- Tiny cheap computers (Raspberry Pi), 3d printing (MakerBot), practically free sensors & low power connectivity (Fitbit) are an amazing marriage that will create a future I can’t predict (but it’s happening now). The Raspberry Pi is about the size of Altoids tin, how small can this go? What other applications can a connected, low powered sensor drive? I think the key to this future is thinking about what we can (or should) do with all this power. No one wants SkyNet, but I think there are other more pleasant possible outcomes.

- Peter Thiel has a depressing outlook on the United States, but in some ways, it’s hard not to agree with him. I guess I should move to China if I want happy times?

- John Biehler reminded me that hobbies can lead to interesting new things to work on. Everything I’ve been successful in life doing has started off as a hobby.

- Most product people wrestle not having enough capacity to do all the things they want to do. Capacity to build still outweighs deciding what to build.

- Canadians are awesome.

- Creating a social/mobile/local marketplace is super difficult, but if you nail it, you can own it. The trick is identifying the market and starting VERY specifically (a neighborhood or a demographic in a city). Some examples include Zaarly & Lyft.

- There are lots of hosting companies that offer hosting for free for a limited amount of time. Img.ur used 3 providers before moving into AWS. Bootstrapping means a level of frugality that might be tough for people who are accustomed to having the “best” or “easiest”

- Having a team of crack networkers working together and understanding each other’s agenda’s is a great way to divide and conquer (even if we were the “Grumpy Old Men” of the Internet).

- Brisket at Stubb’s is really, really good.

I took roughly ~15,000 steps or put another way, walked about 7 miles a day, including two travel days, which reduce the averages a bit. While there are lots of ways to get around without walking (cabs, petticabs, HootSuite buses), walking is usually your fastest way to get short distances. ProTip: always bring 2 pairs of shoes.

A little less measurable was the undesired side effect of talking loudly at parties as my voice is still a little scratchy. RAWR.

The blog looked the same for a really long time, so even going with the theme you see today, Twenty Twelve, (aka default) it feels fresh to me. I’ve made a deal with myself that I won’t poke around in the CSS or change the theme (ok, I set Helvetica as the default font) until I’ve posted at least 10 more posts. Maybe its fresh, new, uninspiring look will inspire me to spend a little more time blogging.

Buster Benson

Karen Cheng

Adam Philipp

Joel Grus

Gregory Heller

House of Cards

See all my photos from Ignite Seattle 12 on Flickr

Jacob Applebaum

Todd Bishop

Roberto Hoyos

Roy Leban

Lisa Bronwyn

Jenny Lam

More in my Ignite Seattle photostream on Flickr

Ignite’s Seattle 2.0 Award

Mark Selander

Matthew Inman – “The Oatmeal“

Andy Sack

Matt Harding – “Where the Hell is Matt?”

Speaker Wrangling

Beth Goza’s Boots

You can find more in my Flickr stream.

Huge thanks to conference organizers, The Parnassus Group (and my pal, Jason Preston) for putting this fantastic conference together.

Photos from 140tc

Needless to say, I snapped a few pix that I’ve posted below. Naturally, there are more on Flickr.

Biz Stone of Twitter

Tony Robbins

Veronica Belmont

The Iron Sheik

Guy Kawasaki

At the last Ignite event, I took 1600 photos and posted 46 of them (just about 3%). Not all of the unposted photos were duds, but they weren’t as good as the photos that I did post. While I want to thoroughly cover an event, I try to post only the best photos of the night.

Portraits in a Dark Theater

Taking pictures at many events (especially Ignite) are challenging due to unique and difficult lighting situations. Couple that with people who are moving around a lot and talking about something that they are passionate about, capturing a passable photo, let alone a good one can be hard.

I aspire to always 1. make the person look as good as possible and 2. capture the essence of the speaker and their material. Occasionally, I succeed.

Looking over my shoulder

Here’s a quick, three minute video (really a super-fast slideshow) that shows you the photos I posted among all the pictures that I took. Hopefully it conveys the pruning and curating process I go through before I post a photo set.

You can watch the HD version on YouTube and the final photo set from Ignite Seattle 7 is here.

50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Photography Skills
Yet another great collection of web resources from Smashing Magazine.

Canon 7D gatling gun shooting 8 FPS of awesome – Engadget Video
I frequently photograph people in dark settings. In particular at a local geek event with 5 minute talks (Ignite Seattle), I’ve got a short time frame to capture a good image or two. ANY edge will help.

