Too Epic

Jun 21 5:23 pm

Grab it. Tell your friends. Give me your feedback.

And if you think 1.2 is nice, just wait a week or two. Did somebody say last.fm scrobbling?

Edit: Almost forgot, promotional codes to celebrate the release:

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Via: Listenr App

Jun 21 5:15 pm

jayrobinson asked:

What are your favorite music tumblrs?

I’m a big fan of Tuneage, Jukebox, and yvynyl.

And I always love when my buddy Prashanth posts new tracks.

If you have your own set of favorites, I’d love to hear what they are.

Jun 16 4:06 am

# 2

Listenr App: Listenr version 1.2 is in the pipeline»

listenrapp:

Now that summer’s upon us, I’m trying to increment the app more rapidly. I didn’t announce the arrival of Listenr 1.1 because, frankly, it was a bit of an embarrassment. Soon after its approval, I discovered a nasty bug that caused the application to crash consistently on specific blog pages….

This is what I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my evening time on this past week.

On the note of catching bugs, I’d like to extend an invitation to you, dear reader, to beta test upcoming versions of Listenr. Sign up here. Testflight is pretty magical. I’m looking for thoughtful, specific feedback and reproducible bug reports.

Via: Listenr App

Jun 12 2:00 am

# 4

Changing Contexts

Last week I moved to Mountain View (well, technically Sunnyvale) for the summer and started interning at Bump Technologies. Since then, I’ve been a bit immersed in the world of Bump. Over the past eight days, I’ve worked on half a dozen distinct projects. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of them with you. I’m just beginning to get my bearings. Expect more substantial updates soon. For now, a photographic depiction of our (@tedlee, @brillian) residential adventures:

Life is Flux.

May 30 1:49 am

# 3

On set-top box remotes»

Revisiting some “work” I did during the school year. Henry Holtzman offered to pay me around minimum wage to fiddle with set-top boxes and write about them. I bit.

It was a fun distraction from problem sets. And I enjoyed donning my tech columnist hat. I think middle school Ethan would have been proud. But frankly, most of the writing was banal. And I can only go through so many Netflix registration interfaces. Maybe I’ll revisit these guys some day. I hear Google might be ramping up their game. Doing a genuine usability study with some people off the street would be a hoot.

Either way, I think this particular piece is salvageable and at least moderately interesting. And dragging the images around on the page is just too fun.

Reinventing the TV remote is a tricky design problem. If you can’t tell from the writeup, I’m pretty heavily biased toward the Boxee remote. But I think they made a fundamental mistake in making the front face vertically symmetric. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally held that bad boy upside down.

Oh well. Baby steps. Americans and their TVs.

May 29 10:25 pm

# 4

Spotify is brilliantly architected»

A few members of the Spotify team wrote a paper describing their architecture. It’s very readable if you’re remotely aware of how TCP works. I had no idea the service was using a Peer-to-peer network to do its heavy lifting. It makes a ton of sense, and I hope Apple’s impending streaming service is equally well-engineered. I have my doubts given the legacy of Mobile Me, but hey, companies are capable of change.

Either way, I hope Spotify makes its way to the United States very soon. It’d be a shame for such a wonderful service to miss the boat to the Goliath of Cupertino (or Google… or Amazon). The more competition we have in this space, the better consumers fare. I’ve been using Rdio for the past few months, and I’m generally very pleased with its offerings. But I’d love to see how much innovation we could squeeze out with another large contender on our shores.

Addendum: The very fact that the Spotify team was willing to publish this paper demonstrates how confident they are in their offering. Spotify is (albeit at a high level of abstraction) telling competitors exactly how its service works! They’re begging Amazon and Google and Apple and the likes to copy their model. Those are some cojones.

(Source: news.ycombinator.com)

May 28 9:28 pm

# 3

Tumblr Notifier for Google Chrome»

I started using Chrome. So I finally got around to porting Notifier over.

As always, the source is on Github.

May 28 5:41 pm

# 1

The Botany of Desire

Exquisite PBS special on the mutualism between mankind and the plants we consume. And I’m sure the book is equally good. I became a fan of Michael Pollan a few years back after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s an excellent journalist. And he speaks to such a fundamental question: human sustenance. I recommend everyone watch it. Here, I’ll make it easy:

If you don’t have two hours to spare, that’s ok. Just watch thirty minutes. Pick your favorite plant: apples, cannabis, tulips, potatoes. Don’t be shy. The film is information-rich and approachable, and some of the shots are just spectacular (especially in the tulip segment).

