Links

The “just don’t look” strategy works for more than advertising…it’s effective in any situation where someone or something runs on attention. On the web attention comes in the form of links and pageviews so “just don’t look” translates roughly into “just don’t link or read”.

Sound advice.

At 2:03 p.m. ET on Sunday, ultramarathoner Scott Jurek crested the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine, becoming the fastest person to finish a supported thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail. He completed the 2,189-mile journey in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes, breaking the previous record by just more than three hours.

Astounding. I’ve hiked sections of the trail in the New England area. A 20 mile day was considered pretty good. To average around 50 miles a day is super human.

This was illustrated one morning when I was in the New York City subway, deep underground. There—far from any cellular signal or internet connection—I used my Apple Watch to wirelessly change the podcast that was playing on my iPhone, which was being wirelessly transmitted to a pair of Bluetooth earphones. I had my own invisible, personal network, off the grid.

This phenomenon—some are calling it the “personal cloud” or “personal mesh”—is one of the most important changes that will come out of the rise of wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch.

Yep. And it’s another reason I don’t have an Apple Watch yet. It’s just the beginning of a much larger story.

The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment, whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences. The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. It must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds, sensations, and even thoughts. Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life.

Not only a great discussion on the purpose and practice of meditation, there are some links to really good resources for further investigation. 

I think what most of us really want is an easier life, not necessarily a more wholesome one. We want less trouble and more enjoyment, probably more so than we want achievement and virtue. But what we often overlook is that embracing difficulty in certain places nets us a lot more ease than our usual “easy” ways. Putting in three hours a week at the gym is easier than being out of shape 24 hours a day. Studying is easier than sitting in an exam room not having studied. Doing a good job at work is easier than wondering when they’ll finally fire you

Embrace your phone when you need to. Take those photos. Be grateful you live in these times.

I’ll keep it real. As an introvert my phone is what helps me even survive many a social situation sometimes. It allows me to take a few minutes so I can focus on something outside of the party, tune it out, and allow me a few moments of respite and recharge. It’s not me being rude, it’s survival.

Thirty kilometres above a chosen city, a plane hangs out of sight of the thousands of people scurrying below — continuously circling the metropolis underneath. Every second, the plane takes a photo of the entire city and all the happenings within a 64sq km radius. The images are beamed down to a control centre where they create what is akin to a real-time Google map of everything taking place.

When a crime occurs, teams of analysts simply scroll back in time to the scene of the incident and identify those involved. From that point, they can follow the target by clicking forward through the images to the present moment and pinpoint their location.

And now we know what is in those planes the FBI has been flying in circles around major metropolitan areas including mine. There been testing this system in a run up to adoption.

Try before you buy.

I’ve been using this a whole lot more since adding a 23inch Cinema Display to my desktop setup. It remains one of my favorite “one thing well” utilities.

XKEYSCORE is a piece of Linux software that is typically deployed on Red Hat servers. It uses the Apache web server and stores collected data in MySQL databases. File systems in a cluster are handled by the NFS distributed file system and the autofs service, and scheduled tasks are handled by the cron scheduling service. Systems administrators who maintain XKEYSCORE servers use SSH to connect to them, and they use tools such as rsync and vim, as well as a comprehensive command-line tool, to manage the software.

Your tax dollars at work lining pockets of spooks who download free open source software, cobble it together with spit and band aids, then use it to take your freedom away.