turn on the Brown Noise option at medium to high volume.  Also, it’s better than white noise, or pink noise.  It started as a kid, where my mom turned on a fan…

Watching Apple’s WWDC demos of Apple Intelligence, I too had my brain racing with the concept of just asking my phone to do things and have it go into apps and services to get it done, but I also can’t help but feel like we’ve been here before and a couple years from now I’ll…

There’s a sound. There’s a note that begins everything. But before the note there is silence, silence is where everything begins. There’s a blank page before the words appear, there’s a white canvas before the picture materialises. There’s space and time between us, emptiness filled with words. There’s nothingness before a thought illuminates the mind.…

Blogging and posting on social is easy. But why is it so hard to publish a whole book on the web? It’s not anymore. Writebook is remarkably simple software that allows you to publish text and pictures in a simple, browsable online book format. Ok I’m intrigued. I’ve run across this situation numerous times where…

A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, I used to write about / really care about digital reading. A whole chapter of my life / career pivoted around digital reading and books, what could be, and I travelled the world (?!) talking about this stuff. I lectured at Yale for nine years…

 One thing is abundantly clear to me: the skills that made people good at building websites are readily transferable and even sought out skills in other fields. Not just the code or the pixels, but the ability to organize, to project manage, to break a big goal down into discrete steps, to collaborate with people…

After a year of publishing Fractional we finally hit some numbers that Lance and I were excited about, a recent episode hitting 2x the numbers of any previous episodes. We don’t really know why—we’ve loved meeting with so many fantastic guests before and look forward to talking having repeats on again!  The process of trying…

For years—like actual years—I avoided TikTok. I was convinced the format would be short-lived and not impact how the rest of us were doing content. Then, on a whim, I used the bloody thing. Its algorithm and “For You Page” hooked me. That has been me with Threads over the last year. I loved Mastodon…

Long ago I learned the trick to helping my brain remember something. Whenever I learn something that feels important I’ll make sure to immediately capture the thought in some form. That usually involves a screenshot, writing it down, sending a voice memo to a friend, taking a picture of a timestamp from an audiobook, photographing…

I’ve been following M.G. Siegler for a long time; back in the days of Techcrunch. I remember back then posts about the struggles with movie theatres.  In his recent post (requires a paywall) he touches on multiple points of why movie theatres are struggling, and will continue to do so. I’ve had reason to think…

This list from Brilliantcrank is, well, brilliant. Reading through I find myself nodding with each. This one especially resonates: Designers are incapable of working well with developers and engineers if they can’t collaborate. Throwing work back and forth over a fence never produces great results. So stop doing it. Designers and developers should work side-by-side…

One thing I want to add to my previous post is my method for capturing screenshots. Since December 2017 I’ve used Droplr for taking screenshots. I haven’t seen anyone else use this method so I want to share it here. When I’m writing down todos in Things 3, or Apple Notes, I often need to include…

The only thing that’s worked reliably for me for more than a decade has been simple tools and habits. I add items to a handful of bulleted lists, and pick a few to do that day. After a lot of tweaking and testing of every productivity system around I’ve landed on something similar. I use…

Over the last year and a half I’ve been growing out my hair. As I’ve learned there are a lot of ways to deal with messy longer hair. The simplest is to wear a hat. I’ve tried a number of different hats and don’t like how they fit and look.  I recently picked up the…

Since Double Dap was announced I’ve wanted to use it on all my Apple Watch apps. Though it has some problems, namely that it has a lag and doesn’t respond as soon as I think it will, it’s a cool feature that I want to build a habit around.  Because Apple is sometimes a bit…

I’ve struggled to figure out how to take things I like—such as great articles written by others—and how to save them. When I read something that stands out to me, speaks to me, I often look for a way to do something with that.  Over the years this has led to me taking thousands of…

If, like me, you’ve been working in technology for a while, you’ve likely felt that tightening in your chest as ore and more news of layoffs and AI breakthroughs piles up. This feels different than before. I’ve been at this line of work for 17 years now.  Shifts in tech have come and gone. I’ve…