Frankly, the higher usable ISOs will be of more use, but I can’t help but think of how nice that bigger buffer will be.

How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard – Lifehacker
I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. Glad to see it’ll work with Snow Leopard.

Why your Web content will look darker on Snow Leopard – John Nack
Apple’s gamma switch from 1.8 to 2.2 explained.

How to Tweet From Anywhere in Snow Leopard
Handy little overview of creating a “Service” in OS X Snow Leopard that allows you to tweet or create a Facebook post.

Gnomedex 2009 marked my 4th Gnomedex and it seems that they get better every year. Gnomedex has always made me think in ways I hadn’t thought, meet people I had not met and do things I wouldn’t otherwise do. I view going to Gnomedex as a kind of engineered randomness with known constraints.

Gnomedex is also a place for me make new friends and to catch up with friends that I don’t get to see all that often. This year was no different (although I did miss one person in particular). Drop me a line if I haven’t said hi after this year’s Gnomedex.

Words, rather than photos

If you’re looking for a wrap up or summary of Gnomedex 2009 in words, rather than pictures, here are few of best that I’ve read.

• Derek Miller (penmachine) has summaries of both day’s talks
  (Day 1, Day 2)
• Kris Krug wraps his prose in between his photos in his Gnomedex 9 Human Circuitry
• While not strictly about Gnomedex, Betsy Aoki crosses over into my other love, Ignite with her post on “Giving an Ignite Presentation – What I learned at Gnomedex 2009.”

Gnomedex 2009 Pix

Here are my favorite pictures from this year’s Gnomedex (some of which have been posted over on my photoblog).

Frank Eliason – ComcastCares

Betsy Aoki

Printed head from Bre’s Maker Bot 3d printer.

Lee LeFever and Kris Krug

Danielle Sipple (@fiercekitty) and Buzz Bruggeman

Mark Horvath

Amber Case

Beth Goza

Thanks

Big thanks to Chris Pirillo and all the folks that put on Gnomedex every year. Their tireless hard work that makes Gnomedex very special to me every year is very much appreciated.

More photos from my Gnomedex 2009 photoset

The Big Picture

About a year ago, I discovered a wonderful site, The Big Picture, curated by Alan Taylor at Boston.com, the online home of the Boston Globe. If you haven’t been to the site, I apologize for ruining your productivity for the next couple of hours.

The basic idea behind the Big Picture, is that photos that might only be shown in small form on a newspaper cover or Web site, are blown up to about 1000 by 660 pixels. Certainly big enough to see the details, but more importantly, big enough to see what the photographer saw and hopefully, to tell their story.

Photo Blog, but BIG

In my humble way, I’m imitating the Big Picture at least in that I wanted to display my photos in large form. Many pictures I take are dark, as I eschew flash (mainly because I don’t have an external one), but the details are there, provided the image is large. The photos load quickly (thanks, Flickr) and I’ll only be posting a maximum of one a day.

So, with that, I give you, in all it’s pixel wasting glory my new photo blog at photos.stewtopia.com. This week, in honor of Gnomedex, I’ll be posting some big pictures from past events.

Broaden your job hunt

When looking for a job, you don’t want to limit your search to one Web site as employers post different jobs to different sites. Pulling all of these job resources into one feed can be quite handy and a one time effort can make subsequent searches even easier.

Additionally, some sites, like Craigslist, don’t allow boolean operators in search and/or don’t offer other advanced search options. Sites specific to job hunting like Indeed, Simply Hired, and Dice.com do provide better search constraints than Craigslist, but ultimately, visiting all of these sites and keeping where-you-saw-which-listing straight can be difficult and time consuming.

Enter Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a service designed to help normal people build custom RSS feeds that can then be reused in other places. Pipes can help you accomplish this with no programming skill required.

I pull all new job listings for the search terms “product manager” and “program manager” in Seattle into Google Reader for later viewing, as it makes it easier for me to know whether or not I’ve seen a job listing. If you don’t use an RSS reader, you can view feed results directly on the Yahoo! Pipes web site.

I was inspired by Dawn Foster’s Yahoo! Pipes 2 Minute Vanity Feed Demo video which taught me how to build a custom feed to help track news about me and my company. I based my “Find a Job” Pipe on her demo as it was simple to follow and allowed me to “de-duplicate” job postings.

Rolling your own own “Find a Job” feed

Indeed, Craigslist and SimplyHired make RSS feeds available from the searches that you type in. I’m sure there are others, but I found these sites most useful.

