fredleblanc

After a little over a year with the iPhone 6, my general workflow goes like this:

1. I can use this one handed, that button over in the opposite corner doesn't look too far away. Reach for it. 2. My palm hits a button in the bottom-nearby corner. 3. Undo last action. 4. Try for the button again. 5. My palm hits another button the bottom-nearby corner. 6. Undo last action. 7. Oh right, that home-button trick. Double-tap the home button. 8. Reach the button.

I don't try to forget that functionality, but it doesn't occur often enough that I instantly think of it. In fact, having used iPhones since the 3gs, the go-to-move when you needed to reach a button out of reach with one-hand way the nose-press, which still comes more naturally to me than "reachability."

I guess if you can train yourself on it, it's good, but after having to use my wife's 4s the other weekend, I long to return to those days, size-wise.

I don't want to speak for them or go into their financials, but in a literal sense, every dollar counts. When we were talking about taking donations and registrations online, they were frazzled about the transaction fees, and I suggested working them into the costs. (It was only, say a $3 increase in membership price.) The truth of the matter is that some people don't have that much to spare.

Of course, that conversation happened way before the site was used as a credit card validator. Trying to explain to them the bad side of charge backs and why this is a big deal is an on-going challenge. The last time I discussed it with them, they kept asking me if they were going to get stuck with all the transaction fees.

And, being a developer, my first gut instinct is stepping back and saying "you're wasting money here and here and here and here, cut down these inefficiencies and it'll all balance out." However, it's not as simple as that. Everyone needs to be on board, and the people in charge of these things are already overworked and not highly paid.

A catch-22, I suppose. I try to stay out of it as best I can. I made them the site for free in exchange for our two kids to use the club's stuff for free, and with those inefficiencies I hinted at, I can't afford to get caught in being the role of business consultant too.

From what I've read in research, the reason is four-fold-ish.

1: Using the site as a credit card validator. Only the real ones will get through.

2: By making donations to places with a stolen credit card little bits at a time, it establishes a wider pattern of use for that card. Fast forward a couple steps ahead, the purchases are getting a little weirder each time, and before you know it, you're at whatever level people use stolen cards to buy.

3: Tiny non-profits generally do not have a great deal of extra man-power to deal with such things, and there's a better chance that this sort of behavior goes unnoticed.

4: When people see weird charges on their card, some people are more likely to feel bad enough taking away money from a non-profit organization that they won't report the abuse, or they may not question it if the card is joint-used.

I'm sorry that I don't have sources on these, the research was from a couple of months ago. It's pretty frustrating and there seems to be little retribution for things. You have to just change your charge flow and move on. :/

I also had something like this happen on a site I built for my wife's work's site, a Boys & Girls Club[0]. I had a donation button that let people make an open donation to the club. It's such a tiny site with little traffic, but apparently the SEO must be decent because somehow it got targeted by people appearing to come through Brazil and Poland.

Suddenly one day, hundreds of donation attempts. Checking the failed transactions, the script was trying $1, then $2, etc up to $22 then starting over, each time with a different number. About $200 in successful donations came through before I caught it.

So I just shut it all down for now. I'm not really sure how best to fix it. The club has no money and already complain about the transaction fees they get charged per swipe (and those are all pretty standard rates in the U.S.). Being a non-profit, they expect a lot of stuff for free, and unfortunately won't consider paying for an anti-fraud service. Even PayPal takes too big a cut.

Realizing that this wasn't a helpful comment, just a "me too." It sucks. Oh well.

[0]: https://salembgc.org

I'm OK with sites blocking content for those using ad blockers. That seems like a fair balance, and if the content being blocked truly is that important to me, it's a one click disable to give in, or I can probably find a similar story elsewhere. (Though most of the time I don't really care that much to do either.)

I've found that using uBlock origin I don't only block ads, I virtually redesign pages. I remove share buttons, I remove elements I never use on sites I visit frequently. Maybe I'm addicted to simplifying the web in my own image.

