The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office took its time: back in February, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department said it had ample evidence that Justin Bieber egged a neighbor’s house, causing what the department estimated at $20,000 of damage. But it took until now for formal charges to be filed. That is expected to happen on Wednesday at Superior Court in Van Nuys, Calif., where Mr. Bieber is to be charged with a single count of misdemeanor vandalism, The Associated Press reported.
—Alan Kozinn, NYTimes.com
I’m just thinking back to all the vandalism I did from age 15 to age 20 and what the cost of my bill would have looked like if I had been charged.
Justin Bieber is a kid and he’s doing a lot of stupid shit. He’ll grow up eventually.
People act shocked. They shouldn’t.

Foxconn has recently confirmed that it plans to deploy a fleet of robots in some of its factories to work on products for Apple, but the “Foxbots” will not be able to replace its human workforce just yet. Quoting a report from Chinese site UDN, G for Games says that robots will only play a supporting role in building devices such as the iPhone 6, as they won’t be able to perform certain tasks that require more subtle assembly or manufacturing procedures.
—Chris Smith, BGR.com

So the Chinese have a thing for sleeping in IKEA stores.
My question is, why don’t we all?

via The Telegraph

I have waaaay too many saved articles in my Instapaper account.
In the next few weeks I’m going to be cleaning this shit out and posting anything that still rings true to me. This is the great thing about truly great insights and knowledge—it doesn’t have an expiration date.
Here’s a great post by Seth Godin from 2011 I found on tips for making a great Powerpoint presentation:

The typical person speaks 10 or 12 sentences a minute.

The atomic method requires you to create a slide for each sentence. For a five minute talk, that’s 50 slides.

Each slide must have either a single word, a single image or a single idea.
I’ve worked at too many companies and seen too many presentations that try to cram in as much information onto a slide as possible. Don’t do that shit. Instead, provide printed out notes (aka, a “leave-behind”), if you need a more in-depth explanation of what you’re presenting.

I’m digging the work of Someguy, aka Brian Singer.

http://tedmccagg.typepad.com/drawings/2014/07/a-better-security-question.html
via thisisnthappiness

Buzzfeed Food published an article asking, “Have you heard about the new kind of pie that’s all the rage lately?” It’s a hand pie, a little foldover pie that you can fit in your hand. They have flaky crusts and can be sweet or savory. You know, exactly like an empanada, a Latin American culinary staple.

On face value, it seems stupid to get worked up over an empanada. I mean, it’s just a pastry, right? But “discovering” empanadas on Pinterest and calling them “hand pies” strips empanadas of their cultural context. To all the people who grew up eating empanadas, it can feel like theft.
—Brenda Salinas, ‘Columbusing’: The Art Of Discovering Something That Is Not New
Columbusing reminds me of one of my favorite psychological terms, ‘cryptoamnesia’:
Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.
Human brains are crazy.

To me, the Fire Phone reeks of experiment. I think Amazon’s testing something, and the experiment is important enough to spend a ton of money and create a lot of competitive hostility. After thinking about it a lot and trying to look at the world through Amazon’s eyes, I think I can guess why the Fire Phone would be strategically important to Amazon. I believe it’s not about the phone market; it’s about the evolution of mobile commerce and the future of Amazon itself.
—Michael Mace, The Real Meaning of the Fire Phone

How are apps made? Painfully with deliberation or effortlessly without thought. Blind inspiration. Eight hours over a lazy weekend. Fifty grand a day. A million dollars a syllable. Do not look for the sense in it.

Apps mirror life in their unfairness. Time spent making an app in no way guarantees successes, financial or spiritual. Grizzled developers toil for years and ‘lose’ to the ‘chain-smoking geek’ in Vietnam with the twitchy bird. Guy doesn’t even want the money.
—Craig Mod, How are apps made?

Russell Ivanovic dispells the myth of Android screen fragmentation:

Seems like a lot of variation, right? The part that might confuse most non-developers, is we lay everything out at ‘1x’ or ‘1dp’. So on the iPhone you can have a 320×480 pixel iPhone 3G, and a 640×960 iPhone 4, but the interface itself doesn’t change, it’s still 320×480. You don’t have to re-lay out any buttons or do a custom interface for it. All you do is provide higher resolution assets to make things look crisper. The same is true on Android.
Android has come a long way.
If they ever decide to get rid of that awful Helvetica/Arial-mutant-lovechild Roboto, I might actually switch off iOS.
Ha. Who am I kidding, no I won’t.

In the morning, we wake up, get ready, have breakfast, and we’re out the door. That’s our morning routine. When we do this, our bodies are performing duties it knows to do. We don’t necessarily think about each step, it just happens. While our bodies are performing these routines, our minds are working on situations, problems, and ideas. This is good, we need more of this throughout our day. The more structure we make for ourselves, the more we allow our minds to roam freely.
—Mister Perez, Create Daily, Publish Weekly

taken from the Washington Post

This rush to use the phone as a camera has meant that phone makers are keen to improve their product (so as to compete effectively with it against each other) and as a consequence they overtake the incumbent camera makers in quality as well as quantity.

The same phenomenon was experienced by fixed component “Hi-Fi” audio products. The quality of mobile music was poor but it was convenient and convenience translated into consumption and consumption translated into quality improvement and eventually the evaporation of usage of the traditional category.
—Horace Dediu, Competing effectively against your most potent competitor

Sanderson thinks it’s more a case of evolving than dying. Talking to theObserver last week, he suggested there are now two types of hipster: “Contemporary hipsters – the ones with the beards we love to hate – and proto-hipsters, the real deal.” And herein lies the confusion.

“Historically, proto-hipsters have been connoisseurs – people who deviate from the norm. Like hippies. Over the years, though, they inspired a new generation of young urban types who turned the notion of a hipster into a grossly commercial parody. These new hipsters want to appear a certain way, to be seen to be doing certain things, but without doing the research. So they appropriated the lifestyle and mindset of a proto-hipster.”
—Morwenna Ferrier, The end of the hipster: how flat caps and beards stopped being so cool
I still think the term ‘hipster’ is silly because it doesn’t mean anything.
Let me rephrase that: hipster means so many things to so many people it has lost it’s meaning. Depending on who I’m hanging out, they’ll point out different types of people they think are hipsters. Based on anecdotal evidence, I can only conclude hipsters are non-conservative people, who might or might not dress in a quirky fashion. They also might or might not have beards and might or might not have dark-rimmed glasses. And suspenders.
Whenever someone says they’ve spotted some hipsters, there’s always a strong whiff of cynicism that comes with it and too much cynicism is not healthy.