Nokia’s new tablet:

Apple’s iPad Mini 3:

No better way to validate your competitor than by copying them.
[Nokia image taken from The Verge, iPad image taken from Apple.com]

Hat tip to my brother for introducing me to smoking hot and sultry Lion Babe:

I have a problem with links. I collect too many of them and don’t post them. Think of the Hoarders TV show, but instead of a house full of shit, I have a folder full of links. So here comes a purge. Some of the things that have caught my eye over the past several months:

“Valley Uprising is the much-anticipated documentary from Sender Films about the epic history of climbing in Yosemite National Park and the counterculture roots of outdoor sports.”

Coastermatic — “Your instagrams in stone, coasters.” Christmas gift ideas. People always need coasters.

Sound City Project — “By using a combination of a panoramic view with high quality 3D sound recorded using a custom “soundhead” prototype, you can select places on a map and give yourself a better idea of what it’s like to actually be there.” If you’re the type of person who likes ambient sound while they work, this site is great. A tumblr about beautiful maps

Neil Gaiman (YouTube): You Learn By Finishing Things Michael Mark Cohen

Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We’ve All Been Waiting For — I am a white, middle class male professor at a big, public university, and every year I get up in front of a hundred and fifty to two hundred undergraduates in a class on the history of race in America and I ask them to shout white racial slurs at me. The results are usually disappointing.

On Mindfulness and Quality — “Think of a tool you’re fond of. What is it that brings about the feelings of endearment? Does it perform a function exceptionally well? Does the quality of the build make the task more enjoyable? Does it feel solid?”

Jason Fried at Basecamp explains how, when designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup.

Aeon: We prize originality, yet humans are natural-born copycats and only good imitators survive. Is it time to celebrate the rip-off? They’re being provocative and snarky by using the term ‘rip-off’. Not new news. Everything is a remix, remember?

Jason Santa Maria: Correspondence with an Ex-Designer — “This month I want to share a letter I received from ex-designer, now sheep farmer, Ruth, in reply to my post from a few months back where I wondered what comes next after being a designer. Ruth kindly shared where her life led, and what the other side might look like. I was moved by what she wrote, not only because of her direct experience, but just to hear that I wasn’t alone with my own fears about exhuastion and nourishment.”

“Huds and Guis was created to form a collection of the most beautiful and innovative examples of HUD (Heads-Up Display) and GUI (Graphical User Interface) design.”

Ben Thompson: How Apple Creates Leverage, and the Future of Apple Pay — “This reading of Apple’s partnership abilities, though, mistakenly rests on the assumption that business deals grow out of personal affinity. The truth is that while personal likability may help on the margins, the controlling force in Apple’s negotiations is cold hard business logic. Thus, in order to understand why Apple has been so successful in previous partnerships – and, looking forward, to better estimate the chances of Apple Pay becoming widespread – it is essential to understand how the company acquires and uses leverage.”

Dustin Curtis thinks Amazon is an echo chamber — “They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product.”

Portishead’s “Dummy” at 20. Sheesh. I’m old, but what a great fucking album. Techcrunch is launching a new show called

“Built In Brooklyn” all about startups from that borough.

A calculator that shows you how long it will take you to save one million dollars. (via Lifehacker)

An awesome, letterpressed, linear calendar I bought by The Made Shop (I might steal the format for my own calendar)

“a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents” — The world’s first homepage. (via BGR)

via Aeon
h/t chasing Tremendous

This week Michael and Bryan discuss Formula One corners & turns, Michael begins to talk about Interstellar (but holds off until Bryan sees it this week), being happy Matthew Mcconaughey’s sh!tty rom-com days are over, Bryan returning to a fulltime job, the irrelevancy of the 40-hour work week, then they dive into political talk which they probably won’t do again. Skype static is brought to you by The King of New York. The episode opens with the exhaust from a 1970 Pontiac GTO.
Weekly Exhaust Episode 21

via Quora

Ellsworth Kelly, still painting at 91 years old:

So great.
The above image was taken from a piece on some prominent people over 80 that are still going going strong.

There’s a great article on the origins of book chapters by Nicholas Dames at The New Yorker:

Novels have always been good at absorbing and recycling, taking plots and devices from other genres and finding new uses for them. With the chapter, novelists began, in the eighteenth century, to naturalize an informational technology from antiquity by giving it a new cultural role. What the chapter did for the novel was to aerate it: by encouraging us to pause, stop, and put the book down–a chapter before bed, say–the chapter-break helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life. The chapter openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses–for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion. Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” insisted that “chapters relieve the mind,” encouraging our immersion by letting us know that we will soon be allowed to exit and return to other tasks or demands. Coming and going–an attention paid out rhythmically–would become part of how novelists imagined their books would be read.
The formatting within the medium is the message?

Verge headline:
Video: Crazy man runs from the cops using the same techniques that work in Grand Theft Auto
Yep, I’ve used those techniques in GTA, but they only work in GTA.

via Designer News

It seems Amazon wants to blanket the world in cheap Kindles, not great Kindles. Not surprising.
Marco Arment on the Kindle Voyage:

And this crisp, new, high-resolution screen is still displaying justified text with very few, mostly bad font choices. Some of these choices, like the default PMN Caecilia font, made sense on the old, low-resolution Kindle screens but need to be reconsidered for this decade. Some of them, like forced justification and forced publisher font overrides, have always been bad ideas.

But Amazon doesn’t care. Nothing about the Voyage’s software feels modern, or even maintained. It feels like it has a staff of one person who’s only allowed to work on it for a few weeks each year.
If you’re making devices to read books on and you don’t give a shit about typography and readability, then what do you care about?
It’s like a car maker not caring that their tires are lopsided and their seats have no cushions.
Oh, and Bryan is still waiting for page scrolling on the Kindle app for iOS.

CNN commentators using Microsoft @surface tablets as an iPad stand: