Faves

My Favorite Things This Week (2019 #1)

Keenen Charles

Jan 4, 2019 — 1 min read

Articles

Your Startup’s Competitive Advantage Can’t Just Be “We’re French!”
Completely agreed with this article's view that being local is just not enough for startups. I've been wanting to write something similar for ages.

California Moves, Haltingly, Toward a Post-Lawn Future
Removing lawns seems like such an easy way to reduce water usage I'm surprised it's not more popular. It's not surprising that the drought in California has accelerated the rate of lawn replacements.

Des Moines Wants to Be the Affordable City for Artists
I love the idea behind the co-working space they've built to help keep artists in the city. I'm interested to see how successful it is and if these ideas could be used in other cities and countries.

Music

Google Play Music added this to a queue, not bad at all Google, not bad at all. This is the second song I've heard from this band and I really like it so I'll be diving into their discography soon.

Products

Makerlog
I started using Makerlog this week and it's pretty great. I've been looking for a private version of this for a long time. I used IDoneThis for a bit but found it hard to keep up. Makerlog being public makes me a want to keep up my logging and it's cool to see what everyone else is working on. Check out my profile here.

Samsung's Space Monitor

I love the idea of Samsung's new space saving monitors https://t.co/aGYyTEzPrE pic.twitter.com/FdyzBl28Jx
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) January 4, 2019

Not sure how practical this is but it looks awesome.

Meta is Getting AR Right

It seems that major tech companies are placing two major bets on the "next platform:" Artificial Intelligence and Augmented/Virtual Reality. Meta has dabbled in AI, but it's poured a ton of money into AR and VR in the past decade. They've been tackling

AI is Not a Friend

The following tweet might easily be one of the most unintentionally dystopian posts I've seen. At first, it seems fine. Changes to APIs on iOS can harm the app ecosystem and what's possible for developers. But this part sticks out. Have you seen it yet? a

People Power

For a long stretch of human history, meritocracy would have been a foreign concept. People were born into positions and no one expected to be in a different position at the end of their lives. The promise of meritocracy must have been intoxicating for the masses when it became a

Dark Mode Sucks

There I've said it. The decision by major tech companies to add native dark mode support to their operating systems is the biggest mistake in the last decade. Does it look like you're doing some cool hacks with Angelina Jolie? I guess. But does it look