Hi, I'm Ramkumar Shankar.

Paul Gilding wants to scare us, but in a good and oddly hopeful way. We have to prepare for the end of growth on Earth. “Our system — of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth — is eating itself alive.”

Watch.

anewcolour:

We moved office today, and this is my little goodbye ode to the first place I worked in after graduating, and a beautiful office and setting that set a very high standard for how I define “workplace” and “office”. I also wanted to kick off a new writing project, called “Hundreds and Hundreds”, which is basically where I aim to write a hundred 100-word snippets about things that mean something to me. Here’s #1.

0.01: Moving Office
Thank you for the squirrels, cats, the monkey that climbed into the rafters, and the family of bats that lived there. For the babies and puppies I’d see every day. For the dead butterfly, it taught me life is short, and to live lightly.

Thank you for when a cute boy had lunch with me on his birthday and ate my too-minty chocolate mousse. For the moonlit picnic we had three years later. For the ukulele man. The bamboo grove. For the magical misty fairy-tale during the monsoon, and a sparkling wonderland during Christmas.

For this, and so much more.

Samsung lists the benefits of the Galaxy Note 10.1 over the iPad. (You can connect a mouse to it!)

Hmm, desperation. Do you smell it? 

(via The Verge Forums)

Michael Lopp on the faux-zone and making time for building things. Fantastic post again. I’ve also just started reading Scott Berkun’s Mindfire. He also makes similar points here and here.

This is definitely something I’m going to pay more attention to. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately and that last essay from Berkun brought home the importance of this.

This begs the question, when was the last time you were free from others? The last day you spent alone and let all the thoughts you bury and hide in everyday life rise in your mind? Travel, meditation, long baths, a run in the woods, are all ways to give ourselves a taste of the solitude needed to think freely. Needed to understand ourselves and feel who we actually are. How can you know how much of what you think you want, and think you need is really coming from you? It may be that our truest, freest voice, the voice we call our heart of hearts, is always talking, but it’s quiet and timid and can’t be heard over the chatter of everyday life. Unless we make quiet time to learn how to hear it. And of course, we’re still free to ignore that voice, but at least we’ve given ourselves a chance to listen. Only then is it possible to sort through our lives to strengthen the connections with others who truly share our feelings and thoughts about life. Being free has never been easy, which explains why so few, despite what they say, truly are themselves.

Do I deliberately try to not fill my calendar? Do I give myself some time alone and away from the screen? I will. One precious hour a day to build something. Sounds like a plan.

I was rather interested in Denso, until this happened. I chose to sign up using a separate username and password, only to find out when adding a video about a week ago that I just can’t log in anymore. No word of warning. They just yanked the ability to log in with a username and password.

I have facebook but I usually refuse to use it, especially for an unrelated service. For one, I don’t want to worry about what permissions your app has (“basic” permissions includes my friends list, which is something your app shouldn’t require at all), and I don’t really trust facebook and their frequent change in policies.

Even if you’re not going to have your own authentication system (I think you should), at least give me a few options.

Lovely Windows Desktop UI concept.

(via The Verge Forums)

Judas Priest last night!

Minimal Mac: Microsoft’s Biggest Miss

An interactive flash animation that attempts to impress upon you the sheer unimaginable scale of the universe. Terrific!

In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that’s the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, “No.”

Mark Shuttleworth just announced the HUD, which is sort of like Synapse, but for app menu items. Personally, I’m looking forward to this in Precise (if it lands). Compared to the traditional menu, discoverability does take a hit in the HUD (at least in its current form) and Mark does admit as much. However, the Inkscape example in the video is interesting. Fuzzy matching and prioritising is rather sweet.

I’d also imagine this to work really well in applications where you’re already spending a lot of time on the keyboard: text editors, word processors and terminals come to mind. Great to see Canonical pushing forward here.

SOPA and PIPA (by khanacademy)

Simple and easy to follow primer on the two draconian and incredibly lopsided bills.

newsweek:

Tweets from kids trying to use Wikipedia for their homework—and failing. SOPA!

[h/t gangster curator Katie Notopoulos]

Heh, silly kids.

Penn Jillette rambles quite a bit. It’s moderately amusing at best, and he does it often. But there is something to be said for the larger point he tries to make. Which is that it is possible to live an ethical/moral life based on shared experiences with other people, and without believing in a god.

I haven’t been to the best page in the universe for some time now, but this latest piece by Maddox is rather hilarious. In a way that only Maddox can pull it off.

“Math doesn’t suck, you do.”