Microsoft hires OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast and donates aerial imagery
Microsoft’s history with hiring high profile open source developers is pretty mixed, but I’m cautiously optimistic all the same. The aerial imagery is a pretty big deal.
I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism.
—Sarah Palin, criticizing the media for biased reporting. Palin said she will not waste her time with another interview with CBS’ Katie Couric. (via officialssay)
Improvements to mobile Safari with iOS 4.2
Mobile webkit is hands down my favorite platform to develop for and it’s only getting better. [via Daring Fireball, natch]
I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook. Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.
—
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction (via azspot)
This phenomenon is, of course, not unique to Facebook but the nothingness alluded to in this quote certainly does seem to characterize it.
I’m pretty excited about this: a new mobile app that Neven and I made for Salt & Fat called Unwrapper.
We’ve wanted to do a mobile … something for a while now but couldn’t figure out what it should be. We had this idea around the time of that massive egg recall a few months back for something that would help you identify safe eggs. We expanded the idea to something that helps with all of the jargon that junks up our food packaging. It’s kinda like Unsuck It, but for food.
It’s a web app, so it should work on just about anything with a webkit browser, even offline. If you have an iPhone, add it to your home screen and it’ll work like a native app. We’ll update the database as often as we can, if you have a suggestion, send us a tweet with the hashtag #unwrapper.
We’ve got plenty of other ideas for fun stuff we can do, I hope that this is just a start. I’ll follow up with another post on how we built it.
Complete time lapse of a teardown and reconstruction of a house in Seattle
My pal Mike bought a house in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle a while ago. He then proceeded to tear it down and build a beautiful new, modern home (with one of the best views in the city). He’s been blogging along the way as well as snapping a photo every five minutes to assemble a time lapse of the entire project. Watching the scenery change around the house over the course of a year is almost as interesting as watching the house itself.
There’s really nothing new in pie. Farm women have tried everything before.
—Emily Elsen of Four and Twenty Blackbirds from Pie to Cupcake: Time’s Up (via harrisj)
Making the leap to SSD on a MacBook
My pal Remiel does a fantastic job breaking down how to upgrade your Macbook to use an solid-state drive instead of the spinning discs of yesteryear. I haven’t had a chance to give that a shot yet but I hear nothing but good things.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, wishing Nicole Polizzi—better known as Snooki from Jersey Shore—a happy birthday on Monday. Snooki responded, “Thabk you Johnny! :) xox” (h/t politico)
Is it true1 that ‘Snooki’ was Sarah Palin’s secret service codename?
It was not ↩︎
Smart folks from The Morning News are recommending books they think you’ll like.