I just have one large nit to pick:

The takeaway message here seems to be: embrace biodiversity.

And yet, in the final section, the film casts genetically modified crops (read: potatoes) in a very critical light. I agree, the Monsanto corporation has done some questionable things over the past few decades. We’ve all seen Food, Inc. right? Soybeans anyone? And I’m sure that genetically modifying the food we consume willy-nilly could bring about some devastating consequences.

But the whole premise of genetic engineering is to increase diversity. You’re taking DNA from another creature altogether and seeing what good it could do in a new context. Sure, this goes beyond the natural scope of the plant’s evolution, but so what? Evolution is rooted in experimentation. In mutation. Trod carefully, sure. But by all means, trod. Bring on the diversity.

May 28 1:20 pm

# 10

On sharing myself.

I’ve done a deplorable job at updating this blog regularly. School is partially to blame. But mostly, I just didn’t feel like I had anything groundbreaking to share. I’ve always been unsure about the purpose of Too Epic. The sole reason I made it initially was to fiddle around with making custom themes after my buddy Prashanth introduced me to Tumblr. What a curiously definite domain name for something assembled so haphazardly.

If you look at my scant postings over the past few months, they’ve all been links to things I’ve created. I figured: why bother sharing something unless it’s genuinely new. Why exert energy reshuffling information that’s already out there? So that’s what I did. Solemn, seldom submissions. Five updates over the span of five months. Not even 400 words.

I lurk pretty prolifically online. I follow just under a hundred Tumblelogs. I genuinely try to read every post. I scour the front page of Hacker News every day. I subscribe to fifty-odd programming and technology-related RSS feeds. I read them all. This past Tuesday, I had my wisdom teeth yanked. No physically strenuous activity for a week, the oral surgeon mandated. So I spent time browsing when I’d otherwise be out-and-about. My Safari history indicates I’ve read over a hundred Wikipedia articles in the past two days. About jellyfish and grafting and how capacitive touch screens actually work. I seem to be on a bit of a biology bender.

Tonight, things got a little out of hand. On a whim, I joined a turntable room with some high school friends, and I just couldn’t contain myself. There was so much information I wanted to share. And you know what? They were intrigued.

Readers, have you ever heard of Ernst Haeckel? What an incredible man. Sure, he was wrong about a lot of things. And like most nineteenth century Saxons, he was a big beardy racist. But boy was he prescient about some others:

Haeckel was a flamboyant figure. He sometimes took great (and non-scientific) leaps from available evidence. For example, at the time that Darwin first published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), no remains of human ancestors had yet been found. Haeckel postulated that evidence of human evolution would be found in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and described these theoretical remains in great detail. He even named the as-of-yet unfound species, Pithecanthropus alalus, and charged his students to go find it. (Richard and Oskar Hertwig were two of Haeckel’s many important students.)

One student did find the remains: a young Dutchman named Eugene Dubois went to the East Indies and dug up the remains of Java Man, the first human ancestral remains ever found. These remains originally carried Haeckel’s Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus.

What a life. Look at these illustrations. They’re breathtaking. I just picked this one at random. They’re all this good:

I could go on, but I’ll stop. Here’s the point:

I’ve decided it is worthwhile to share the things I consume. Even if they’re a hundred years old. Even if it’s the tenth time you’re hearing about such-and-such today. Sometimes I’ll ramble. And I doubt I’ll be consistent. But I will be genuine. I want you to know what interests me and why. I want to maintain a public record of my mind. Because all of this information is beautiful. And the mere act of writing something, anything, is so inherently valuable.

Here’s to trying. I hope you stick around.

Let’s open those floodgates.

May 25 5:02 am

# 2

Listenr version 1.1 submitted to the App Store

Hooray for summertime. Just finished up my first year of college. Now comes the fun.

listenrapp:

Hopefully it’ll be in your hands by the week’s end. Apologies for the long interlude of silence.

This update brings improved streaming and listening to posts from individual blogs: