Pebble was an early smartwatch company that launched with a successful Kickstarter back in 2012, with a focus on providing a customizable wearable front-end for apps that ran on your phone. They had pretty good success for the first few years, but then started running into cash problems, and eventually ran out of money and …
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has flagged articles from Der Spiegel and the Wall Street Journal that together paint a grim picture of how the Russian occupation of Bucha, Ukraine started as a simple occupation but quickly devolved into hellish war crimes against the civilian population. Sounds like a combination of an undisciplined occupying …
I just learned about “Unknown Number”, a short story by Blue Neustifter that was just named as a finalist for this year’s Hugo Awards for Best Short Story. The story is told as a chat history, and was published on Twitter last summer as a series of screen shots (if you use Twitter’s default web …
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A well done message from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Russian people (in many ways reminiscent of his message to the American people shortly after the failed January 6th insurrection last year).
A while back my friend Jay turned me on to Old Gods of Appalachia, an eldritch horror anthology podcast set in the Appalachian mountains. Steve Shell and Cam Collins (both Virginia natives) weave the idea of ancient evils imprisoned in the mountains with the very real hardships, temptations and injustice experienced by the poor settlers, …
A few days ago Wordle moved from its old indie spot at www.powerlanguage.co.uk to its new owners at the NYT, and apparently some folks have been grumbling that the words have gotten harder since the switch. And this past week the words have seemed harder both to me and friends and family I swap scores …
I started blogging at DocBug back in 2003 as a way to think through my ideas about technology, culture, and whatever else was on my mind that didn’t fit LiveJournal’s vibe. For several years I was posting three to four times a week, sometimes spending hours researching a post, but after I got married and …
[Originally posted to LinkedIn on 10/4/2021, migrated to DocBug 2/10/2022.] When we started Loon we had no idea whether delivering wireless internet via long-lived high-altitude balloons was even possible, much less as a sustainable business model. No one had ever done it before, and there was no road map or guide book. So we consulted …
[Originally posted to LinkedIn 9/23/2021, migrated to DocBug 2/10/2022.] As many of you know, Loon is shutting down. We landed our final balloon a few months ago, and while a few folks are still helping with the wind down, most of us (including myself) have moved on. Delivering wireless internet via high-altitude balloons was always …
Via Jay Schneider: There’s a Kickstarter that I’m affiliated with that has just launched. Short Version: I’d appreciate you checking it out/telling your friendshttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1526351393/load-the-ark Long version: The Kickstarter will complete a dream of one my students from the UW’s Game Design Program. His purpose, stated clearly on the 1st day of class, was to create …