Author: Carl Page 93 of 152

Dispatch from the Trenches #8

On September 5, 2014

XKCD is the only web comic I’ve managed to be continually challenged and delighted by every single time I read it. Today’s is no exception.

When you’re finished reading, hold your mouse over the screen and wait for the alt text to appear. It adds to the comic.

Josh Ginter’s reviews are like tasty roast chicken for the eyes. The photography is beautiful and the writing thoughtful. His latest review of Overcast is one such experience. His views on Overcast mirror my own. I’ve used it since it was released and haven’t looked back. The Smart Speed and Voice Boost features are as indispensable as they are seamless.

Smart Speed analyzes the downloaded episode and shortens areas of downtime or pauses in speech to speed up listening time. This is handled brilliantly. Conversations sound smoother and less robotic than a generic speed boost option. There is even an indicator in the settings menu to indicate how much time you have saved by using Smart Speed. I would wager Smart Speed alone is worth the in-app purchase.

Voice Boost is equally impressive. Voice Boost also analyzes the downloaded file and boosts areas where speech is quieter. This eliminates the need to manually up the volume when a quiet speaker takes the mic and, generally speaking, makes the whole listening experience easier on the ears.

These two hallmark features are what sell Overcast for me. They are so well executed and act so invisibly that I usually forget I have them turned on.

Another feature I love is the Twitter-based recommendations.

y recommending a show, Overcast can use your Twitter account to send your recommendations to your followers. Overcast doesn’t tweet on your behalf, but rather reads the recommendations of the people you follow and shoots the results into the “Recommendations from Twitter” section in the podcast directory.

I’ve found some great new podcasts I’d never heard of based on the recommendations from Twitter. I love this app and you’d be nuts not to read Josh’s review. If podcasts aren’t your thing, he takes equal care with the same spectacular photos on his reviews of pens like the TWSBI Diamond 580AL and paper like the Field Notes: Night Sky edition.

So That’s It Then

I was turning right onto James, from Broadway, in Seattle. And I said it, as if I felt like I just pulled off some great heist as I mumbled under my breath: “So, that’s it?”

I struggled with what to say about this piece. Just go read it. It’s a beautiful story.

Chrome Quick Tip – Pull multiple tabs into a new window

By Carl

On September 4, 2014

In Tips

If you’ve ever used the Google Chrome browser, you know all about tabs and how you can drag a tab into a new window. But did you know you can select a group of tabs and pull all of them into a new window?

Select a tab
Hold CTRL on the PC or ⌘ on the Mac and select multiple tabs.
Pull those tabs off the tab bar and into a new window.
Enjoy your new set of tabs.

It’s dangerous to go alone

By Carl

On September 2, 2014

In Links and Quotes

Steve Lubitz, of the wonderful Isometric Podcast tweeted something that caught my attention this morning.

This is the best explanation I've read yet about what's driving the current ugliness in games. Worth your time. http://t.co/By0fxsTNfm— Steve Lubitz (@WickedGood) September 2, 2014

He’s right. It’s very much worth your time.

For people who have never been real outsiders, who have never known what it’s like to sit in a room full of humans who treat you alternately as invisible and a target for nasty harassment, it’s hard to understand why the gamer identity matters so much. I was a comic book nerd in high school, and I was a horror nerd, and I was a movie nerd, and these gave me identities. In the real world I would get beatings and be teased and ridiculed, but in private these identities offered solace. The whole world of normal socialization was a club to which I couldn’t belong, but these communities – and later punk rock – offered me places where I could be among people who thought like me and often looked like me. They were safe places for me, and as the tide of geek chic rose I was horrified to see that the kind of people who had abused me for my fringe-interest identifiers were now co-opting them.

I’m not saying this is the right way to be, but I get it. I get that panic of finding the one place where you felt at home suddenly being overrun with exactly the kind of people who made you feel like you weren’t at home in the regular world. And that panic makes people act poorly, and to lump others who are actually just as much of an outcast and a weirdo and a freak as they are in with the bad guys. This is how women get abused in geek circles. This is how the powerless prey on the other powerless.

Why I Feel Bad For – And Understand – The Angry #GamerGate Gamers

I don’t know what GamerGate is but I can take a guess from this article. It’s no secret women and really, anyone is a target when playing games online. But it’s so much worse if you have a slightly feminine voice, avatar or profile.

I grew up an outcast. I’ve always been tall. I topped out at 6’5″ but I got there very quickly. I was the tallest person in my school from nearly the time I entered elementary school. I had one teacher in middle school was 6’8″. Besides that, I towered over the other kids and I had a good six inches on many of the teachers

I went to a small school in a small town. My graduating class was 168. My entire high school (grades 9-12) was about 550 students. I didn’t play football. I quit the basketball team late in a season to attend and run our literary magazine’s coffee-house / open mic night.

