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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Technology

The Response to Forward-Thinking: Laughter

“I wanted to be able to send pictures and videos and stuff like that in e-mail…And by the way, when people would ask me, ‘Why do you care so much about putting media into e-mail?’ I always said because someday I’m going to have grandchildren and I want to get pictures of them by e-mail. And people’s reaction was to laugh and laugh.”

Nathaniel Borenstein from The MIME guys: How two Internet gurus changed e-mail forever by Jon Brodkin

Borenstein is one of the co-creators of the MIME protocol, which has made it easy for us to include photos, videos and other attachments in our email for twenty years.

Transfer Mail.app’s Junk Filter to Another Mac or Account

Close Mail.app on both machines, and then find the file ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/LSMMap2 on the old machine and copy it into the same location on the new machine.

This is useful on those occasions when you need to copy or move OS X’s Mail’s rules for filtering spam from one account to another, or from an old machine to a new one when you don’t want to use Migration Assistant.

The same can be done for any Rules (copy MessageRules.plist) or Smart Mailboxes (SmartMailboxes.plist) you’ve set up.

Accurate as of OS X 10.7 (Lion)

Innovation, the US and China

If you haven’t read the excellent How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work in the New York Times, you should do so now. The story describes a seismic shift in technology that many haven’t noticed until only recently.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

Charles Duhigg and Keith Brasaher- How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

It’s also worth reading Why China Wins after you’ve read the first article for additional context:

Go to the lobby of the Sheraton Four Points in Shenzhen — or a dozen hotels like it. Table-after-table is a white guy from middle America trying to make his company competitive again sitting with a Chinese factory head or “fixer” who can get them into the right factories. It’s not unlike wandering into Cuppa Cafe in Palo Alto and seeing table-after-table of VC sitting with hopeful entrepreneurs.

It shocks me that people always assume the Chinese can only make inferior products when Apple– the gold standard of well-made products– is made in China. Sure, China can make shitty products for cheap. But it can also make the world’s best products. Again, like Silicon Valley can produce a bloated, uninteresting startup like Color and a nimble startup like Instagram that millions love. The startup machinery doesn’t make a company great or bad. It just makes whatever is put into it, more efficiently than any other place. Ditto China and manufacturing.

Sarah Lacy – Why China Wins

If you haven’t tossed all of your old assumptions about quality, innovation, China and the future already, you should do so now. If you want to be prepared for the future, you can’t carry old expectations as baggage.

Quick Tip: Printing or Creating a PDF of Google Translate Output

Note: This is a bit technical, but it does work if you’re comfortable modifying a bit of HTML via your browser’s development tools.

I’ve recently needed to translate some PDFs from Chinese to English in order to understand some workflows and wireframes from a partner. Google Translate provides a great jump start in providing context, though sadly, the rendered translation doesn’t like to print, typically only outputting the first page. As I needed to maintain the layout to compare to the original wireframes, pasting the translated text into another app wouldn’t work.

So, I began mucking around with Chrome’s developer tools and found a quick solution, which comes down to one change: Remove position: absolute; in div.main

And with that, I was able to both print to PDF and the printer.

The American Dream

“We would not have become a global superpower without the contributions of immigrants who built the railroads and canals that opened up the west, who invented ground-breaking products that revolutionized global commerce, and who pioneered scientific, engineering, and medical advances that made America the most innovative country in the world.

“But make no mistake: we will not remain a global superpower if we continue to close our doors to people who want to come here to work hard, start businesses, and pursue the American dream. The American dream cannot survive if we keep telling the dreamers to go elsewhere.

“It’s what I call national suicide – and that’s not hyperbole. Every day that we fail to fix our broken immigration laws is a day that we inflict a wound on our economy. Today, we may have turned away the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. Tomorrow, we may turn away the next Levi Strauss or Jerry Yang.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

This is far too true, and it saddens me to see the growing anti-immigration drive and calls for isolationism. The United States is powerful because of the risk and work of the brave men and women who came to our shores over these last few centuries.

To turn away the next generation only serves to weaken our future on every possible front.

Simply put, it is a betrayal of our core principles as a nation.

It’s a betrayal born of complacency and fear.

We can do better.

All That’s Programmed is Not Code

We’re all programmers now. We all have to decide what to post next, what to point to next, what to launch next. Is there a skill in dreaming up Must-See Thursday nights, or in establishing a season of Shakespeare or even in deciding what’s on the special list at the restaurant? I think there is.

Seth Godin

This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over these last few years working at a high-tech media company. Crafting, combining and scheduling content is just as important as, and not that different from, writing code and designing interfaces.

If your work hits the screen, you’re programming at some level.