Matthew Lang

Answering the questions in physics that you didn't ask at school. This time it's a mole of moles.

via Pedal Consumption

I've never seen such close pictures of any of NASA's shuttles before.

via The Verge

Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones? It's definitely going on the wishlist. Thanks Rob!

via The Hammock Papers

Ever since Google Drive came out, I've been wondering about it in relation to my journaling product that I am building that uses Dropbox. Is this a threat or an opportunity? Initially I perceived it as a threat and I was slightly nervous of the fact that another big company has entered the cloud storage market amongst other big names like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Google were definitely late to the party, but I was still concerned that people would move in their droves from Dropbox to Google just because of some special feature that Google had that Dropbox didn't.

After a few days though, my perception of Google Drive as a threat wore off and I kept plugging away at my journaling application.Then I started to think of opportunities.​ My product is small enough that I could add the ability to allow users to persist their journal entries to Google Drive, ​but should I? The whole idea behind Journalong is that I wanted something to persist plain text journal entries to my Dropbox account. Nowhere else.

Yes it would be nice if it could tie in with other cloud storage services, but that would inevitably prolong the release of Journalong. I had just gotten to the stage where I was ready for a public release. Is the opportunity to target more customers worth a delay in my product.In the end I took the decision to move on with releasing my journaling product.​ Google Drive can wait. That's the beauty of a minimum value product. Release it when it delivers the minimum value you need it to. There's plenty of time to develop it further in the future.​

While browsing through the books at my local Waterstones store, I became aware of how easy it was to pick up books, rifle through them and decide whether to add them to my reading list or not. It's something I do every month. Flick through a few books at the bookstore, take notes of their titles and then purchase them on Amazon for my Kindle. I've never just bought a book on Amazon though.While the purchase of books on Amazon is simple enough, the actual browsing of books isn't the same as your average book store. At the book store I find that it's quicker to pick up a book, flick through it, read the synopsis and then decide whether you like it or not.

On Amazon it's fairly easy to decide on whether a book interests you or not as all the information is there on the book's product page. Finding that book on Amazon however isn't as easy as the bookstore method. You can't glance or scan the books on the Amazon website.

Finding a specific genre or category is easy enough but then you're met with a massive volume of books displayed in a white spaced grid with tiny images of the books cover.I'd much rather be able to scan the book spines in a horizontal page ordered by author. Just like the bookshelf at the bookstore. They have images of the book cover on the Amazon website, but why not the spine?

They've probably already done tonnes of research on this with teams of designers and marketing folks and disagree with my view. For me however, the browsing of books on Amazon just doesn't compare to the experience of visiting a bookstore.​

via Fixed Gear Girl Taiwan

The email client redesigned for today.

via Fixed Gear Girl Taiwan

The Hammock Papers. Because you never know when you'll need the words to that naval song.

Dropbox just announced better plans. Really tempted to move a few more things to the cloud.

Nicholas Bate is at again. This time it's his winning career formula. You might want to mix some strategies for success in there as well.

Yes folks, we have entered new realms of crazy in the mountain bike world. 11 gears.

It was only a couple of years ago that everyone thought we were going to have 3x10 gearing, but now 2x9/10 is becoming more popular and if you have the legs for it, you can go down to 1x11, SRAM's new drivetrain.

With this you can now pretty much get any number of gearing you want (within reason of course) on any mountain bike.

Carbon cranks for the XX-1 set might be a bit expensive though, so I'll wait for it to trickle down the range perhaps next year.

The mass market is no longer. There is almost no room left for the next Procter & Gamble or Google. Instead, you are far more likely to do your best work if you are willing to delight a few as opposed to soothe the masses.

— Take This Simple Marketing Quiz by Set Godin

... and other writing tips from Explore.

The raw steel look. Love it!

via Pedal Consumption

I love reading posts like this. It's that moment when people wake up and say, "Fuck it. I'm doing things better from now on".

Be brutally honest with your self. Write about it and tell the world. Then just think about the first time someone asks you "How's that whole 'make things and be awesome' thing going?".

What are you going to answer with? I know what I would want to answer with.

via Singletrack

.. to defining what a start-up is.

A start-up should be viewed as continually evolving entity, not a static product or service. Entrepreneurs should use Lean to learn from customers and iterate accordingly. Decisions should be made based on data from customers, not purely a vision.

— You Don’t Have to Be a Product Visionary to Create a Great Product by Huffington Post

It's easier than you think.

And if you are struggling with your start-up and you're thinking of discounting then don't. NB has you covered:

via Nicholas Bate

Wow. Niner sure do know how to make an appealing steel hardtail.

via Singletrack World.

Then I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I'm “bored”. But because a company is a laboratory to try your ideas.

— Why you need your own company by Derek Sivers

via Explore

via Daily Dose of Imagery