Disqus - Latest Comments for berberich

Re: 6 Ways We Recommend Using Apple AirTags (and 1 Way We Don’t)

Jason Berberich — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:02:02 -0000

One tip that can help with the problem identified in the luggage section: If you tap on an AirTag to go into its settings and go into Notify When Left Behind, you can add your home under Notify me, except at so that you don't get notified every time you leave your house.

Re: The Mandrill Debacle | MageMail

Jason Berberich — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:38:46 -0000

FYI for your spreadsheet - SendGrid does have a free plan with 12,000 emails per month.

Re: Evolution of my WordPress theme development workflow

Jason Berberich — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 22:58:24 -0000

I go back and forth. I do a lot of client work in WordPress, mostly because it's the software non-technical software have heard of somewhere. There are a few interesting things going on with it, like the rest API, but other things have been getting my attention lately.

The Craft CMS uses PHP and MySQL like WordPress, but offers flexibility without the workarounds and kludges.

And I have to admit, I've been really interested in the latest versions of Microsoft's web stack. C# + ASP.NET 5 + MVC 6 looks like a really good combination, especially now that they're open sourcing things and allowing them to run on OS X and Linux in addition to Windows.

I haven't looked at Flask for quite awhile, but it looks nice. Python is the bomb.

Re: Overcast feedback from a podcast power user

Jason Berberich — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 23:20:57 -0000

That's a really good idea. I think I remember Marco saying that he had the ability to load and play arbitrary files enabled in some of his development versions, but obviously he hasn't made that available to the public (yet).

My workaround for this is to drop an mp3 into dropbox, grab the public link for it, then add it to my Huffduffer feed, which Overcast visits an few minutes later and then grabs the file. Not a great solution, but it gets the job done.

Re: Five things I’m excited about right now

Jason Berberich — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 16:27:58 -0000

Information overload? Not really. I have them sorted in a priority system, so the ones I listen to the most automatically go to the top of the list. The others I usually ignore unless I've already played my favorites or I'm looking for something a little different.

Re: The death of Google Reader is App.net’s next big opporunity

Jason Berberich — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 23:34:07 -0000

I'm currently using Feedly, but am willing to give Digg Reader another try. It's iPhone app was a mess out of the gate, while Feedly works well with Reeder, which I previously used with Google Reader.

Re: The Grand Forks Herald reviews the new Olive Garden in town

Jason Berberich — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:16:42 -0000

My wife and I thought this one was ridiculous when it came out last month. "I found the canned peach slices appealing". I had trouble getting past that sentence.

Re: http://sinker.tumblr.com/post/14267087602

Jason Berberich — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:15:02 -0000

If you haven't read it already, I suggest taking a look at the Businessweek article NPR linked to in their post. Long story short, Lego has spent four years researching, designing, and testing the Lego Friends line for girls - including extensive anthropological studies of how kids play. They ended up finding some big differences in boys and girls. A key excerpt:
----------------------

Encouraged by what it had learned about boys, Lego sent its team back out to scrutinize girls, starting in 2007. The company was surprised to learn that in their eyes, Lego suffered from an aesthetic deficit. “The greatest concern for girls really was beauty,” says Hanne Groth, Lego’s market research manager. Beauty, on the face of it, is an unsurprising virtue for a girl-friendly toy, but based on the ways girls played, Groth says, it came, as “mastery” had for boys, to stand for fairly specific needs: harmony (a pleasing, everything-in-its-right-place sense of order); friendlier colors; and a high level of detail.

“It was an education,” recalls Fenella Blaize Holden, an under-30 British designer, on the process of getting Lego Friends made. “No one could understand, why do we need more than one handbag? So I’d have to say, well, is one sword enough for the knights, or is it better to have a dagger, too? And then they’d come around.”

