Over the past few months, I’ve been trying out various search engines to avoid being consumed by The Google. DuckDuckGo’s initial appeal for me was that it doesn’t track me, but over time, I grew fond of the way it displays results and some of the rando cool features. DuckDuckGo feels similar to Google in […]
Author Archives: Michael Arestad
The temporary web
Is there a place for permanency on the web? If you walk into any library, you’ll find books older than any computer. There are archives of newspapers that go back decades. We have access to photos as old as the art of photography. There’s some sense of permanence with the archiving of these items. Everything […]
On being a friggin cyber designer
I live in mild terror of a single question. It usually crops up when I meet someone for the first time. It’s not because the question is a difficult one for most people. In fact, it’s one many people enjoy answering. What do you do? Well, shit. I guess it’s time for me to attempt […]
The shape of WordPress shapes the web
I’ve been thinking a little about the design of PowerPoint, WordPress, and WordPress.com lately. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about Edward Tufte’s criticism of how the design of the PowerPoint software is to blame for the Challenger disaster. I saw Edward Tufte speak about information design a few years ago and one of the points […]
Designing with OSS: Getting started
As few months ago, I decided to make an effort to see how much of my job I can do using only OSS (Open Source Software). I wanted to share my experience so far and welcome any tips/help you can share with me. This first post is about how I got started with a new […]
WordPress commit
This weekend, a whole new set of committers were announced at the first ever WordCamp US. I was among those #blessed with commit. What the heck is commit? For those of you who don’t hang around making Internet all day, commit is just a term for the ability to send code somewhere. In this case, it […]
A new challenger has appeared
Meet Napkin, my new super light FPV quad. Making it was a test of patience and my soldering skills. Another one? A week or so ago, I was flying Ripley with all of it’s brand new FPV gear strapped on. First of all, that was super duper fun. I then decided to shoot a gap […]
Meet my new quad, Five
On Wednesday last week, I finally got my Vortex ready to fly. All the pieces were here. All the batteries charged. All the cameras were strapped on. It was game on to finally take the plunge and try out FPV (First Person View flying). I took Thursday and Friday off to do just that. AND […]
My third day of FPV
I’m getting a bit better. I need to smooth out my turns and tilt the camera a bit more.