Marco.org

Matt Gemmell:

Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision.

In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move.

If you write on the internet, read this.

Special thanks to Carnegie Mellon University for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:

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By Danny Sullivan.

“Open” is meaningless. It means whatever people want it to mean to advance their agendas, much like “freedom”, “national security”, and “family”.

It’s true that parts of Android are open-source. But Google pushing PR about Android being generally “open” for consumers, whatever that’s supposed to mean, is misleading at best. That’s why I called it bullshit: most people misinterpret it more favorably to Android and Google than what it means in reality, Google knows this, and they not only allow the misinterpretation to continue but actually fuel its expansion.

Bullshit isn’t lying, usually: it’s the art of bending the truth to persuade others of a false or misleading perception without technically lying or doing anything “wrong” yourself.

Matt Alexander at The Loop:

E-readers are targeted products built with the aim, as I wrote in my Kindle Touch review, of providing a compelling “replacement for the venerable and inherently simple printed word.” They are cheap, lightweight, have long battery life, and operate well in direct sunlight, but they do little more than present traditional literature in an electronic package.

So far, we agree, although I think presenting literature electronically comes with quite a few nontrivial gains that shouldn’t be glossed over. But then:

And while that might be enough for some, it is clear that e-ink is progressing towards a colorful, responsive, video-capable future, and that is certainly not what constitutes an e-reading device. That is a tablet.

Is it really clear and inevitable that e-ink is going to become colorful and video-capable? I’d argue that most of e-ink’s appeal today will still appeal to a lot of people five years from now, and probably even longer.

Newsprint can’t do much compared to color glossy magazine printing, but it has never gone away. Why must black-and-white e-ink readers inevitably be replaced by multimedia color tablets?

The e-reader’s purpose is, ostensibly, to serve as a stopgap measure until both e-ink itself and LCDs evolve to the point of intersection —

Is it?

and that does not seem too terribly far off. Tablets are losing weight with each iteration, prices are lowering, battery lives are lengthening, and soon, everything that makes e-readers wonderful products will be assimilated into other pieces of technology.

As tablets lose weight, so do e-readers. As tablets get cheaper, so do e-readers. As tablets get longer battery lives, so do e-readers. With the (large) exception of the screens, tablets and e-readers are using the same classes of components, the same batteries, and the same manufacturing processes. But e-ink readers have far lower hardware and power needs, so e-readers should maintain their advantages over tablets for quite some time: the best e-reader on the market today costs $79, weighs less than a third as much as an iPad 2, and has a battery that lasts a month. That’s a huge gap that won’t be filled with incremental hardware improvements.

Plus, the ideal size of an e-reader is probably going to remain smaller than the ideal size of a tablet. And there are other big advantages to reading on a basic e-ink reader, such as the lack of a bunch of apps and multimedia features to distract you from reading.

I don’t think the e-reader is “doomed” at all. It may just be relegated to a fringe device for reading nerds, but that’s what it’s been for most of its lifespan as a category and it’s been fine.

Not good.

A lot of people have asked me about this part today, since e-readers are doomed and all:

Nook sales were up 70% from a year ago for the 9-week period ending Dec. 31, but holiday sales for its $99 Nook Simple Touch reader were weaker than expected.

I don’t think this, alone, is a sign that e-ink readers are in trouble. The Nook Simple Touch is a decent-but-not-amazing reader that’s 7 months old, and most of the buzz this holiday season went to the brand-new Kindle lineup.

Matt Alexander responds to my rebuttal of his e-readers are doomed article:

Moreover, despite the many merits of e-ink in its current form — merits I’ve written about at length in the past — the e-ink display is unquestionably life-limited. There is little that can be done to evolve the technology further. Sure, the current form is good for reading (and only for reading) — I do not question that — but it is very clear to me that there’s only so much more that can be done before color and video become involved.

I disagree. E-ink still has a long way to go in responsiveness and pixel density. The current Kindle is 167 ppi. Imagine how nice it would be to read on a 300+ ppi version, like the iPhone 4’s “Retina” screen but with e-ink.

I’d take that before color.

And when those are implemented, surely the benefits of a dedicated e-reader will be lost altogether?

