Andy Beaumont

Back in early 2013 I got an email inviting me to join the beta for Medium. I can’t remember how or why this happened, but it did. You should see “contribute” buttons on most of the collections. You will also be able to create collections of your own and customize your Medium profile page. It sounded interesting, so I signed up, poked around, and loved what I found. There was a built-in community thanks to the Twitter authentication and thematic collections that anyone could submit stories to.

Water Strider by Daniel Pink on Flickr Over millions of years, nature managed to evolve a creature with such a delicate presence that it can stand on the surface of water without breaking the surface tension — the water strider. When they move though, water striders create a series of ripples that emanate out from each foot. The ripples are often large enough to scare away whatever prey they’d had their eye on, and to attract the attention of predators.

with insulating tape £2000 If you need the large screen of the 15” MacBook Pro, you have no option of having some actual keys at the top of your keyboard. Instead, you get what Apple calls the Touch Bar. Now, this is a terrible name for it. If you’re a touch typist, or even if you’ve just been using Mac keyboards for a long time, you know where everything is, and not only that but you can feel where everything is using the sense of touch.

Note: This article originally appeared onCharityConnect so some of it is specific to the third sector. However I think there’s enough in here that it might be useful to a broader audience too. Choosing a supplier for your new website is hard, even for big organisations who have dedicated in-house expertise. Most charities and non-profits don’t fit into that description; often they’ll have just a few people who muck in when they get time between all the stuff that’s actually in their job description.

The new MacBook Pro caused quite a kerfuffle on release. “It’s not aimed at pros” they said, “not enough RAM” they said, “Apple have abandoned their users” they said. I’ve been using Macs for knocking on 30 years and haven’t bought a non-Apple computer in all that time, so I trusted Apple. I figured they must have actually tested this thing, they must be confident that it’s better than the previous generation.

Image via Wikimedia Commons Given that in a previous post on Medium I called for TV manufacturers to give us dumb panels to which we can connect any number of little black boxes for our “smart” features, I’m building up quite a collection of these little boxes while stubbornly refusing to upgrade a television that I hate to something with features I don’t want. This week I added an Amazon Fire TV to my collection.

TVs last a long time and the upgrade cycle is very slow. In the six years or so that I’ve owned my current TV I’ve gone through 3 smartphones, 3 laptops, 2 games consoles and two tablets. My TV just keeps soldiering on. The things connected to my TV have changed too — where there used to be a Mac Mini with EyeTV there is now a YouView box and an Apple TV.

TC;DR I made a Tumblr that accidentally went viral. For a year or so I’d been collecting screengrabs of websites that obscure their content behind modal overlays, begging for newsletter signups, follows, likes, or even adverts that direct you to another site entirely. In the words of Brad Frost, bullshit. Throughout that year they were becoming more and more prevalent and more and more invasive. I made a Tumblr site to collect them on, called it Tab Closed; Didn’t Read and posted one lone tweet announcing it to the world.

I’m signed into Twitter right now. At a quick glance, the entire list of posts on the first screen are relevant to me. I’m willing to bet the same is not true for you though. You probably have to scroll through 30 posts to find 4 that you actually care about. I’m going to show you how you can make Twitter useful again. I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while now.

My grandad introduced me to Ray Harryhausen when I was about 5 and I was obsessed with his films as a kid. His was the first filmmaker’s name I ever knew, and his work was the first thing that ever made me wonder about the process of making films. His movies are a big part of why I grew up with such a love of film. I introduced my daughter to them when she was 3, we watched Clash of the Titans together and she was every bit as enthralled as I had ever been.