007 - Bits of Online Ephemera

Gabe, Potatowire, and Erik talk about Coffee DRM, Breathalizers, Python, Ruby, Pythonista, Editorial, thumb typing, iOS and Android app cultures, styluses, and spider bites.

Truth in Advertising

• Fussy coffee. Exemplar
• The move from crack to fine coffee roasting
• The inevitable slide towards coffee mediocrity
  • Tonx
  • Blue Bottle
  • K-cups
• Coffee with DRM
• HP Ink coffee synergy
• Did someone ask for an avenging angel to be added to Boards of Directors?
• Board of Average People

Drunk Modes

• Temper tantrums overhead
• Shell inception
• sudo
• Dagerous commands
• Gmail Goggles
• Breathalyzers
• Legally drunk
• PSA (with bonus callback)
• Hazel needs a drunk mode

Python Guy

• College nicknames
• Pythonista
• Reasons to use Python
  • Good science support
  • Whitespace matters
  • AppleScript is a dumb language
• Node.js and learning through problem solving
• Ruby
  • _why or why the lucky stiff (not unknown anymore)
  • Nothing really disappears from the internet
  • why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby
  • “Some jerk researched him”; Lots more
  • Sad hipster
  • Related, anonymous people on the internet are weird

Seriously, Back to Python

• Resizing and cropping images for fun and profit
• Macdrifter Editorial workflow for images
• Workflow distorts images
• The fiddler
• Breaking iOS within the Rules
• Ruin your life with Pythonista
• Doxing oneself
• Peak scripting
• “Exhaustive” app research instead of scripting
• Kids ruin Daddy’s concentration
• Actually creating script on iOS
• “It’s all Ole”, i.e. genius
• Tasker as Android’s uglier utilty tool
• Scripting: The Nerd’s Song
• Inability to read documentation indicates a lack of seriousness
• “Big-boned phone”

Forcing Apple Evolution

• Constraints foster creativity
• Android’s freedom and iOS’s artisanal app market
• CyanogenMod
• Android text editors are nothing special, however, ssh plus Vim is wonderous
• iOS-only as clickbait
• Quitting the internet as clickbait
• The misjudged Federico article
• Peak iPad
• Thumb-typing

Rumors!

• 12” MacBook Air
• We want a small device with a built-in keyboard
• 13” MBPr vs. MBA
• Airline seats are getting smaller](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-narrower-airline-seats-20150206-story.html)
• “And Leon is getting larger”
• iPad apps that should be on OS X
  • Editorial
  • Pinswift
  • Mr. Reader
  • Drafts
• Rosetta
• Android apps on Chrome OS
  • Some officially
  • The rest unofficially
• Webapps are fine (or awesome)
  • Fastmail
  • Feedbin
  • Trello
  • Slack
  • Pocket Casts

Styluses…Stylii?…Digital-Marker-thingies

• FiftyThree
• Wacom
• Bob’s Surface Pro 3 replacement
• Finger-painting
• The software is better even if the hardware isn’t

Spider bites and Farewells

• Blizzards in Boston
• Tauntaun survival
• Trains in the snow
• One-handed keyboards

Gabe and Potatowire brave the Storm of the Century to talk storms, taxes, Amazon Prime, movies, and Lego.

The Taxman Cometh

• Accountants
• Scary Letters
• Leaving money on the table
• The Man
• 1040EZs
• TurboTax
• Flat Tax

Navel gazing

• Asynchronous podcasting
• Recording under a bowling alley
• Sound booths and moving blanket igloos
• Podcast business models

Amazon Prime

• Delivering to USPS Shipping deals
• Uber for packages
• Add-on items
• Sharpies and beer
• Digital services
• Netflix

Movies and Kids Shows

• Thee-act structure
• Personal time management
• Other rental options
• Lucy
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Wrong opinions
• Avatar
• Tumble Leaf
• Wolf Children

Lego

• Legoing above one’s age
  • Step one
  • Step two
  • Step three
• LEGOLAND Discovery Center
• Lego Friends
• What if your daughter likes pink, purple, fairies, and princesses?
• “Expectations” on Invisibilia
• Turns out

Gabe, Erik, and Potatowire discuss file storage and time travel literature. Along the way, they touch on Erik's broken DAS, Crashplan restore speeds, Gabe's new Synology, WD Blacks vs. Reds, SMART Failures, two-factor authentication, building your own NAS from first principles, thumb drives, digital hoarding, bullet-time, hyperlapse, and the utopian optimism of Paul Verhoven's RoboCop.

Gabe, Erik, and Potatowire talk about bringing their mobile email workflow into the 21st century. Along the way, they discuss circumventing ancient work browsers with portable Firefox and Chrome, collaborative TaskPaper workflows, Erik's Sunrise, Evernote, Todoist, and CloudMagic combination, using enterprise Exchange servers with your iPhone, mobile email search, sorting email vs searching through the big bucket, FastMail on Mail.app, filtering email notifications, and how old everyone is now.

Gabe and Potatowire talk about home and personal improvement projects. Along the way, they touch on their basement offices, the dangers of electricity, plumbing, working with contractors, virtual assistants, outsourcing your life, oversubscribing to learning sites, and deciding to do something yourself.

Bob, Erik, and Potatowire are joined by special guest Gabe Weatherhead to talk about Dr. Bunsen's oddments.txt post, the stress of the holiday season, vacation projects, Bob's purchases, sales, and returns of the week, Authy, USPS deliveries, Uber Trains, and other compelling topics.

Bob, Erik, and Potatowire talk about their compulsive buying and collecting habits. What causes those collecting tendencies, how do they deal with it, and what makes the difference between what they keep and what goes?

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and Bob, Potatowire and Erik get together to chat about some of their newest devices. Erik laments that his WeMo stack is stuck at Bob's house, Potatowire ponders building a fleet of solar-powered Arduino-based WeMo replacements, then Bob explains why he's buying an NVIDIA Shield instead of the Nexus 9, discusses what it's like to use a keyboard and mouse with his 13-inch Wacom Cintiq, and talks about his new Note 4 doesn't disappoint him. Potatowire moves on to explain why he finally ordered a Nexus 6, before the guys discuss the pros and cons of the Toshiba Chromebook 2 vs. the Acer C720, chroagh vs. crouton, i3 vs. other window managers. Finally, Erik talks about trying out Nozbe, Mailbox, Cloud Magic, Acompli, and concurrent inbox management solutions.

Potatowire brings Erik along for a surprisingly coherent analysis of his personal tech setup. They discuss laptops, file servers and mobile devices. Along the way they touch on file syncing services, tech boredom driving purchases, Erik's work toolchain, Creative Cloud, Chromebooks, MailSteward, Linux, Solaris, FreeNAS, FreeBSD, BitTorrent Sync, Raspberry Pi Remote Backup Servers, Nexus 6 vs. Nexus 5 with a broken screen, Alarm Clock Pro, AMOLED vs. LED, unrealistic expectations, and whether you should pay attention to product reviews.

Gabe triumphantly returns to Dawn Patrol as he, Potatowire, Bob, and Erik explore their favorite naming schemes. From there they ponder the viability of the .plumber domain, Bob's late-'70s throwback pop-soul band, getting stuck in traffic at the checkout lane, Bitcoin, an economics discussion that is wrong on so many levels we won't go into it here, all the great shows on Relay FM, idea guys, what people tune in for, Bob coming out of the closet, listening to books, Bob's new mic, Potatowire's Raspberry Pi project, and Potato Sack, the Eventual Potato Syncing System, currently in Potato-beta 5.