The new Pokémon augmented-reality game came out last week, and since then I’m sure everyone who’s been playing it has interesting stories to tell about their experiences with it. I think this game is a great example of the increasing power video games have to affect our world and ourselves. As a game developer, I find this sort of thing exciting, so I’d like to add my own stories from my first day…
I just spent three months in Japan with two friends, Eric and Tim. It was my first time really traveling outside of California, let alone internationally. I would have happily (read: lazily) moved on, without writing anything about it, even though my mom was hounding me to write. However, once I got back, my family friend Naveen, who lives in India, asked me about the trip. He said, “I would like…
“There are no ordinary moments.” – Dan Millman This is a guide to introduce the theory, benefits, and practice of mindfulness meditation to beginners like myself. This guide is composed mostly of what I have read about the subject, learned from talking to knowledgeable people, and a little from my (limited) experiences so far. It’s become clear to me that meditation has the potential to be a…
I get it, I really do. I’ve complained about school just like you have. There’s a lot to dislike about the current education system, and if you feel you have an idea and the drive to change the world all on your own, it’s very tempting to just drop out and pursue your passion exclusively. But unless you either a) are an intellectual genius, or b) have an undeterrable love of learning and…
There’s a fly in my room. It’s distracting me from my work. I can’t stop watching its trajectory, the way it moves smoothly in one direction, and then abruptly jerks to the side. It sometimes moves in circles, sometimes in straight lines, sometimes up and sometimes down. I try to understand its motion, understand why it’s flying the way it is. It’s not moving towards any food source, it doesn’t…
Today’s computer interfaces are really, really stupid. Think about it. Your computer and your phone together know more about you than anyone else does. They’ve been privy to most of your conversations. You’ve conveyed to them your deepest thoughts. They’ve seen pretty much every side of you. And yet, you have to tell them, one key or one mouse click at a time, in excruciating detail, exactly what…
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound…
I’m falling in love with the concept of emergence – the idea that complex behavior can emerge from a set of very simple rules. And I’m starting to think that true artificial intelligence is not going to be a mathematically complex program expressly designed towards a pre-determined product, but rather an emergent behavior of a very simple ruleset. Emergence in the universe I recently watched a…
If I offered you the choice of typing at half of your current typing speed for two months in exchange for typing even faster and more comfortably than you do now for the rest of your life , would you take it? Let me ask you another question. Look down at your keyboard. Have you ever wondered why the keys are arranged in that way? The answer might surprise you. The QWERTY key arrangement on almost…
Listen, I really want you to try this. It’s a simple technique that will get you to plan what you want to get done today, and actually get it all done, with time left to spare. For the last few months, it’s totally changed my life day by day, and whether you’re a lethargic loser who wastes most of the day or a productive workaholic who wants to get even more done in less time, it will change your…
Edit: This post is deprecated in favor of the simpler Time Bending method. I just had the most productive day I’ve had in years. I finished everything I wanted to get done today through 10 hours of solid efficiency, no sweat. And the best part – I have 4 whole hours to do whatever I want for the rest of the day, and I know I completely earned them. It’s called the Checkpoint Method, and it will…
Let’s just face it. We’ve all been guilty of reusing passwords. (If you don’t, then I’m not talking to you. Asshole.) And for good reason — it’s just too damn inconvenient to manage unique passwords across the hundreds of services we use. But we can at least be a bit intelligent about it, and achieve a certain level of security with a smart system without having to blow our brains out. Yesterday’s…
So you’ve about finished your shiny new app, and you’re ready to unveil it to a salivating world (or so you hope). Only one thing left to do: create that glimmering landing page that your potential users will see and instantly be enlightened about what your app does and why they should use it. There’s just one problem: you’re just a humble developer / designer, and you don’t have thousands of…
A year ago, I switched to the Colemak keyboard layout . I’ve since had zero pain in my hands when typing for many hours straight, I’ve been able to type faster, and I make fewer mistakes while typing. A few months ago, I decided to try the biphasic sleep cycle . It worked as advertised, allowing me to get better sleep and need less of it. I used to sleep for 9 - 10 hours each day, and now I need…
I got this email from a friend today. this is unbelievable. im taking this class about the legal implications of the drug trade, and what we did today was to bring in a bunch of trash bags and examine the contents, to see what people throw away or leave behind. at the end of the investigation heres what we know: 1) the family is three people, a husband, a wife, and a son 2) we know the names 3)…
Three reasons: speed, easability, and reusability. And that’s what will drive the next generation of web apps and services. In one compact list, here is everything that makes Node.js really damn exciting. It’s a server-side JavaScript framework. That means the same type of code that powers awesome Ajax applications like Gmail will now power its servers, too. Code reuse FTW! It’s driven by…