If e-ink readers could display color and video without losing e-ink’s advantages, wouldn’t they still have their huge leads over tablets in affordability, size, battery life, simplicity, and lack of distractions?

And if color and video ruin e-ink’s ability to deliver on those advantages, wouldn’t there still be just as big of a market for the slow, grayscale displays as there is today?

As much as you or I might enjoy the e-ink experience, people are not thrilled about buying a device that does one thing very well when they can buy something that does that one thing fairly well along with dozens of other features.

Then why does anyone buy grapefruit spoons, prime lenses, or two-seater sports cars?

Or tablets? Laptops do everything tablets do fairly well along with dozens of other features, and you probably already own one.

Remember Cow Clicker? This great Wired article by Jason Tanz is worth a (long) read:

And then something surprising happened: Cow Clicker caught fire. The inherent virality of the game mechanics Bogost had mimicked, combined with the publicity, helped spread it well beyond its initial audience of game-industry insiders. Bogost watched in surprise and with a bit of alarm as the number of players grew consistently, from 5,000 soon after launch to 20,000 a few weeks later and then to 50,000 by early September. And not all of those people appeared to be in on the joke.

See also: The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow.

Dr. Drang, at the end of this post about killing apps in the multitasking switcher:

There’s another bit of iOS voodoo floating around that I’d like to see Fraser tackle: recalibrating your home button. My gut feeling is that this, too, is a waste of time.

I tried the “recalibration” procedure a few times on my iPhone 4 and iPad 2, both of which slowly developed unreliable home buttons.¹

It seemed to help for a few minutes the first time, but later attempts showed no improvement, so the first time was probably just coincidental. I think it’s safe to say that recalibrating iPhone or iPad home buttons is a myth.

Anyone have any solid knowledge to the contrary? (If an Apple “Genius” told you, that’s not good enough.)

Update: I’ve received numerous reports, some from current and former Apple employees, that “recalibration” is indeed bullshit. Grant Paul even reverse-engineered the OS routine being invoked by the extreme long-press and confirmed that it only force-quits the current app. Nothing more.

Julie Bosman at The New York Times:

Barnes & Noble, in a move to increase sales of its Nook devices, will offer deep discounts on them to customers who also buy subscriptions to the Nook editions of People magazine or The New York Times, the retailer is expected to announce on Monday.

The numbers:

• $119.88 for a year of People magazine gets a $50 discount off the $250 Tablet.
• $239.88 for a year of The New York Times gets a $100 discount off the $100 Simple Touch or $200 Color.

Interesting move. I can’t see people subscribing to these publications just to get the discounts, but I can definitely see some New York Times subscribers choosing the “free” Nook Simple Touch over a Kindle.

John Gruber:

The truth is, the average Android user is not the same as the average iPhone user. iPhone users surf the web more, they’re more willing to buy software, they’re more willing to install and use apps. Some of these stats aren’t even close. What I see as the fundamental flaw in the Church of Market Share doctrine is the assumption that users are users.

MG Siegler, on Google’s hypocrisy and constant selling out to carriers:

Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this “open” bullshit, we thanked them for it.

Remember when Google argued for net neutrality? They’ve been pretty quiet about it recently.

There are two stories here. First, it’s remarkable that Instagram has surpassed 14 million users with only an iPhone app so far — not even a useful web interface.

It’s also interesting that the Instagram CEO believes that an Android version will “nearly double” the user count. Given Android’s significantly higher market share, why wouldn’t it more than double? (Right.)

The other half of the story is Instagram’s plan to advertise, presumably by inserting photos from braaands into your stream even when you don’t follow them.

“I think the advertising experience is going to be extremely engaging,” [Instagram CEO Kevin] Systrom said. “It’s much harder with text,” but Instagram offers photos, and brand names such as Audi, Kate Spade, and Burberry have joined Instagram.

“They’re sharing pictures of products and the message of their brands. That shows we’re at the beginning of what will come with brands,” he said.

In part to make Instagram more compelling for advertisers, the company is concentrating on getting more users. “We’re only at the tip of where we want to be,” in terms of users and activity, he said.