The article says otherwise:

> Students don’t log in with Facebook, and engineers handle data in accordance with the White House’s Student Privacy Pledge[0], which prevents them from selling student information or using their behavior to target advertising at them.

[0]: http://studentprivacypledge.org/

Do people really check Yelp for hospital reviews? I live in a reasonably rural area, but even we have a couple of hospitals within reach. It never really occurred to me to not go to the nearest one for emergencies. I couldn't imagine a deep gash in my leg or my child screaming and me on my phone looking up hospitals.

Although then again, I suppose the argument will then become that I can ask Siri for the closest hospital (travel time) with the shortest wait time total.

Holy cow that was tense, and I cheated by clicking on kids everywhere, wondering if it was happening already without me knowing it.

Not sure that it helps, but the one local to me is Massachusetts, USA, and they describe it as "Suffolk (Boston)," where Suffolk is the county name. No one would use that in day-to-day talk… maybe they have some more or semi-official name of a "region" in your area?

Bah, one of the No votes was my house rep. Time to set aside an hour to write some letters of disappointment on Monday.

I agree that too many in the country don't exercise their right to vote, but I wouldn't take away their right to abstain. But, I mean, that could be solved by having an `abstain` option on the ballot itself.

Yes, absolutely!

We had a case of this in Massachusetts this year in our governor's race. One of the third party candidates did so well during the first debate that all of the third-party candidates were then blocked from future debates. Of course, there's nothing exactly admitting that, but it seems like it could hardly be a coincidence. (In fact, the third-party candidate that did well was _uninvited_ from a future debate that he had already accepted an invitation to.)

Bonus: he ended up earning the minimum 5% vote needed to establish a new political party[0] in the state!

[0]: http://www.unitedindependent.org/

Not to be that guy, but there are generally other candidates than just the main two. Most seem to ignore third-party candidates because they'll never win, but that quickly becomes a vicious circle: they probably won't win so people don't vote for them, it looks like they have little support so people won't bother, they continue to earn 1-3% of votes.

That's not to say third party people are the greatest either, personally, a candidate needs to earn my vote, not just be the lesser of evils. What I'm saying is that if a non-main candidate interests you, I think it's worth your time to vote. The same way it's nice to tell someone on the Internet that you appreciate them.

There are a lot of hardworking people trying to make the world better, they just don't have the funding, pull, or connections to make it happen. But as we've been seeing with recent protests: if there are enough people fed up with the current system, and people back another option, the (US) government does seem to still listen to its people.

Worked fine on my iPhone 6 not plus.

I see a two-week notice as a reverse-layoff situation. In many jobs, you're hired with the ability to leave whenever you want, which becomes more like a reverse-firing. But, of course, when you do that, you risk tainting your reputation within the industry, perhaps not being able to give references or worse. Depends on the industry I'd say.

> “There is a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels,”

Anti-Canada petroleum movement, or Canadian anti-petroleum movement? This doesn't seem like an accidental word re-arrangement.

Don't forget that you can stretch $2k a lot further on something like half.com instead of buying new books: http://product.half.ebay.com/Introduction-to-Algorithms-by-C...

They blackout your home games and all nationally televised games (although there may be a carrier-exclusive deal worked out here and there).

It's a shame that the NHL signed such a long deal with NBC. I know it was just a couple years ago, but everything was so different then. I hope when their next deal comes around, the NHL is the first to abandon these stupid blackout restrictions.

Besides, if you stream it live, you're still watching the commercials.

It's an interesting idea. Will GoPro someday evolve to a "Google-Street-View-esque" camera that sits atop your head and records your entire world in real time. The with Oculus Rift, populate a view so that you can look wherever, which would things like the video in the article less disorienting?

The future sounds crazy.

Agreed, but I found watching this video that I felt more like I did while at the game than the standard "god view" that you usually see. It wasn't fully as good, but it was closer.