• Look for the RSS logo or search the page for the word “RSS.”
• Copy and paste that URL into a text file.
• Go to my pre-made, job-finding Pipe.
• Next, click “clone.”

• Once you clone the pipe, you can then create your own copy.
• Click “Edit Source,” you’ll be presented with a window that looks like this:

Click through for a larger version

• Replace all the URLs in the “Fetch Feed” module with the ones that you copied into your text document then click “Save.”
• Finally, click “Run Pipe.”

You should get something that looks like this.

Thanks

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you found this useful or if there are any changes that you would suggest to make this Pipe or tutorial better.

Hopefully, they’ll arrive before Gnomedex this weekend.

Seattle PI’s Big Blogger, Mónica Guzmán implores us to put down the iPhone

Todd Sawicki talks about the beauty of ballet

Jessica Hagy on Lies to Ignore

Mehal Shah tells us how to Fight Dirty in Scrabble

Scissors beats paper

More pictures after the jump.

Easy Tagging

I started using Lightroom because of the thoughtful, fast workflow it offered. Keywording in Lightroom is both quick and robust and the metadata I added was exported to Flickr as tags (thanks to Jeffrey Friedl’s wonderful Export to Flickr Tool).

Prior to Lightroom, I used iPhoto to organize my photos which has keyword support that was designed for people needing only a handful of keywords (if any).

iPhoto Keywords

I always expected more from iPhoto, but I imagine, for most people, tagging is a secondary feature. ¹

Why Not Just Use Lightroom’s Existing Keyword Method?

Lightroom’s keyword tool is great if you’re just typing in a few new keywords, but if you have many keywords to enter (with Parent categories and synonyms), it gets a little tedious. Lightroom requires you to switch back and forth from the mouse to keyboard a lot, which can really slow you down.

Second, if you already have a keyword data source that is a long list, you can’t just copy and paste that into Lightroom.

Finally, once you import keywords, it’s easier to keyword photos inside Lightroom through auto-completion (if you type them in) or dragging and dropping onto the keyword.

Getting Started: Export Your Keywords

If you’ve already been keywording your photos in Lightroom, you can get an idea of what your existing keyword data looks like by selecting Metadata > Export Keywords… The resulting file is a tab delimited text file that can be viewed in any text editor (TextEdit, TextMate, etc).

The keywords are structured something like this:

[Folder]
	Keyword
		{synonym, synonym, etc}

Creating a Text File to Import

I have a massive amount of keyword data in Lightroom and I’m constantly adding to it. On occasion, I know what keywords I’m going to add before a photo shoot.

Shortly before the last Ignite Seattle event, Brady had posted the schedule on the Ignite site, including speaker names, their Twitter IDs and the topic of their talk. This made for an easy copy and paste into Excel.

After a little data massaging, I saved the file as a .txt file that was tab separated and ready for Lightroom. It looked something like this:

[People]	
	Hillel Cooperman 
		{@hillel}
	Dawn Rutherford
		{dawnoftheread} 
	Shelly Farnham 
		{@ShellyShelly}
	Dominic Muren 
		{@dmuren}
	Jen Zug 
		{@jenzug}
...

Import Your New Keywords

Now, before you start importing keywords into Lightroom, I’d suggest that you first set up a new catalog to see what the results from the import will look like.

If you import a lot of new keywords and they aren’t structured properly, you might muck up your existing Keyword List. While you can “Purge Unused Keywords,” this might remove other keywords that you actually wanted.

Create a new catalog, by selecting File > New Catalog.

Select Metadata > Import Keywords and you are on your way.

Keyword entry

If you do type your keywords, type in the little keyword box, not the big one. If you enter keywords into the big keyword box, they don’t auto-complete whereas they do auto-complete in the little box.

That’s it.

Hopefully, this will help you as much as it has helped me. Having good keywords will help you find and organize your photos much more than without them.

Caveat – Don’t Move/Change Keywords

Sadly, what I really wanted to do was restructure my keywords without breaking my existing keyword set, but this is not possible with the current Import/Export tools. If you want to move a keyword into a category, you must use the Lightroom interface to do so.

For example, if you have a category “People” and a keyword “Randy Stewart” at the top level of your keyword hierarchy, you can’t move “Randy Stewart” under “People” in the text file.

Lightroom stores keywords as explicit paths. For example, you can have both

[People]
	Randy Stewart
Randy Stewart

which I think is a total pain. You can have the same keyword on multiple levels. Some folks think this is a feature, personally, I think that it is a bug.

