These are awesome.

Beautiful.

—William Gibson

BGR.com headline: Motorola explains why it made the Moto 360 so sexy
The Moto 360 is a sharp looking hardware/software combination, but I can’t get past the fact the display is not actually a circle. No, you see that sliver of black at the bottom of the display? Yeah, that’s where the display ends:

Tell me this: How does a company release a product, where the whole premise is the fact that it’s display is a circle but not actually make the display a complete circle?
That sliver of non-screen is an eyesore, like Christian Bale’s eye wart. Oh, you didn’t know about his eye wart? Now you’ll never not see it.

Everyday Football Fouls

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?