Category / link

by Alex

Love Your Nose

Dr. Robert Ivker: ‘Love Your Nose’ – A Holistic Approach to Sinusitis Treatment is a pretty terrible title, but a pretty great resource. Just following one element of the strategy (the garlic pills) fixed up a sinus infection for me in record time last month. I was already eating Paleo, and I did also load up on the probiotics for immune support, but the garlic was the obvious kicker.

And when I say record time, I know whereof I speak. Last year’s sinus infection was four months long. I eventually gave up on the industrial-strength antibiotics, because they were mostly just killing off everything good in my gut. (And boy, was that fun.)

by Alex

BioLite CampStove

The BioLite CampStove is a brilliant idea. Burning some little sticks will cook your food and charge your phone (or other USB device) all in one shot. Nice.

I’d love to own one, but most of the time, I wouldn’t be able to use it here in Colorado (or New Mexico, or Utah, or all our other desert-type neighbors). Fire bans, and all. If we were move someplace wetter, though, I’d be all over this.

by Alex

Top 10 API Worst Practices

Programmable Web just posted a really nice list of 10 reasons why your API sucks. Or doesn’t, depending on how good your documentation and developer experience (DX? Do we really need another bullshit acronym, people?) are. The post also links to their own list of 5 attributes of a great API. Definitely check out the presentation slides in that post.

Note that a number of the bad things (unexpected and undocumented releases, poor developer experience, inadequate support, and poor documentation) and good things (provide great developer support) are documentation-related. How surprising. Yet another bunch of reasons you should add a good writer to your development team.

by Alex

‘Why the iPad 3 Won’t Replace Your Laptop’

Today, John Gruber linked to an article at PCMag by Eric Grevstad, and quoted this bit:

That’s because, for all the talk about whether the iPad 3 will have a quad-core processor or a retina display or a VW Beetle bud vase, we already know one thing about it: It won’t be a laptop. And we know, if we’re honest, that the iPad is no substitute for a laptop. Never will be. Isn’t supposed to be.

Gruber’s comment was this:

That the iPad is not a substitute for a laptop for everyone does not mean it is not a substitute for anyone. That’s the key to the iPad’s success. Many people don’t need a laptop for their away-from-the-desk computing needs.

Which is a good start, but doesn’t go far enough. Apple’s goal is pretty clearly to replace your laptop in as many use cases as possible. Hell, Tim Cook even said as much just recently at a Goldman Sachs conference:

We started using it at Apple well before it was launched. We had our shades pulled so no one could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur.

Anyone calling bullshit on this whole post-PC thing already sounds fairly out of touch, and Grevstad doesn’t help his case when he goes on to say he wants a VGA port on his next laptop). But it’s early yet. Keep watching; this line of thinking is going to seem even more backward in the near future.