Roku's Upcoming Streaming Stick

This is the type of innovation that will lead to a new era of television. While it is unfortunate that this new chapter won't include access to all the content we want on-demand (although great inroads are being made), it will instead be defined by eliminating the hassles between the viewer and the content we already have. I think Roku is on the right track with this device.

Update (2012-01-04): Dan Frommer has a slightly different perspective than my own on this announcement. Frankly, there's nothing within his argument to say that this new Roku "box" won't be a success per se. Rather he presents a healthy, but bridled skepticism about Roku's prospects based on their current performance.

January 02, 2012

Space for Working

There has been a fair amount of ink being spilled over minimalist working environments lately. The idea goes over something like, "use only those tools necessary to accomplish a given task". Any other devices, tools, etc., create distractions and complicate your original task. So, by using only those tools that are necessary

December 31, 2011

New Year's Eve

As I sit at the island of the kitchen inside my spouse's parents' home in Pheonix, AZ, there is celebration in the air. Not the typical cheer I had formerly associated in my younger days, definitely not the "party hard" or "whoo-hoo" type of sentiment. Instead there's multiple quiet, civil, and jovial conversations going on throughout the room. Each discussion is interesting and worthwhile in their own right, yet I am not apart of any of them.

I am the man lingering in the shadows. While others talk and drink and laugh, I sit and write so I might remember how happy I was in the years to come. I hear "how long 'til supper?" somewhere among the background noise and "did you see my new motorcycle?" somewhere else. The only pause between conversations is the high pitched laughs of my friends and family. I can know that this is a night to remember, yet I can only imagine that this will be the least eventful New Year's Eve celebration I've ever been apart of. There will be no drama, no fights, no excessive drunkenness but these are the only memories worth having.

On the television John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever begins to "groove" and some of us attempt to imitate. I give it a try. Immediately I switch to 80's era moonwalking and my ol' standby, the robot. My girlfriend pushes racks of food and snacks into the oven preparing for the feast ahead. More friends and family begin to come out of the woodwork. Arguments ensue about the motorcycle ride they took earlier in the day while the dog begins to beg incessantly.

It's eleven o'clock and no one is wondering how long until the big moment. This might be what, in my childhood, I thought growing up would entail. To be entirely honest, I cannot be sure if this moment qualifies since I still don't know if I'm an adult myself but regardless, I am incredibly happy.

I feel no need to conduct a year in review because this experience sums it all up nicely. I am not sure how I've grown, or where I've succeeded, nor is any of that information necessary. The people I'm with and the experiences we share together are the only measures of success that have ever and will ever matter.

On this night, I might be the most successful man that ever lived.

JekyllMail

I've been trying all sorts of techniques to streamline my writing process and I think this might just be the ticket. All you need is a POP3 capable email account (which should be just about any) and a secret passkey of your choosing.

Seriously cool.

(via @Octopress)

Jekyll-Bootstrap

If you're planning on creating a Jekyll based weblog, then I suggest you start here. I know I will be.

Update (2012-01-05): The site appears to have been deleted. I'll do more investigating, in the mean time you could check out Octopress as a starting framework for Jekyll.

Update (2012-01-05): It's up again.

'10 steps to better blogging'

I love this list. For every single point I read I found myself knodding silently in agreement. I've printed this out and have tacked this to the space next to my monitor.

Stickiness

Shawn Blanc:

I believe it is their simplicity that makes social networks like Twitter and Instagram sticky. If a service is easy to use, people are more likely to use it. The more complex it is, the less likely people are to use it.

I think this idea has a lot of play especially in the early adopter scene. It's a mere fact that "apps" are a dime a dozen, especially in the iOS ecosystem. To justify adding another icon to the home screen and the time taken to understand its function the app must be simple. For any service/app/whatever to gain "stickiness" its utility has to be apparent from the very first use. Whether that utility is realized or not will determine its initial success.

Afterwards, the app's continued success may cease to be wholly about its simplicity and more about the authority of those users it does have and the voice they lend to the application. Intial stickiness and long-term success are slightly different beasts but simplicity contributes to both.

"You Guys Are Millionaires Right?"

"Shifty Jelly" presents are so many interesting facts about the "other side" of software development that a mere consumer rarely intuits on their own.[1] There are so many ideas here that it becomes hard to pick just a single quote, so here's one that I realized myself not that long ago:

As a kid I pirated all my software, because I felt like these were giant, faceless corporations that didn’t need my money, and I had no money to give them anyway. I pirated operating systems, I pirated apps, I pirated games. Then one day I got a job, and learnt just how hard it is to make good software, and a switch went off in my head. Now I pay for every piece of software I have, sometimes I buy apps I don’t even need, just because I appreciate the level of crafts(wo)manship and care that went into them. If it’s too expensive and I can’t afford it, I just don’t use it.

(via Marco Arment)

  1. One may be justified in expanding the model to loosely fit the creation/consumption interaction more broadly; at the very least I have made this connection. ↩︎

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This is the weblog of the strangely disembodied TRST. Here it attempts to write somewhat intelligibly on, well, anything really. Overall, it may be less than enticing.

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