Lego confirmed that girls favor role-play, but they also love to build—just not the same way as boys. Whereas boys tend to be “linear”—building rapidly, even against the clock, to finish a kit so it looks just like what’s on the box—girls prefer “stops along the way,” and to begin storytelling and rearranging. Lego has bagged the pieces in Lego Friends boxes so that girls can begin playing various scenarios without finishing the whole model. Lego Friends also introduces six new Lego colors—including Easter-egg-like shades of azure and lavender. (Bright pink was already in the Lego palette.)

Then there are the lady figures. Twenty-nine mini-doll figures will be introduced in 2012, all 5 millimeters taller and curvier than the standard dwarf minifig. There are five main characters. Like American Girl Dolls, which are sold with their own book-length biographies, these five come with names and backstories. Their adventures have a backdrop: Heartlake City, which has a salon, a horse academy, a veterinary clinic, and a café. “We had nine nationalities on the team to make certain the underlying experience would work in many cultures,” says Nanna Ulrich Gudum, senior creative director.

The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,” says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, “I want to shrink down and be there.”

The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot. A neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, Eliot is the author of Pink Brain Blue Brain, a 2009 survey of hundreds of scientific papers on gender differences in children. “Especially on television, the advertising explicitly shows who should be playing with a toy, and kids pick up on those cues,” Eliot says. “There is no reason to think Lego is more intrinsically appealing to boys.”

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My initial reaction to hearing about Legos for girls was the same as yours, but this article changed my mind. I just know that I'd rather have my daughter play with a Lego Friends set instead of Barbie dolls.

Re: Bike Commuting

Jason Berberich — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 10:35:50 -0000

Jesus - that's always been a fear, but I can't imagine it _actually_ happening, you know?

Grand Forks isn't very friendly for cyclers yet, but thankfully most of my route to work is on a designated bike route with very little interaction with vehicles. I _do_ need to do a better job of wearing my helmet though, because I get lazy and leave it in the garage sometimes.

Good tip about the shotgun too.

Re: The Trouble With Back-Ends

Jason Berberich — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:23:52 -0000

Boing Boing recently moved over to WordPress, so they're no longer using Movable Type.

Re: Five Months Later: Chrome OS and the Cr-48

Jason Berberich — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:26:35 -0000

Ha. Thanks for the tip.

(NOT written on a Cr-48)

Re: Twitter Co-Founder @Ev: On to Startup #3

Jason Berberich — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:29:18 -0000

Ev is a three-time founder by my count:
1. Blogger
2. Odeo
3. Twitter

Re: Hands On: Google’s Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook Prototype

Jason Berberich — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:23:08 -0000

Yeah, apparently all of the testers do get to keep them. It was never explicitly said, but I'd imagine that the time and effort required to get back 60,000 laptops wouldn't be worth it.

Thankfully, a couple of teardowns have already been done, so I can save mine for when it's completely dead.

Re: Extensions vs Bookmarklets

Jason Berberich — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:46:05 -0000

A bookmarklet can perform a single task - shorten a URL, restyle a page for easier reading, perform a search, etc. An extension is able to "plug" deeper into the browser, and can therefore have multiple functions, any of which can be more or less complex than a bookmarklet. For example, the Google Voice extension for Chrome adds these features:

<ul>
<li>Click on an on-page phone number to call</li>
<li>View new voice mail messages</li>
<li>Send text messages to contacts</li>
<li>Initiate new calls</li>
</ul>

So in my experience, a bookmarklet is preferable to an extension that provides the exact same functionality. It doesn't have sit in memory and there's no chance for it to cause crashes or compatibility issues with other extensions.

Re: Hands On: Google’s Chrome OS Cr-48 Notebook Prototype

Jason Berberich — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 22:08:28 -0000

The motherboard/chipset is apparently the Intel CG82NM10. I doubt there's any chance of swapping out the CPU though.

Re: Don’t be Interesting, Be More Interesting than Every Person I’ve Ever Met

Jason Berberich — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 22:48:39 -0000

I had to give this tweet from @scottsimpson a big ol' star when I read it:

"My new standard of cool: when I'm hanging out with you, I never see your phone ever ever ever."

I'll get there someday.

