blog

On the false dichotomy between content creating and consuming devices

I recently came across one of my favorite books from the last century: "Fire in the Valley," a tome about the history of personal computing. In the book, there are chapters that go back to the Altair, a machine which was heralded as democratizing computing even though it was ... (more)

(1 day ago)

Online leverage: on Groupon's early success

Back in the 90s, I was a huge fan of Mercata (during its fleeting existence), the predecessor to all of today's group buying sites. And it doesn't take long these days in any conversation about the consumer internet for Groupon to come up, at which point anyone who has ... (more)

(4 days ago)

Blowing trust means no $300 stock price for AAPL

This iPhone antenna thing is insane, both because of how much airtime it has gotten (this is my last iPhone/Apple post for a long while) and because of how ridiculously careless Apple has been about wasting all of the accumulated trust it has collected with its customers over the years. ... (more)

(6 days ago)

projects

Makerbot

I'm trying to do my part for Skynet by bringing into existence a 3D printer that can print itself. If this works, it will be the ultimate bridge between bits and atoms.

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Pycon keynote

After nearly a decade of benefiting from the work of the Python community, I had a chance to give back by doing a keynote at Pycon this year. Primarily focused at small software startups thinking about how to hire, who does what, and the age-old business/engineering divide.

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Arduino smarts

Arduino is a very easy to program microcontroller board that allows you to add smarts to just about any object out there. In this case, the boys & I made a "light leash" for a tincan robot that would cause it to follow the beam of a flashlight.

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Tabblo

My last startup started life as a personal project. A longtime fan of digital photography who had gotten really really tired of the tired "contact sheet + detail view" way of looking at photos online, I set out to build a better way to bring photos and text together online. Tabblo the site (and business) grew out of that itch.

(link)