Virginia Roberts on buying tech:

Always actually plug in your iPhone whenever you sit at your computer because you need to remember to offload those cat pics so you can take more cat pics unencumbered even though you have very little space left because of all those apps you accidentally synced to your phone.

Seriously guys — if you don't read Virginia's site, you're missing out.

Apple is often criticized for their endless obsession with making everything thinner. It seems as though they pick a reasonable battery life target, and make every generation of iPhone as thin as possible while still meeting that target.

Customers, on the other hand, seem to want more battery, thickness be damned. As someone who can't make it through the day on a single charge, I disagree.

More battery sounds great, of course. Who wouldn't want 2 or even 3 day battery life out of a phone? Like anything, longer battery life comes at a cost, and I'm not talking about money. Let's try something, shall we?

If you happen to have two iPhone 6's nearby¹, put one on top of the other. Now try to use that superphone. If Apple had kept the thickness of the iPhone 3G and just increased the battery life, it would look something like this. ² Would you use this ultra-thick, ultra-heavy monstrosity in 2014 just for crazy battery life?

If you are one of the three people nodding, don't worry. I'm sure Mophie is hard at work on a giant battery case for you. The rest of you get my point — thinner phones are just plain nicer to use, at least to a point.

We will get to a point when making a phone thinner is just silly. I don't know where that point is, but I do know that the iPhone 6 feels better in my hand than my 5S did.

Casey Liss on his biggest problem with Camel:

Am I missing any other obvious answers? Specifically, ones that don’t require me to rewrite Camel to use a different data store? I know I can go the virtual private server / self-hosted route, but I have zero interest in taking that on. What’s left?

I suspect that Casey knows the answer to his problem. It's a VPS. It solves all his problems in a very clear manner, and it takes less than an hour to set up. Seriously, less than an hour.

A Digital Ocean $5 VPS + Dropbox would make it simple to upload new posts from iOS. It's the basis of my system here. There isn't a better answer, and it isn't nearly as difficult as it seems.

All I want to do is run. I'm not good at running. I am not fast, and I don't run especially far. My knees positively hate running. They would be much happier if I sat down all the time.

I won't let them win, though. Running is like nothing else, really. Once I start running, all my thoughts and worries start to slip away. There is only pain. It gets easier after the first mile — ignored pain tends to fade, but it never lets me completely forget that it's there. It's building up in secret, just waiting for the right moment.

As soon as I run out of breath and have to walk, all that built up pain comes rushing back. My legs burn. My knees scream at me. For some reason, I love it.

I never want to stop running.

Gabe of Macdrifter, on iOS keyboards:

In the case of the TextExpander keyboard, I think it’s fair to assume all data stays on the device and nothing is sent to an external server. I don’t think any other third party keyboard has earned that reputation yet.

I couldn't agree more.

From the NY Times:

In Mr. Drier’s case, the primary surgeon, Dr. Nathaniel L. Tindel, had said he would accept a negotiated fee determined through Mr. Drier’s insurance company, which ended up being about $6,200. (Mr. Drier had to pay $3,000 of that to meet his deductible.) But the assistant, Dr. Harrison T. Mu, was out of network and sent the $117,000 bill. Insurance experts say surgeons and assistants sometimes share proceeds from operations, but Dr. Tindel’s office says he and Dr. Mu do not. Dr. Mu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Just to be clear: the primary surgeon who performed this 3.5 hour surgery originally billed $133,000. However, he was a semi-reasonable human being, and accepted a less ludicrous, pre-negotiated fee of $6,200.

The assistant surgeon, however, billed for, and collected, the full $117,000 for his three and a half hours of assisting. That's just over $33,000 per hour. For assisting. All while the primary surgeon squeaked by on only $1,771 per hour.

In case you were wondering, shit like this is our biggest healthcare problem in the United States.

Markus Persson, Minecraft developer, on the $2.5 billion sale to Microsoft:

It’s not about the money. It’s about my sanity.

LOL.

It's a little about the money, though.

Up until 2:20 this morning, when I was finally able to order my wife's new iPhone and was ready to order mine, I wasn't really sure which one I wanted. The big iPhone or the big-ass iPhone — I must have changed my mind 50 times.

Finally, after my wife's order went through, I decided. iPhone 6 Plus, 64GB. Gold.

Great, except no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't get the order to go through. Finally I went to sleep and tried again in the morning. This time, the shipping time for the 6 Plus was 3-4 weeks.

Needless to say, I ordered an iPhone 6. According to AT&T¹, I should have it "on or around" the 19th. Don't get me started on the whole "on or around doing" part.

I plan to check out the 4.7" and make a final decision then. If the 4.7" is the largest phone that I can use with one hand, it will be the best choice. If it's already too big to use with one hand, then I might as well get the 5.5".

Or, of course it doesn't matter.

The latest phone from Apple's lab doesn't matter. It isn't important. There are literally people dying right now. How could a phone possibly matter?

Of course it doesn't matter. It's a phone. Nothing so trivial really matters. We shouldn't be talking about shiny new phones. We should be talking about civil rights infringements. Well, maybe we should be talking about sexism. What about all the awful diseases in the world? Then again, murder is even more important. And really, what is murder compared to war? Even war is trivial compared to genocide.

There is always, always something more important. No matter what you want to talk about, something else is more important. Well, unless you are talking about The Most Important Thing.¹ Nothing is more important than The Most Important Thing — it's right there in the name. If you are talking about anything else, you are wasting your time on the trivial and unimportant.

Except.

Do you want to live in a world where you can only express interest in one thing? One (most likely) horrible thing?

I don't.

So I talk about things that, in the big picture, don't matter. Of course they don't matter, and I like it that way.

The one and only Sid O'Neill, with the only thing you need to read about the Great Markdown Debate of 2014.

In those days many Kings reigned in the land of the Internet, and they constantly waged war upon each other, and on their liege lord. The countryside was loud with their striving, and to-and-fro roved many bad knights, ravaging and slaying the people.

This is my favorite part:

They all entered, and found it was as he had said. There was a wondrous repast laid in the great hall.

It's so great.