is a thing by Tom Taylor
It's always good seeing behind the scenes of stuff you love. More so if there's good engineering involved, so I enjoyed this pair of videos from Spotify. Lots of overlap with Creativity, Inc. too, unsurprisingly. This is how people make things now.
This week we launched a thing I've been working on for the last few months, alongside a brilliant little team of colleagues and freelancers.
PaperLater lets you save the good bits of the web to print, so you can enjoy them away from the screen. If you've used something like Instapaper, Pocket or Readability before, it's a bit like that, but in print.
It's a really nice scale of product to have built. We solved some gnarly technical problems (automated layout/typography, single copy print production, content extraction), but it's distilled into what's really quite a small web app. There's only a handful of pages, and we've tried to make the whole experience feel really light and easy. Time will tell us whether we've got that right, but I'm proud of that.
It's nice to realise that we're getting better at launching things. Little things make it easier: knowing to get nice photos shot before launch; having a customer support system to bolt into; having an existing framework for legal documents; and so on.
I'm also getting comfortable with patterns and tools that reduce the numbers of things I need to think about, and let me concentrate on building the thing at hand. I'm never changing my text editor again, for example. That's a good feeling, and only taken a decade.
I think of PaperLater a bit like podcasts. I don't really listen to podcasts, not because I don't like them, but there just isn't a podcast shaped hole in my life. But there is a PaperLater shaped hole, and we built it because our hunch is there's one in other people's lives too. If there's one in yours, I hope you enjoy it.
Much like Alice, every now and again someone says to me: "you still doing that newspaper thing"? Yes, yes I am! Still!
It's year five now, pretty much. I didn't think I'd ever do a thing this long. I might never again. But it turns out businesses are hard, especially when they involve atoms and even more so if you want to be profitable, legal and have good customer service. Not that much of that is to do with me.
We've just launched one of the things I naively thought we'd be doing in the second year: selling print-on-demand newspapers from our site, with a nice profit sharing arrangement. This means you can, for example, grab a bunch of your favourite posts from your blog, put them into ARTHR to do a quick layout, print a single copy to check it all over, then start selling it from our site. We take our cut and send you your cut shortly after.
And we're running a small beta test of a personalised newspaper service. I can't say too much about that yet (other than it's a lot of fun), because we're still working out the shape of it, but if you think something like that might work for [your large media organisation], we should have a chat.
So it's good. And hard. But good.
"adequate responses, including of a technical and technological nature"
From. Pretty much describes my job.
Still shooting film. Still enjoying it. If I get one good shot out of a roll I'm happy.
I've been using Eye Culture in Bethnal Green for processing and scans. High res JPEGs are about £6/roll. They do a good job.
I really enjoyed this post by Oona Räisänen about decoding a signal hidden in the raw video from a police chase. But then I had a look through the rest of her blog, and it's chock full of brilliant forensics on pervasive radio transmissions. Like decoding the real-time bus timetable broadcasts, and listening into wireless keyboards. The ether is alive with the sound of binary.
Facts not opinions, inscribed on Kirkaldy Testing Museum.
1. I love Matt Edgar's posts about historical engineers. It's like a mini In Our Time, without the posh people. 2. I'd like to see more mottos inscribed on buildings. Mottos, not slogans.
If a cook touches a sauce, it gets passed through a sieve.
Sometimes all you need is for someone to see what you are planning and not look bemused.
On Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, from the book about the KLF with the long subtitle.
Perhaps more than anything they did, The Manual led to the pair being perceived as cynical media manipulators rather than random followers of chaos. In a sense, this was always inevitable when they became successful because the public narrative believes that success comes from knowing what you are doing. The equally common phenomenon of stumbling upwards is rarely recognised.
From the same book.
Almost as much a condo as a car.
From this video about the Pontiac Stinger, found via Fosta. If anyone wants me to do a presentation about feature creep, I am ready now.