I’m a freak and an outcast.

I didn’t have broadband internet until college and barely had dial-up in high school. (26.4kbps!) Online gaming was limited to Command & Conquer over Westwood Online. Usually played with my brother, we would work as a team to build units with the mouse and spam the chat with text to confuse our opponents and hopefully make they think we were busy typing instead of building.

Until the tanks would rush in.

There was no voice chat. I had no idea who was on the other side of the screen I was playing against. Talking to other people was limited to text. Not voice. With video a distant dream, I talked smack but nothing hateful against the other person. I used juvenile jabs like “You Suck” or “I’m coming to get you sucka!” I didn’t spew racial epithets.

I grew up in a different time. Looking back, it feels like a world alien to today.

I had a lot of anger growing up. Much of it poured into angry music and notebooks. I was always writing. I poured my feelings onto paper and let them grow there. Instead of keeping the rage inside, I let it out. I wrote it out. I shouted it out. I would take long bike rides and listen to Nine Inch Nails.

What would have happened to that young man if I had a cable modem and Xbox Live today? What if I had Halo and Call of Duty at my disposal? To play in those worlds means being inundated by hatred and insult. Would I have volleyed a vitriolic return? Probably. I was good with words after all.

As Devin Faraci says in his post,

I’m not saying this is the right way to be, but I get it. I get that panic of finding the one place where you felt at home suddenly being overrun with exactly the kind of people who made you feel like you weren’t at home in the regular world.

It’s not right. But I get it.

Dispatch from the Trenches #7

By Carl

On August 29, 2014

In Links and Quotes

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Instead of jabbering on for thousands of words, here are three videos I enjoyed this week. I hope you enjoy them too.

THE DISTRICT

“The District” is a Washington D.C. based timelapse project I decided to take on since I’ve lived in the area my entire life and I think it has beauty and architecture that needs to be seen.

Beautiful collection of shots from around Washington, D.C. This is a beautiful city with interesting sights and architecture. This collection captures them beautifully.

Beautiful Ghost: A Filmmaker’s Look at Chernobyl

On the 27th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Christiaan Welzel and his wife, Kseniya, entered the Exclusion Zone. Christiaan’s cinematic footage captures the eerie beauty of the desolation and decay.

Haunting visit to a place of terrible things. the room full of gas masks is haunting.

Stunning Video: The Portuguese Man-of-War Up Close

The Portuguese man-of-war—a colonial organism related to the jellyfish—is infamous for its painful sting, but one photographer finds the beauty inside this animal’s dangerous embrace. For nearly two years, retired U.S. Navy combat photographer Aaron Ansarov has collected and photographed man-of-wars that wash up on a local Florida beach.

It’s a beautiful look at a deadly creature. The photos in the Deadly Beauty series are stunning.

On Ending the Tyranny of 24/7 Email

By Carl

On August 29, 2014

In Observations

End the Tyranny of 24/7 Email

Why would less email mean better productivity? Because, as Ms. Deal found in her research, endless email is an enabler. It often masks terrible management practices.

When employees shoot out a fusillade of miniature questions via email, or “cc” every team member about each niggling little decision, it’s because they don’t feel confident to make a decision on their own. Often, Ms. Deal found, they’re worried about getting in trouble or downsized if they mess up.

When I am not at work, I do not check work email. I do not think about work email. I do not consider what could be going on in work email.

If it’s in email, it is inherently unimportant.

If something urgent were happening, I would receive a phone call. No phone call. No urgency.

In contrast, when employees are actually empowered, they make more judgment calls on their own. They also start using phone calls and face-to-face chats to resolve issues quickly, so they don’t metastasize into email threads the length of “War and Peace.”

See? Face-to-face meetings or phone calls are for important things. Email is for ass-covering and uncertainty.

These changes can’t happen through personal behavior: The policy needs to come from the top. (If your boss regularly emails you a high-priority question at 11 p.m., the real message is, “At our company, we do email at midnight.”)

This is another important point. The example is set from the top-down. If your manager and his manager and his manager all email all night long. That’s the message. I keep my work email habits to myself mostly because people are aghast when I tell them I don’t check it outside of work.

But when I ask them how often they’ve had something in email that absolutely could not wait until they were back in the office?

Very rarely do they have any examples. And the ones they do offer were accompanied by a phone call. This Labor Day let’s think about how we labor. We give all of our time to work in exchange for what?

More work. You won’t ever get ahead. The harder you work and the more time you pour into your work and email, the more you’re rewarded with more work to do.

Stand with me. Hold the line. Do not check work email outside of work.