colinmorris.net

Serious inquiries only. LATER… I’ll update with...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:16:00 -0500

Serious inquiries only.

LATER…

I’ll update with inquiries as they arrive:

At 12:53 PM, Jeff writes: “Was said bacon organic?”

Thank you, chintzy camera FX, for making today feel warm and...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:11:29 -0500

Thank you, chintzy camera FX, for making today feel warm and sunny.

Oh look, another sunrise. Thursday, 17 January 2012

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:50:44 -0500

Oh look, another sunrise.

Thursday, 17 January 2012

This morning’s uninspiring sunrise in Chicago’s Near...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:22:00 -0500

This morning’s uninspiring sunrise in Chicago’s Near North Side. The sky’s not great, but I love watching the lights flick on.

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Life is good. Really, really good.

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:34:00 -0500

If I seem giddier than usual these days, it’s not just because I’m enjoying being back in Chicago. (Though I am.)

Today’s not been unusual, and it’s gone like this:

Wake up at five. Brew excellent coffee in a french press. Make eggs with salame and four cheeses, and granola with fresh cut strawberries and bananas and almond milk.
Sit-ups, push-ups, and some curls in the gym. Sorry if that sounds bro-ish, but it makes me feel great, so deal.
See fiancée off to work, do dishes, shower at leisure.
Go back to bed for a while.
Restring a guitar. Play it for a few hours.
Walk around my favorite place on the planet in the sun.
Journal. Better stuff than usual.
Get some good news on the job front.
Meet fiancée after work. This is always really exciting, like we’ve been together a week instead of five years.
Get an unexpected call from a job prospect I didn’t know existed. Whoa.
Band practice.
Dinner and a couple glasses of wine.
Early to bed and do it all over.

I’m not gloating, I’m just counting my blessings. Sincere thanks to everyone who has helped me and led me here. I still am and always will be an Ohio boy from Akron, and I didn’t do much to earn this.

My fiancée looking gorgeous on her first day of her new job....

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:00:06 -0500

My fiancée looking gorgeous on her first day of her new job. Behind her, washed out due to my tiny lens, is the greatest city in the world.

Depending on how I sleep, this is the first thing I see when I...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:12:05 -0500

Depending on how I sleep, this is the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning.

I realized last night I’ve waited half my life for the one I have now, an it’s just as awesome as I’d hoped.

Now I just need to find a day job.

My new fiancée in our new, 25th floor home. I’m trying to...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:56:08 -0500

My new fiancée in our new, 25th floor home.

I’m trying to come up with some words to mark the occasion, but I’m stuck on “holy shit.”

FaceTime

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:56:58 -0500

Jinae: you don't have facetime on your iphone?
me: My phone is the 3gs -- no front-facing camera.
Jinae: oh
if you had facetime
you could see that i'm laughing and pointing at you now

How to use Find My Friends on iPhone/iPad without entering your iTunes password every time

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:45:52 -0500

This isn’t strictly a tech blog, much less a how-to blog, but I figured I owe the Internet a handy how-to for all the ones it gives me.

With Apple’s release of the latest iPhone/iPod/iPad operating system, iOS 5, came an app called Find My Friends, which does precisely what its name implies using the devices’ GPS. There are other apps that have been around a while and do this pretty well (see also: Google Latitude), but they’re beyond the scope of this post.

Click the image to download the app.

The trouble with Find My Friends is that, for security, it prompts you for your iTunes password every time you open the app. This is a deal breaker for a lot of people and creates a lot of friction in the name of security.

Here’s how to get around it:

Find My Friends allows you to forego the password if you set a passcode lock on your phone, a four-digit PIN you have to enter every time you unlock the screen. You can set a passcode in Settings > General > Passcode Lock. But this too is security friction I don’t want. So…
In the same settings module, you can tell your phone how often you want to be prompted for the passcode. By default, the phone requires it each time the screen is locked or goes to sleep. If you tap “Require Passcode” in the passcode settings, however, you can choose to only be prompted after 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or an hour.
Choose an hour.

Now you can use Find My Friends without being prompted for an iTunes password AND without having to enter a passcode every time you unlock your phone’s screen.

If you’re less cavalier than I am about the security of your phone’s contents in the wrong hands, consider that Find My iPhone (or iPad, or whatever), designed for tracking stolen devices, allows you to wipe the device remotely. You should have Find My iPhone activated anyway, folks. In iOS 5, it’s in Settings > iCloud > Find My iThing.

