Category: Uncategorized

I used to listen to quite a lot of music. Nowadays I hardly ever find myself thoroughly immersed in tunes, actually listening and not just hearing music. Why? Podcasts, that’s why.

For a long time I knew podcasts existed, but never thought there’s anything worth my time there. Then several things happened:

1. I bought my first iPhone
2. I found about Instacast¹
3. I stumbled upon the 5by5 network

Yeah, I had an iPod before the iPhone. Sure, I had phones that were perfectly capable of playing podcasts. But there was sooo much friction. To download the podcasts. To sync the podcasts to the iPod / phone. To find a suitable player with the ability to display shownotes, remember the position and so on. In this regard, the iPhone along with Instacast changed pretty much everything. Suddenly I could catch podcasts on the fly, stream them online and check the shownotes on my phone. Great!

…until I found myself subscribing to twenty-something podcasts². Each of them producing 60-120 (or even more, in the case of Hypercritical) minutes worth of material every week. Now I am in the situation that I have more interesting stuff to listen than I can handle! Nevertheless, I regret nothing and can only recommend this to everyone. It’s nice to be able to make use of my spare time commuting, doing errands and so on. Talk radio is dead, long live podcasts!

Email is bad business

Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app with broad appeal and released it into the hottest software market the world has ever seen. And yet it was a financial flop.

Last Friday when Sparrow was canned, I was honestly annoyed. I’ve bought and used both the OS X and the iOS client extensively right after they added generic IMAP support to it. But David Barnard did the math, and it ain’t pretty.

Marco Arment on buying stuff

While we’re on the topic on making choices, on yesterday’s Build & Analyze Marco talked about research before making a buying decision.

So I finally managed to start a blog. I’ve been agonizing on so many things for such a long time. Wondering about what to write about? What platform to use? Should I self-host or go for a hosted service?¹ Does anyone care what I write about? Is it even worth starting, knowing that I might just abandon the whole thing after three posts? Do people even read blogs anymore?

Then today at work I had a brief discussion with my colleague about the matter. Turns out, he has had similar thoughts for quite a while. So we decided to do it (Mike’s blog can be found here), knowing that both of us has at least one reader 🙂

Overthinking tends to yield more thinking, but nothing concrete. Sometimes just winging it and seeing where it takes you might be just what fits the bill.

The definition of a geek according to the dictionary in OS X:

geek |gēk|
noun informal

1. an unfashionable or socially inept person.
2. a carnival performer who performs wild or disgusting acts.

Hi, I’m Antti and I’m a geek.

Most of the time I’m not performing wild or disgusting acts, and I tend to think of myself as not that socially inept. The definition above is sorely lacking. I find “geeking out” as being extremely passionate and truly interested in something. Being a geek is finding joy in things that might be totally invisible to “normal” people. I, for instance, enjoy taking care of my computing devices, carefully choosing the hardware and software I enjoy using. I spend surprisingly much time obsessing over text editors, color themes, fonts, line heights and what have you ¹.

But it’s not all about computers. I also geek out on guitar stuff, board games, lately also coffee. I might not have the most expensive guitar gear that’s available, but usually I can rest assured I have the best for the money available. How can I be so sure? Extensive background research. I get great pleasure on browsing the web for reviews, user experiences and discussions.

If one does not deeply care about something, how can one experience pleasure?

I’m a geek and proud of it.