Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

A Father's Advice

A wonderful piece highlighting some life lessons from a father.

Begin conversations with people on airplanes when you hear “We have begun our descent.” If they prove to be fascinating, you will broaden your world; if they prove insufferable, it’s only 15 minutes. Uber rides and chairlifts provide a similar opportunity — exposure to people you would not otherwise meet in controlled time periods.

— Unsolicited Advice for My Three Sons, In No Particular Order by Rufus Griscom

It's writing like this that I love to read but going through the thousands of posts on Medium is a real problem. Another walled garden of potentially great content I guess.

20 Years Since Moseley Shoals

Today marks 20 years since Ocean Colour Scene’s Moseley Shoals entered the British charts. It was the band’s second stab at success: their self-titled 1992 debut sunk without trace and they’d been honing the follow-up for four penniless years. “We knew it was good,” said guitarist Steve Cradock. “We spent a lot of time working on it.” Championed by Radio 1’s Chris Evans – who loved The Riverboat Song so much he made it the theme tune to TFI Friday – it screamed in at No 2 and stayed in the top 10 all summer, buoyed by support from Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher. The real reason for its success, though, was simpler: it was an absolute gem of a record, by a brilliant group of musicians.

— Ocean Colour Scene: the band whose chief crime was being too normal by The Guardian

I can't believe it's 20 years since Moseley Shoals was released. I'm still an avid listener of Ocean Colour Scene today. Can't fault them at all. Recommended.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Love this quote that Shawn Blanc highlighted as part of his Focus Course and he follows it up nicely with his own take on it:

May devotion to our business not be sustained by neglect of our health, relationships, values, and even our own happiness.

— Family Balance by Shawn Blanc

Both worthy additions to DailyMuse.

Stephen Fry's post makes for a good argument in getting off the grid.

Jacking out of the matrix would cast one as a hero of the kind of dystopian film that proved popular in the 70s, Logan’s Run, Zardoz, Soylent Green, Fahrenheit 451 … on the run from The Corporation, with the foot soldiers of The System hard on your heels. We really are starting to live in that kind of movie, mutatis mutandis, so surely it’s time to join the Rebels, the Outliers, the Others who live beyond the Wall and read forbidden books, sing forbidden songs and think forbidden thoughts in defiance of The One.

— Off the grid by Stephen Fry

I would love to delete my digital footprint (with the exception of this blog of course), but what does that achieve for myself? My career is the Internet.

Stephen of course is not just a conventional celebrity, he's more than that. I can understand why he would like to remove himself from the digital world, but it's not really an option for me.

A freelance web developer without a Twitter account?

How absurd.

Subscribing to @problogger’s RSS feed again. Feels like 2010 again.

Sony PlayStation Neo

I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled to see Sony releasing a console so soon after the release of the PS4. It is good to see though that all future games for the PS4 and PS Neo will be compatible and you will be able to play on the PlayStation Network regardless of which console you will own.

That move is one of several that Sony is reportedly making to keep PS4 and PS4 Neo owners on an even keel. The company's documentation reportedly states that there will be no Neo-only games, owners of both versions of the console will continue to use the same PlayStation Store, and publishers are barred from offering special features or downloadable content to owners of one type of console. Crucially, players of both the original PS4 and PS4 Neo and will be able to play alongside each other on PlayStation Network.

— Sony’s upgraded 'Neo' PS4 will reportedly have smoother games and better graphics by The Verge

One eye on a Rails app I moved to Heroku from Cloud66. For my needs, Heroku’s managed platform is ideal.

Not content with the millions of Kindles out there, Amazon have introduced another Kindle to the family. This time it's the Oasis. A very different Kindle to previous models and with a new longer battery.

One of the Kindle's signature features has always been its marathon battery life—up to six weeks in the case of the Voyage, assuming that you read on average for a half hour a day. I always assumed that such endurance was sacrosanct, but with the Kindle Oasis, Amazon has messed with its recipe in a new way. The device is so small and thin that it packs a rather dinky battery, which Amazon says provides up to two weeks of power, again based on an average of 30 minutes of reading a day. But every Oasis comes with a posh leather case with a much beefier built-in battery. The case snaps on magnetically—its battery sits next to the hump on the e-reader, and fills in the surrounding area—turning the whole package into an e-reader that can run for up to two months, a new Kindle record.

— Amazon's Kindle Oasis: The Highest-End High-End Kindle So Far by Fast Company

The extended battery life, new look and what I would consider to be minor features aren't enough for me to upgrade. I'm happy with my Paperwhite.