“Obviously, we didn’t start a business to not make money,” he said. “Our focus now is on growing the network. You really need to build up the network, or no advertisers care.”

When app-based startups have the goal of “get as many free users as possible”, they need to port their app to every major platform.

For most VC-backed consumer web startups, the goal is to get as many users as possible by making everything free, spreading everywhere, and figuring out how to make money later, which usually relies on selling your userbase’s attention or privacy to corporate customers.

I’d guess that Instagram could have charged a few bucks for their app from the start, made us their customers, budgeted carefully, and avoided VC funding and advertising. But they chose the free-now-ads-later model, and it appears to be working very well.

Thanks to HelpSpot for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:

At HelpSpot, we’re big supporters of open source software and simply couldn’t run our business without it. So, 6 years ago we created Open Source Help Desk List to assist companies looking for an open source help desk software solution. Its success has been beyond our wildest expectations, serving as an invaluable tool for thousands of companies to find the solution they need. We hope it can help you as well.

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Thanks!

Ian Landsman
Founder, UserScape

P.S. Check out the newest project we’re working on, the PHP framework Laravel.

On this episode, we had four big discussions that I’m proud of:

• Why new generations of consumer electronics catch on (or don’t).
• Code shouldn’t need a lot of comments.
• Why I don’t discount the Instapaper app’s price, and the premium-app role I hope Instapaper can retain if its ever-increasing competition ever dominates it in iOS paid-app sales volume.
• Blog comments are a relic of a time when setting up your own blog was harder. Today, there are other solutions to address the problems that comments solve with fewer downsides.

If you only listen to occasional episodes of my podcast, or if you haven’t heard it yet, I highly recommend this one.

(Also, where’d this awesome timeline wiki come from?)

Ben Brooks:

Here’s a thought I had after reading about the discount applied towards Nooks if you buy a subscription to select periodicals: What if instead of buying an e-reader that is book-centric, you get an e-reader that is Instapaper-centric (with the ability to side load eBooks)?

It’s an interesting idea, but it effectively already exists: the $79 Kindle is a pretty good Instapaper device that happens to also be able to read books and old-world periodicals from one of the biggest catalogs in the world.

Shawn Blanc:

Sadly, most of the junk mail I get these days is from companies I already do business with.

Me too. The biggest offenders, by far, are American Express and Verizon (FiOS, not Wireless).

Verizon takes it an infuriating step further. We have a bare-bones FiOS phone line for emergencies, and we’ve given its number to almost nobody. It rings about twice a week, and nearly every time, it’s a Verizon telemarketer trying to upsell us. (Pick up, 5 seconds of autodialer silence, “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Verizon…”) And we pay extra every month to have this number unlisted.

I’m just about ready to cancel the line and just hope we never need it, or keep its only phone unplugged, simply because Verizon so relentlessly telemarkets us despite my demands each time to stop.

In a footnote to my Coffee Joulies review, I wrote that it might be interesting to test the Joulies against equal masses of rocks or metal.

Here, Jeff Ammons has done just that.

A lot of people have asked whether I’ve used this filter, by Able Brewing Equipment (formerly Coava), in my AeroPress in place of the usual paper filters.

I have, but I don’t like it. Here’s why:

On my preferred AeroPress grind, nearly as fine as espresso¹, the Disk clogs badly. This results in two problems: more difficult cleanup and increased sediment in the cup from the grounds that pass through.

So the Disk ruins three great things about the AeroPress:

• Ability to use a very fine grind.
• Very fast and easy cleanup.
• Zero sediment.

I also didn’t detect a taste improvement over the paper filters. Maybe you can, in which case, go in peace and love your Disk. But I can’t recommend it.

I don’t agree with a lot of their choices, but good for them for finally defining strong standards.

Now comes the hard part: ensuring that Google’s apps follow the standards often enough, and getting enough support from leading OEMs and third-party developers, that the standards actually become conventions rather than just suggestions.

By some people who reported some things said by some other people familiar with the matter who said:

The tablet will use a quad-core chip, an enhancement that lets users jump more quickly between applications, two of the people said.