I believe they experimented with the refs wearing GoPro cameras for a couple of games. You rarely saw them live, but when they were helpful or interesting or worth watching for novelty they were included in the replays.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Last year, in an attempt to "make it up to the fans," they added all of those extra "Stadium Series" outdoor games. Although I'd rather see more standard games, they're neat things to see.

A side note on the GoPro video on that site is similar to how I felt attending an actual game this year with really good seats: you don't fully get the sense of how fast the game moves and how incredibly talented these guys are as pushing a little rubber puck around ice. This video made me feel like I did watching it live and right in front of me: just wow.

The NHL has started adding additional "non-standard" camera angles to their streaming (pay) NHL GameCenter app/service. Many (perhaps all, I don't know) now give you a top-down shot of each goalie in addition to the standard home and away broadcasts. I watch them now and then, and it's really interesting if you're a fan of the game.

I know the adoption of this is mostly going to be extracurricular for now, maybe used during All-Star games and such (they've been known to mic up and interview goalies in those while they're in goal).

Although these videos did make me dizzy, it's such an interesting way to become more engaged in the game. I love that the NHL (being the "4th-place league" in the US) is always doing interesting, creative things to try to make their league better.

That's great. In my research of what makes a good newsletter, it wholly seems to be a combination of aggregation and curation. Not just collecting links to interesting things, but highlighting what makes them interesting to you, the curator. (From there, it seems that you develop an audience of people that like your point of view).

That's fantastic, congrats! As someone who has been interested in both consuming newsletters and aspiring to start one maybe soon, I'd love to see more information about how much time you spend putting it all together. Is it 1-2 hours per week? 4-6? Do you have a backlog of things to include for short weeks, or do you mostly just let it happen as it happens?

Again, nice work sticking with it!

Hooray, parsedown! Thank you for your hard work on this, it's my favorite of the PHP markdown parsers. I really like the philosophy and execution.

Exactly this. It's such a simple concept (spirographs themselves), but using this site put me into an almost trance-like calm. And clicking buttons to choose the "plastic wheels" was even easier than finding them in the box.

Having never liked U2, I now have this thing in my music list I either have to figure out how to either or scroll around forever. It may only be an inconvenience, but so was junkware that carriers would preload up. Bono is apparently the carrier that Apple can't resist.

Agreed. This article does a lot of comparing to 2006, in which a lot of technology has happened — not just on the field but off. From what I've seen, many people "watching" games these days aren't doing just that, they're multitasking with three or four other things: checking feeds, timelines, stats, other game scores, fantasy updates, etc.

To me, in-game changes seem to be only a minor contributor. More so, I'd like to hear more about how people are so easily distracted these days. Notifications for this and that, work emails checked all night, game on in the background while surfing reddit or ESPN or whatever. It's becoming extremely easy to forget you're watching baseball at all.

Always nice to see some new programming font options! One thing that stood out to me is the space between a lowercase a and the text that follows. The gap feels a little awkward to me.

I really like the numerals, and the options for different asterisk vertical positions and zero characters. Consecutive underscores are also nicely spaced.

One odd thing, if you visit the preview interface — http://input.fontbureau.com/preview/ — and swap out the letter forms, it seems that some characters are different widths. For example, changing the 'a' letter form to the alternate makes lines with a's in them smaller. This could very well just be a browser thing, trying to auto-kern monospaced letters for some reason, although it's doing it in both Chrome and Firefox.

Edit: oh, then I read some more. That's a feature. Huh. The future is weird.

I guess I don't fully understand what you're saying here. For me, a "project" is "I'm going to do something for you, and you'll pay me." The only way I could gain more money that way is by raising my rate. (My projects are one-to-one.)

Otherwise, time becomes the biggest limitation. I've toyed with the idea of hiring people to work for me, but I really like sleeping at night, and I'm not sure that I can do that if I'm worrying about being able to pay people. I've heard that more people will spawn more projects and more money, but time and time again I come back to the thinking: I'm not unhappy with what I have now. No need to rock the boat.

Time, as always, will tell.