Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese

via Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese.

Nǐ hǎo 你好! Permanently on my desk, and everywhere I go is an iPad/iPhone app called Pleco, which has my custom flash cards that I use to quiz myself about 300 Chinese (Mandarin) characters. I’m getting pretty good with the help of a weekly instructor found via Craigslist, daily walks through Chinatown in NYC, and a website called Memrise. In less than a month I’ve been able to specifically translate (a lot of) the data sheets for products I’m sampling/purchasing for my job at Adafruit Industries, and for fun/downtime I’m translating some of the Chinese graffiti in Blade Runner (I always wanted to know what they said).

At this point, you might be asking, “Why are you wasting your time learning such a hard language? Computers can do it — why don’t you hire a translator?” Or “the USA will make electronic components again, really!” Well, I’m going to tell you why and how I’ve decided to devote the next 2+ years or so of my free time to learning (Mandarin) Chinese with my own deadline to be fluent by 2016.

In this week’s article I’ll talk about why I think it’s a good idea for any maker to consider picking up some new language skills and specifically what I’m doing. A lot of my articles tend to be about the future (I can’t wait to look back on these 5 years from now). So, yes, I think a lot of us are going to find speaking, reading, and writing the language of the soon-to-be biggest economy in the world and, who makes almost everything, is a good idea. It’s something to consider learning, starting now, particularly for makers, especially the ones who run maker businesses.

continue reading at Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese.

Evernote – Architectural Digest (http://blog.evernote.com/)

Not everything is best suited for the cloud. I’ve used Evernote for a few years and always thought their performance was impressive.

http://blog.evernote.com/tech/2011/05/17/architectural-digest/#

Take aways:

• Shards – protection in silos
• Single-tier architecture; No remote storage
•  Evernote’s business model and cost structure. Evernote is notable for their pioneering of the freemium model, based on the idea from their CEO: The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using. Evernote is designed to become profitable at a 1% conversion rate.

hitreCords Summer in the City show – NYC

http://hitrecord.org/records/182869

Too bad wordpress won’t let you post embedded videos… that’s so 2007

www: the origin of the BLINK tag

A very interesting story of the origins of the BLINK tag.

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The Origins of the <Blink> Tag

I am widely credited as the inventor of the tag.   For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying.    I won’t deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

Back in 1994 I was a founding engineer at Netscape, prior to that I had written the Lynx browser, which predated all of the other popular browsers at that time.    Lynx had been and still is a text only browser and is commonly used in a console window on UNIX machines.   At Netscape we were building software that used a graphical user interface and could express vastly more text styles and layouts as well as images and other media.   We spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the web and new technologies that would enable new classes of documents, applications and uses.    A few examples of those thoughts were, HTML Tables, SSL for secure communications, Plugins for extensions, and JavaScript to enable dynamic HTML.

Sometime in late summer I took a break with some of the other engineers and went to a local bar on Castro street in Mountain View.   The bar was the St. James Infirmary and it had a 30 foot wonder woman statue inside among other interesting things.    At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions  that we were proposing,  I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text.    We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be.     The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife.

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via www: theoriginofthetag.