I love when mainstream reporters or CPU marketing people try to explain multiprocessing. Or any other CPU advancement, for that matter. Remember when Intel successfully bullshat people into thinking that the Pentium 4’s “NetBurst” microarchitecture made their internet connections faster?

Drew Breunig:

This is the allure of “content”: it allows comforting, structured data which simplifies the complexity of a large business and makes decisions less intimidating. Executives aren’t making qualitative picks regarding art or an artist, they’re merely signing off on whichever “content” produces more valuable metrics.

Khoi Vinh:

For my part, I have no opinion on what their chances are, only to say that the successful design platforms that we’re most familiar with tend to be ‘born that way,’ whether it’s Apple or Adobe or even Windows Phone, which had to essentially reboot the notion of Windows to properly integrate the kind of design culture that Microsoft aspired to.

Great design is usually great from day one.

I’m not sure what Disqus was really trying to say in this giant image. I think they were attempting to defend comments (their business, as an embeddable comment system) in response to the recent anti-comment discussions around these parts.

Their conclusion was that most good comments come from people who don’t give their real name, and I guess the implication is that sites without comments (like mine) that prompt people to respond publicly from their own online identities elsewhere are suffering as a result.

But Disqus gives commenters the choice to post anonymously, under pseudonyms, or using their real names. You can type whatever you want into those boxes. Given that choice, of course most people wouldn’t put their real names in. It’s not worth it. Most people lack the fortitude to attach their real names to debatable public opinions.

All Disqus’ data shows is that most people smart enough to write coherent comments are also smart enough to dodge the risks of attaching their names to them.

To show how anonymity affects comment quality and volume, you need to test the same community both ways: forcing everyone to use real names, and forcing everyone not to.

(Matt Gemmell responds well to Disqus’ post, too.)

This Ars Technica article by Jacqui Cheng is interesting from the pros’ perspective, but the idea that the Mac Pro is being neglected is short-sighted:

The fact that the Mac Pro seems to be on Apple’s back burner is making professional users nervous and forcing them to begin looking at other—non-Mac—hardware solutions to ensure their future employability. …

With the current iteration of the Mac Pro about to turn 18 months old—and even at the time of that update, the previous version was nearly two years old—these users are becoming increasingly jaded about Apple’s commitment to the pro market.

Since the Mac Pro’s introduction in 2006, it has always followed the Xeon CPU roadmap. New Mac Pros are released when Intel releases new Xeon CPUs for them to use. That’s it. I’ve given away my secret on how to very accurately predict when the Mac Pro will be updated (and when it won’t be).

There’s not much about the Mac Pro for Apple to update between Xeon launches. The chipsets (and the ports they support) are also dependent on Intel’s server-class roadmap, so it wouldn’t have been easy, for instance, to have released a Thunderbolt Mac Pro update (with the same CPUs) while waiting for the next Xeon.

Apple can’t switch away from Xeons for the Mac Pro, and Intel hasn’t yet released the dual-socket successor to the current lineup’s CPUs. It was scheduled for release a couple of months ago, but Intel delayed it, and estimates put its release at early March. So — ready for this crazy rumor? — I bet we’ll see new Mac Pros in March, at which point pros can go back to complaining only (and legitimately) about Final Cut Pro X and Apple’s attitude toward the pro software market.

Thanks to Scrivener for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:

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Available for Mac OS X and Windows at Literature and Latte.

This makes a lot of sense, and it’s in line with how Apple has kept around old iPhone models since the third-generation product’s launch.

Cheap 7” Android tablets are now selling in meaningful numbers (mostly the Kindle Fire and Nook Color), but I haven’t seen a single credible review claiming that anyone should buy one over an iPad for any significant reason except their much lower prices.

The Kindle Fire and Nook Color are $199 and the iPad starts at $499. How far down can Apple push the price of the iPad 2’s basic design, maybe with only 8 GB of flash? $199 probably isn’t possible and $399 probably isn’t a significant enough reduction to change anything, but if they can get it down to $299, that would take a lot of wind out of the 7” tablets’ half-assed sails.

John Gruber’s theory is pretty good.