Re: Why Buying Music Legally Still Kinda Sucks

Jason Berberich — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:55:53 -0000

A good rule for sites selling audio/video: if it's faster or easier for customers to get the same content on bittorrent or similar sites/services, you're probably doing it wrong, and need to start over.

Re: Apple Shrinks the iPod Nano But Manages To Add A Touchscreen

Jason Berberich — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:37:41 -0000

So, can the new Nano play video? Steve only showed and mentioned audio and photos, and the menus didn't seem to have a video icon.

Re: Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It’s Fantastic.

Jason Berberich — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:42:39 -0000

It looks like you can combine Priority Inbox and filters to always or never mark certain types of messages as important: http://mail.google.com/supp...

Re: Android development, can the breakneck pace continue?

Jason Berberich — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 11:43:49 -0000

Maybe you missed it, but back on June 1st, Andy Rubin of Google/Android said they will be moving to a yearly update cycle:

"Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down, because a platform that’s moving — it’s hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don’t want developers to have to predict the innovation."

Re: Timerrific for Android: A Great Way to Forget Your Phone’s Settings

Jason Berberich — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:25:17 -0000

Is $11 really that much to support the developers of software we use and get a real benefit from? I'm all for free software, but I also think it's important to support the developer community if I want to see it grow and thrive.

Re: [Sponsor] Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores

Jason Berberich — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:39:06 -0000

From North Dakota here. We've got lots of really small communities where the population cannot support a grocery store (they're most likely within half an hour of someplace that does have one), but can easily support one or more bars. Probably comes down to simple economics, if I had to guess.

I grew up in a *really* small town in northwestern Minnesota where we had one church and two bars. A neighboring town actually had a municipal bar/liquor store, which I didn't find out until recently is not uncommon in Minnesota due to state law.

Re: Google Public DNS and FUD

Jason Berberich — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:52:56 -0000

Paul:

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It gives me a lot to consider and reconsider. I don't have first-hand experience with subpoenas like you, but I've heard plenty of stories that give cause to worry.

I just wonder about the specific digs against Google. If the complaint is the sheer amount of data it collects that is potentially available via subpoena, then yes, I think that's a completely valid argument. But otherwise, I haven't seen or heard anything that causes me to worry about what they're privately doing with my data or that they'll be more eager to respond to a subpoena request than anyone else.

According to the OpenDNS privacy policy, they "generally" remove IP addresses within two days, but make no such guarantees for backup/archive tapes. As a user of OpenDNS for the last several years, that gives me more cause for concern that Google's privacy policy for Public DNS. But, add that to Gmail, search history, etc., and I think it becomes a much bigger issue.

As for ISPs not recording DNS requests - really? I have no reason to doubt what you said, I just find it surprising that they don't. Do you think they'll start collecting that data now that Google apparently finds some value in aggregating it?

Re: We Know Hollywood Is This Dumb. Et Tu, Netflix?

Jason Berberich — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:30:42 -0000

*Exactly*. We're really talking about different types of consumers here for a given movie: 1) People who buy it on disc 2) Renters 3) Those that get it off bittorrent and had no plans on buying it or renting it.

The three groups are almost mutually exclusive. I really don't see people changing their behavior because of a time delay.

Re: We Know Hollywood Is This Dumb. Et Tu, Netflix?

Jason Berberich — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:22:46 -0000

I fail to see how this would change enough people's behavior to have a big impact. If I *really* wanted to see a movie for the first time, I'd go see it in the theater. If I loved it on the big screen, there's a good chance I'll buy it on disc when it came out.

But if Netflix is my primary method for watching movies and I have dozens or hundreds of titles waiting in my queue, there's a fairly good chance that I'm not concerned about seeing a new release immediately when it's available. If it's in my queue, I know that I'll eventually get it. And in the mean time, I'm watching something else I'm interested in.

Nick Carr's recent post on Netflix (Netflix's tail massage) shows how the company is already manipulating demand for new releases by waiting awhile before suggesting them to users. You have to go out of your way to find new titles and add them to your queue.