It would be fantastic to edit this file manually although, I suppose if keywords didn’t work this way, they would have to store keywords in a database rather than a flat file.

Fred Wilson

“what’s the worst kind of failure? one that takes a long time and costs alot of money” (via jtgameover)

“the idea that you cannot build an important tech company outside of Silicon Valley is a crock of shit.” (via Fred Wilson)

Mike Arrington

forget the money, just sell yourself like YouTube did before you ever make any money. Twitter is going to sell for $2 billion to Microsoft or Google by the end of the year, and they’re going to have absolutely no revenue whatsoever.

(via Techflash)

The Crowd at the Naked Truth

Greg Gottesman, VC plays Emcee

There’s a lot more commentary out there (mainly Twitter) and video of the event will be posted on Seattle 2.0 later.

More photos

Little known fact – I was the first to give it a go as a Social Media Club organizer here in Seattle, but life got in the way of me doing it as well as I could. Glad to see so many good folks taking the ball and running with it.

Chris Pirillo

Kevin Urie

Vanessa Fox – "Oh, really, Chris?"

Showing Jeremiah the love

More pictures after the jump

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

The Crowd

Jeff Lawson

David Jennings

Amplitude measures the response

More pictures are in my npost Flickr set.

Another Way

There was another way to create my desired product and that was to have a fully featured desktop app and a fully featured iPhone app and sync your Groups between the two. Syncing, however, is less than ideal.  I have long history of using Desktop and Mobile apps that sync together and generally, syncing was done poorly (data loss or corruption) or at best, slowly.

Enter: Tweetdeck for the iPhone

Tweetdeck for the iPhone and its desktop equivalent have mostly answered my call for the perfect Twitter application.

It doesn’t change that I don’t particularly like Adobe AIR due to its lack of native OS interface conventions, but Tweetdeck answers most of the feature requests that I outlined previously and works well enough. It even includes some of my “nice to haves”

UI Tour

Reading Tweets, both in “All Friends” and “Groups” as well as a view of the most recent update.  Much like Tweetie, you can then dig into your friend’s profiles and recent Tweets by clicking on their avatar.

Groups and Columns

Groups functionality was one of my primary wants in an iPhone app. In many ways, having groups on the go is even more important than at my desktop. Being able to quickly see the folks that matter to you is something that is sorely lacking in Twitter and I look to 3rd parties to make up for this deficiency.

To ease the burden of creating groups in a limited interface, Tweedeck can sync with your desktop client.  Syncing from the Tweetdeck server makes adding Groups from the desktop a snap, although you will have to create an account on Tweetdeck’s Web site.

A few issues

The initial view into Tweetdeck shows us a list of “All Friends” in a slightly shrunken view.  I like this view as it immediately gave me a clue that swiping to the right would give me a different view.

What I don’t like about this view is that like the desktop app, Tweetdeck on the iPhone tells users things that they don’t really need to know about. In this case, the number of API calls are displayed,  which is interesting, but not necessarily that useful. There is any number of better ways to do this (limit API calls to avoid this issue altogether or make limiting API calls a preference).  Ask the average Twitter user (let’s say… @Oprah) what an API call is and I’d bet the best you’d get is a blank stare.

That and a few of the other “extra” buttons (left and right arrows, for example) add to the already busy interface.   The worst thing about this is that otherwise, Tweetdeck is almost as minimal an interface as Twitter can have and retain all the extra functionality that Tweetdeck offers.

Adding Groups

Groups functionality is great to have on the iPhone app, but I had imagined that adding people to groups on the iPhone would be a little tedious. In many ways, Tweetdeck did an admirable job at adding this functionality, but they only pull in your 100 most recently added Friends(I’ve got over 500). Tweetdeck then displays your Friends list alphabetically.

The trouble comes in when you click “load more friends”, Tweetdeck grabs the next 100 people and “fills in the blanks” alphabetically. If I had realized that this is what was happening from the beginning, I’d have clicked “load more friends” 5 times to see the full list, rather than sifting through the list twice to find the folks I wanted to add.

Finally, the app has been a little “crashy,” let’s just say. I’m running the iPhone 3.0 software, so perhaps there is a little blame to spread around.