My theories:

1. Screen size is a clear differentiation from the iPhone that stands out in stores, attracts people’s attention when comparison-shopping, and trains reviewers to assume that bigger is better, and Apple has shown no interest in competing by matching the larger sizes.
2. A bigger footprint yields a much larger internal volume, allowing manufacturers to get around Android’s historically poor battery life by just adding much bigger batteries.
3. Some of the increased internal volume can be eschewed to achieve an overall thinner phone than otherwise possible, especially when the handful of thick components like the camera can be moved to a thick lump on one end that reviewers will ignore when discussing the phone’s thinness.

Seth Godin:

It’s painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

Kelly Clay paraphrasing an anonymous Google engineer:

While he says there is no direct pressure to conform to “crazy hours,” he hints at the reason he lives a Google-centric life: His pay is directly related to the amount of time he spends with Google. For those who can’t keep up with the demand, they simply have no choice but to leave, as previous (and notably older) Google employees have done when they must make the choice between raising a family or getting a raise. (I personally know at least one former Seattle-area Googler who quit under similar circumstances after being forced to either choose seeing his newborn less, or receive a demotion if he didn’t travel more.)

This workaholism culture has infected much of the tech industry, especially startups. It’s sad that it has even hit Google to at least some degree.

Even before my wife was pregnant, I never let a job prevent me from having a healthy relationship and home life. You just need to stand up for yourself: if you need to work long hours constantly (not just in occasional “crunch times”) to remain competitive and reasonably paid, your employer has serious cultural problems that will probably never be fixed.

There are plenty of employers out there who respect their employees enough to permit them to have a work-life balance.

Squashed:

This metaphor only makes sense if we assume that pies behave in ways that pies doesn’t actually behave. The argument only makes sense if we pretend the economy behaves in similarly imaginary ways.

Watts Martin:

There are a lot of stories out there which are genuine examples of terrible government overreach and/or the evils of the current copyright system. Megaupload’s story is not one of them.

Megaupload is actually a great anti-SOPA argument: it’s an example showing that we already have the means to fight online piracy without SOPA. Maybe we can’t fight it as quickly, cheaply, and effectively as SOPA would, but our current procedures also have very few negative side effects and much less potential for abuse.

“Someone else can take it from here.”

Rocky Agrawal on Google’s sometimes misleading stats that make Google+ sound more widely adopted than it might really be:

Google is by no means alone in how it plays with numbers. This deception happens nearly every day and is especially rampant in Silicon Valley where new business models are created and standard metrics aren’t always available. It also reflects the optimistic nature of the Valley. We want to see exponential growth. We see hockey sticks everywhere. Even worse, these statistics get thrown around in the echo chamber and presented as fact. And as they get reblogged and retweeted, they lose the disclaimers that made them technically true in the first place.

The number of accounts created on a free web service is almost meaningless. Not only are some customers worth much more than others to a service, but a nontrivial portion of accounts on any free service often don’t correspond to actual humans using the service. Even if you somehow block all automated spam, spam-like human activity like bulk affiliate marketing will still distort the numbers. And a lot of accounts are duplicates created in error when people forgot about their original accounts or confused the registration form for the login form. Should all of these count?

When multiple services are bundled into one login, like Google’s, a very large portion of the bigger service’s userbase (e.g. Gmail) might not even realize that they have an “account” on the smaller one (in this case, Google+). Should they count?

Even for the real people who intentionally register to use the service, as this article points out, most abandon their accounts shortly after registering. I created an account to try Google+ and effectively abandoned it after a few minutes. I don’t consider myself a Google+ user. Should I count?

I prefer to gauge a social network’s success on more subjective factors: How many people do I know who use it? How much do I feel like I’m missing by not using it?

Thanks to MindNode for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:

MindNode is an elegant, easy-to-use mind mapping tool for Mac and iOS. Whether you’re brainstorming for your next project, organizing your life, or planning your vacation, MindNode lets you collect, structure, and expand your ideas. And thanks to built-in Dropbox and WiFi sharing, even your biggest ideas can go anywhere your iPhone does.

MindNode is easy mind mapping for your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Try out Mindnode Pro and MindNode touch today!

My biggest complaint with the Kindle Touch so far has been that it’s frustratingly slow.