Well, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:23:00 -0500

Well, this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Happy winter.

Music: “Dance Yrself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem.

Thanks to Adam for sharing. Originally via Taylor

They used to play this awesome hold music at my old dorm, The...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:38:47 -0500

They used to play this awesome hold music at my old dorm, The University Center of Chicago.

And about a million other places, it turns out, because it’s the default hold music for Cisco CallManager IVR.

I used to call extensions I knew didn’t have phones attached, just to listen to it.

Point 'Em Out, Knock 'Em Out

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:31:06 -0500

The video actually makes me queasy.

It’s of a game kids are playing in the city where someone points to a random stranger and another person in the group has to go punch him or her, ideally knocking the victim out, or risk being on the receiving end of the same or similar.

Pretty sick.

*I would have embedded it, but Fox News doesn’t make that easy, so you’ll have to watch it on their Website.

HANDS.

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:33:42 -0500

Last week, I posted a cool video from Microsoft about concept technology for the near future. In the post, I needled Microsoft for rarely delivering technology that wows and boggles and inspires the way the stuff in the video does.

(A really smart friend of mine disagreed, and we each had our say, and that’s that.)

Then I found Bret Victor’s illuminating “Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design.”

In it, he argues today’s multitouch technology we’re all so in love with is really selling humanity short because we have these awesome things called HANDS that can do all sorts of amazing stuff, and our phones and tablets, which he calls Pictures Under Glass, don’t offer a way to interact with them the way we interact with and use everything else.

It’s a really interesting view on the issue, and well written, and cheeky, but also authoritative — Victor was a “Human Interface Inventor” at Apple for three years.

And it’s a really good challenge to the imagination. I’m not even sure how to phrase it right, but here’s a shot: what would you expect of computing devices if their interaction surfaces were tactile in a way that leverages the complex capabilities of the human body? What if your tablet responded to your touch with shifts in weight and texture?

Crazy ideas welcome.

Thanks to Woven’s David Notik for sharing Victor’s post.

This Microsoft “Vision” video keeps popping up on my...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:30:06 -0400

This Microsoft “Vision” video keeps popping up on my radar. It demonstrates great imagination, then executes it beautifully.

The irony I can’t ignore is that it was produced by a company that traditionally does neither. One time in 1985, Microsoft revolutionized the way we use computers by releasing Windows. Since then, its products have revolutionized productivity much in the way a whisk revolutionizes eggs. There’s probably a better way and this method kind of hurts my elbow, but we already bought 200,000 whisks, so keep at it. Tilt the bowl a bit. There you go.

Indeed, this is an exciting time for people and computers getting along*. But I’d hardly consider Microsoft to be a major player. True, they’ve been developing a coffee-table sized iPad for a few years now, but I don’t envision letting my kids do school projects on a piece of furniture worth more than my car.

Anyway. Cool video.

*If you were unaware of this, try Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs, or one of those talky things from the garage guy in California.

"That’s why several members of Congress are suggesting phasing out the dollar bill entirely and..."

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:32:06 -0400

“That’s why several members of Congress are suggesting phasing out the dollar bill entirely and replacing it with a coin. The production savings could add up to $5.5 billion over those three decades, proponents say.”

- LA Times

Beautiful morning in German Village Thursday, 13 October 2011

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:35:06 -0400

Beautiful morning in German Village Thursday, 13 October 2011

Thanks to Chava for sending this along. This complements nicely...

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:30:05 -0400

Thanks to Chava for sending this along.

This complements nicely all the useful things I’ve been learning from Merlin Mann and Dan Bejamin on their excellent show, Back to Work.

Among these things: * You wouldn’t need inspiration if you were already working on what you want to be doing. * Make the clackety noise (Merlin’s term for typing, which is what he, a writer, says he does for a living). Or make the motion of whatever it is you need to be doing. If you’re a musician, make sure you’re putting in the hours playing your instrument before you complain about not being inspired to write songs or whatever. If you’re a photographer, keep that shutter going.

So much yes. Thanks, @milesjai.

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:30:06 -0400

So much yes. Thanks, @milesjai.

"We could shoot the interview inside, but the monkeys would start screaming."

mail@colinmorris.net (Colin Morris) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:32:00 -0400

“We could shoot the interview inside, but the monkeys would start screaming.”

- @damgodfrey, talking shop. Totally serious.