Tweetdeck for the iPhone – Great 1.0 Product

I’m hesitant to even qualify my opinion of Tweetdeck for the iPhone with a “1.0 product” label, but it’s mostly there.  To some degree, the UI issues that I’ve outlined feel a little niggly given how good this app is otherwise.  Huge thanks to the folks at Tweetdeck for making such a useful, free (for, I suspect, a limted time) application.

You can download the Tweetdeck iPhone app from the iPhone App store and the desktop app for Mac and Windows directly from Tweetdeck.com.

I’ve also posted a Tweetdeck UI gallery on Flickr.

Groups

Ok, here’s my dirty little secret about Twitter, I don’t read everyone that I follow all the time. - gasp -. I know, it’s terrible. But here’s the thing, I like everyone I follow and I do read their Tweets some of the time. I don’t want to unfollow them because they are having a bad week and and I just can’t read their feed. Or they represent a company/product I like, but they are getting a little too chatty.

While I agree with Tweetie developer, Loren Brichter, that groups in Twitter would be best handled on the server side, but until Twitter adds this as a feature, any third party app that I use should have grouping.

So far, no iPhone client software has groups (as far as I know), but even if there were, I’m not sure I would use it. Currently, managing groups in a desktop app is an onerous task. Managing groups on the iPhone would be Herculean.

Desktop App?

I love desktop apps. I’m a Mac user and there are all sorts of common conventions that, if you are a good developer (read: Cocoa), I get to use across all applications. From big things (like Emacs key bindings, preferences in the same place, etc) to little things (pressing the up arrow to go to the beginning of a field), there are lots of little niggly conventions that are embedded in my hands, making me faster and more efficient.

Many Twitter clients are written for Adobe Air (are there other Air apps?) and from a development standpoint, Air is great. You can write an app that can access the web, is cross platform, visually appealing and sits outside the browser (browsers can crash when you have 27 windows open like I frequently do). Additionally, you might be able to add functionality that would be hard to add with just HTML, CSS and Javascript.

What sucks about Air is that you get none of the OS conventions that I mentioned above. This might not be a problem if you are new to computers or not terribly advanced, but for power users, it sucks. I imagine that this is something that Adobe can fix, but I’m not holding my breath. Adobe fell off the OS native app convention bus a long time ago.

Web app with mobile version

Now, you could go off and create a killer desktop app for the Mac, but you’ve got two problems there. First, there are more potential Windows customers, so you’re not addressing the whole potential market and second, you’re not solving my mobile problem.

Like Google Reader replacing NetNewsWire for me, having an app that works on the web (mobile and desktop) keeps my world in sync, without syncing anything. Before Google Reader, I thought that web apps were clunky compared to desktop apps (and most web based RSS readers were clunky compared to NetNewsWire), but using two full fledged computers (my Mac and my iPhone) syncing with the web just wasn’t cutting it.

If the app is web based, has a mobile version and has groups, congratulations, you’ve just solved my biggest problem with keeping up on Twitter. I get many of my desktop “conventions” and everything stays in sync, because it doesn’t need to sync.

Note: I’d probably relent on this point if Nambu and Tweetie Mac clients would have a baby (Tweetbu? Nambie?). I tend to read more Tweets at my desk and write more Tweets on the go.

Multiple accounts

I have a personal and business Twitter account. I conceivably could have more, but managing multiple accounts on the web isn’t fun. I’ve limited myself to two, mainly because I use two browsers and I don’t really want to use more.

In theory, if I were married to a Twitter client, I might be able to do without groups and sign up for yet another Twitter account that I exclusively read from, but like many email clients, app designers would need to account for this by making a primary “response” account to go along with my “read” accounts. But so far, this hasn’t happened

Nice to haves

Beyond that, I’m easy. Obviously, I need to be able to see DMs, @replies and non-”@” mentions of my usernames.

Here is my list of “nice to haves.” Get the above features nailed down before looking at this list.

• URL shorteners/expanders
• Inline photo/video integration
• Location links into a web map
• Saved searches/filters
• Avatars are nice
• Preferences in an obvious spot (or even better)
• An interface so simple I don’t need to find the preferences
• UI that does not make me want to stab eyes out

Unnecessary features

• Stocktwits
• 12seconds
• Twitscoop
• All these buttons:

Until then

I use Nambu on my Mac, Tweetie on my iPhone, TweetDeck if I have to use Windows, PowerTwitter in Firefox, (but I usually use Safari). I want to like PeopleBrowsr, but I can’t get past my last “nice to have.”

What about you?

Is it just me? I’m curious to hear what features other people need in their Twitter app. Am I too simple? Do I ask too much?