Great news: this new software update makes it much faster. Page-turns are now as fast as the Kindle 4 and Nook Simple Touch. Navigation and menus have improved to be about the same speed as the Nook’s, and in the ballpark of the Kindle 4’s (but a bit slower).

It’s still not perfect: I still dislike the unintuitive touch interface, proneness to accidental actions and backwards page-turns, and lack of physical page-turn buttons. But this update makes the formerly frustrating Kindle Touch into a decent product.

Boris at The Next Web:

It seems to me that Siri is slowly entering this area of ‘nice to show but not actually useful’. I know a quite few people with an iPhone 4S and I asked around a bit and they all almost regretfully acknowledge that they, in fact, don’t really use it anymore, once you get beyond the newness of it all.

Siri has two big problems:

1. Managing people’s expectations: It’s quite good at the commands and tasks it was optimized for, but it can never understand what you mean as well as a human could.

2. Reliability: Siri’s service reliability seems to be getting worse over time — not misinterpreting what was said, but responding with an error indicating that the service can’t handle commands right now. Anecdotally, I’ve had about a 50% failure rate recently.

   After a few failures when trying to use a feature, a lot of people will get permanently discouraged and just stop using it. Reliability is a very serious problem for Siri that I hope is getting the attention it deserves within Apple.

But I still use Siri. My wife still uses Siri. Last night at dinner, my friend used Siri. I don’t think Boris and his friends are a representative sample.

James B. Stewart at the New York Times:

So with all the focus on tax rates, I sat down with my 2010 returns, calculator in hand. I’m still reeling from the results.

I paid 24 percent of my adjusted gross income in federal taxes and 37 percent in combined federal, state and local income taxes.

I just did the same calculation on my 2010 returns. While they’re not quite as high as Stewart’s, my numbers really make me wish for Romney’s tax rate.

Equally rankling to many is New York City’s unincorporated business tax, which is “charged to every individual or unincorporated entity carrying on a trade, business or profession — in whole or part — in New York City,” according to the New York City Department of Finance. “I despise it,” Mr. Willens said. (As head of his own firm, Robert Willens L.L.C. in New York City, he pays the tax.) “You’ve already paid federal, state and local income tax on the same income. It’s double taxation. It’s odious. I hate it. The self-employed are supposed to be the backbone of the economy. They’re treated very harshly. I guess there’s no organized lobby for the self-employed.”

This is one of the (many) reasons I live just above New York City, not in it. New York State already imposes a large tax burden, but New York City makes it much worse.

New York City’s additional taxes effectively tell self-employed people to live somewhere else.

The L.A. Times reports:

Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues.

This just reeks of greedy desperation to attempt to boost DVD sales. Unfortunately for Warner Brothers, it won’t work.

If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime. If I can’t add it to Netflix, I’ll just forget about it and probably never see it.

Maybe the studios’ problem isn’t that people can rent movies. Maybe there are just fewer people motivated to buy and keep their own copies of the studios’ decreasingly interesting movies on plastic discs of hostility.

Read Matt Drance’s post on this, too.

Ben Brooks:

I can tell you from first hand experience that the reading experience is very different on each of the different mediums and that’s why the distinction matters to me. I don’t care which version you bought because it changes what you read, but I do care because it may not be the same as the book I read (sometimes in the minor content differences, but always in experience and layout).

I disagree. Many people romanticize the experience of reading a printed book, but I just don’t get it.

When I start reading, the form of the book quickly disappears. Just as I don’t notice the individual letters in each word, I stop noticing the layout, the font, the paper, the binding, and every other physical artifact because I’m focused on the writing.

The same effect hides most flaws in e-ink readers, as I noted in my Kindle 4 review:

Honestly, once I got into what I was reading, I forgot about the cheap, crappy page-turn buttons and the tacky ads on the sleep screen. Even the distorted unblinked text isn’t very noticeable when you’re engrossed in a book.

Whether I’ve bought a book made of dead trees or encrypted bits doesn’t really matter, and I don’t think my experience suffers when I choose the bits.

Since I don’t think the distinction matters, I rarely need to say “I bought the Steve Jobs book in iBooks,” or “I bought the Steve Jobs book on my Kindle.”

I just say, “I bought the Steve Jobs book.”

Michael Wolfe:

Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach.

Amazing.

Thanks to Kooaba Déjà Vu for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week:

Déjà Vu is your visual memory. Use the app by taking pictures of things you would like to remember. For example, products you see in a magazine, recipes you read in a cooking book, wine labels in a restaurant, Newspaper article, DVDs, CDs or event flyers. Each picture is a visual memo. A regular camera app doesn’t distinguish those photos of stuff from “regular“ photos. Déjà Vu helps people organize and structure their visual memos in an easy and effective way. It does this by a tailored interface for tagging and categorization and integration of image recognition technology.

Features:

• Quick shot camera (allows faster picture taking)
• Image recognition integrated
• Syncs with cloud account
• Easy search (find your visual memos by keywords and tags)
• Map location (locate your visual memos on a map)
• Available on iPhone and Web

Free for up to 30 visual memos/month. Learn more at Kooaba.

It was an honor to be interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s Planet Money.

The New York Times reports on Newer Technology’s Power2U outlet with built-in USB ports for charging USB-powered things.

It’s an interesting idea that I’ve been following for a while. But even though I’m renovating my home office right now, I need to buy new outlets for it next week, and I’m a huge geek, I’m still not buying these.

• They’re about $26 each, which is about 5 times as much as a decent standard outlet. And the Amazon user reviews are pretty bad, citing what sounds like a lot of quality issues with the USB ports.
• Outlets are semi-permanent household fixtures, yet these are made with today’s quickly-changing technology in mind. They would replace 50-year-old outlets in my house. How useful will a pair of USB charging ports be in even 10 years? Will they even charge next month’s iPad?
• These require a non-standard faceplate. If I ever crack or accidentally paint the plate and want to replace it, I presumably need to buy a whole new outlet to get another one. With a standard outlet, I can probably go to any hardware store for the next hundred years and buy a new plate for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

There are some alternatives that avoid some of these downsides. But even if I could get a perfectly executed USB-outlet combo, I don’t think it would solve a problem that I really have.

The biggest problem is most outlets’ location: it’s not very convenient to plug a USB device into an outlet that’s near the floor. Many USB cables, including Apple’s, are barely long enough to reach an outlet from a desk. This would make a lot more sense for outlets at desk or countertop height.

But I’m also just not very bothered by USB power bricks by themselves. You still need to keep the USB cables around, after all, so these USB outlets are only saving you from dealing with half of each device’s charger. How many USB-charging bricks are you really likely to be saved from over the lifetime of these outlets before you get devices that can’t be properly charged by them?

If these still make sense to you, by all means, go for it. But I just don’t see the appeal in practice.

J. R. Daniel Kirk:

However, coffee bean weight is determined, to no little extent, by the water naturally present in the bean. When you roast a coffee bean, one effect of the roasting process is that the bean dries out.

The longer you roast the bean, the drier–and therefore lighter!–the bean becomes. …

So here’s the question: should we, in fact, measure coffee by volume rather than weight in order to produce more consistent coffee? Or, alternatively, should we vary the weight of coffee such that fewer grams are in play for darker roasts and more for lighter roasts?

Great question.

Water doesn’t account for much of an unroasted bean’s mass. According to strangers on the internet:

Water accounts for between 8 to 14 percent of the weight of unroasted coffee. … The total loss weight loss for an average roast is approximately 16 percent.

I like to use about 12g of beans in my AeroPress. That would be about 14g of unroasted beans, and honestly, I don’t think I would notice the difference between 12g and 14g most of the time. And that’s the weight difference for the entire roasting process.

But the difference between light and dark roasts is very small relative to the entire roasting process. Most good roasts are likely to fall in the narrow band between 430–460°F.

All of the water, being heated far past its boiling point into steam, probably escapes long before the lightest usable roasting temperature is reached, leaving no meaningful water-weight difference between light and dark roasts.

But let’s assume that there’s a tiny difference. For a 12g serving, a 1% weight difference is about 1 coffee bean. Your kitchen scale probably isn’t precise enough to notice.

So there might be a water-weight difference between lighter and darker roasts, but it’s probably too small to matter when you brew.