Well, yeah. Google is buying Nest.

Nest makes physical products that consumers love, like its learning thermostat (review). Google wants to get more into hardware because they understand that people have relationships with their gadgets, and they understand that “smart” or internet connected devices are the future and even the present, and they understand that gadgets can be sold for profit and that this is a more challenging but potentially more rewarding business than selling advertisements, and they understand that they could presumably put Android on Nest devices and thereby get Android in more homes.

I think there’s a small possibility – maybe 15% chance – that this will go really well for Google and for Nest.

It’s much more likely that Nest will get some attention from Google in the next few months and that there will never again be a great Nest product that isn’t already in the pipeline.

I feel bad for the employees at Nest who made it great.

I just noticed another new kind of information that Google is showing in its search results: quotation cards, with data generated by Wikiquote.

Here are some complete answers from the support page for a new mobile app called Jelly:

How do I create a Jelly account?

Jelly uses your existing social network accounts. You can sign in to Jelly with Twitter and, or your Facebook credentials.

So you can’t sign up to use Jelly without letting it use your Twitter or Facebook accounts.

How do I deactivate my account?

You can delete the Jelly application from your mobile device if you no longer want to use the service. This will not however remove any content you have created on Jelly.

So there’s no way that you can ever delete your Jelly account if you don’t want to use it anymore. The best you can ever hope to do is to remove Jelly app from your telephone.

How do I remove a social network connection?

We currently do not support the ability to remove a social network once authenticating it.

So once you’ve signed up for an account with Jelly, which is only possible via Twitter or Facebook, you can never delete that account and you can never dissociate it from your Twitter or Facebook identities.

There are shitty apps, and then there are apps that are so shitty and so completely and entirely worthless that I’d probably never hear about them to be able to bitch about them on my blog. And then there are stupidly and pathetically lazy apps that don’t support even the most basic elements that don’t even rise to the level of “features” or “functionality.”

Making people sign up for a new app or web service using other services like Twitter or Facebook is totally acceptable and understandable, especially considering how much Twitter and Facebook (and Google) are investing in getting themselves to be the universally recognized services for identity verification, and what a prize that would be, though in time any service that wants to grow needs to allow signup without a Twitter or Facebook account.

But never letting someone disconnect his Twitter or Facebook account and identity from another app? Never letting him delete the content he’s created on that app? Never letting him close his account? That is utter bullshit and Biz Stone, the Twitter guy who’s also responsible for Jelly, knows it. Shame on him.

I strongly discourage anyone from using Jelly for any reason, under any circumstances.

Ingredients

• 6 oz chocolate chips
• 1 stick softened butter
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup sugar
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup chocolate syrup

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour 8-inch glass baking dish.
2. Melt chocolate 6 oz chocolate chips in double boiler over low heat stirring constantly, or in microwave.
3. Add 1/4 cup chocolate syrup and stir well.
4. Turn off heat and add 1 softened stick of butter. Mix until smooth.
5. Stir in 1 tsp vanilla and 2 eggs and mix thoroughly.
6. Sift 3/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour and pinch of salt into chocolate mixture and mix well (by hand) just until blended.
7. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake just until cooked, 30 minutes.
8. Let brownies cool completely in pan before cutting into 1 inch square pieces.

I eat pasta nearly every day, which means I cook pasta nearly every day. Because cooking pasta is one of the things I do all the time, I’m very open to ideas for small improvements to my routine that, put into place, can scale into a big aggregate improvement over time.

Some things I’ve done so far:

• Cooking pasta in a much bigger pot
• Adding salt to my pasta water
• No longer putting oil in my pasta water
• Very slightly undercooking pasta (al dente)
• Adding starchy pasta water to the pasta’s sauce
• Cooking the pasta in its sauce for a minute before serving

My method for years has been, after under-cooking the pasta, to pour it into a colander that’s in my sink, then to drain it there quickly and then to pour it again from my colander to a saucepan with its sauce, then to cook again there for a minute.

The hassle of pouring the pasta three times – from pot to colander, from colander to sauce pan, and finally from sauce pan to bowl – has been a very minor daily irritant. But multiplied by more than three hundred times a year, which is how often I cook pasta, I have a big incentive to fix the irritant.

Here’s what I decided to try using: Cuisinart 77-412 Chef’s Classic Stainless 4-Piece 12-Quart Pasta/Steamer Set.

I’d been trying to decide on one of these sets for years. The basic idea is that the pasta is cooked inside its own strainer, which sits inside the bigger pot. Then when the pasta is done cooking, you can just lift the pasta strainer out and the water will not come with it because it has a lot of holes, and you can pour the pasta immediately into the sauce pan or bowl.

I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t convinced that it would work as advertised. And after trying it for some time, I can confirm that it doesn’t.

Here’s the biggest problem with this item: when the pasta is cooked inside the strainer, inside the bigger pot, and then you lift the strainer out, the water in it doesn’t drain immediately. Instead, it actually takes several minutes to train. That means pasta water will get all over your kitchen counter and floor. Even lifting the strainer out of the pot and trying to get it directly to the sink won’t work: there will be a lot of pasta water. Because of this, there’s no way to lift the pasta strainer out of the pot and pour the pasta directly into something.

Because I couldn’t get it to work the way it was intended, I tried something else. Once the pasta was done cooking, I lifted the entire pot off the stove and put it in my sink. Then I wanted to lift the strainer out of the pot while in the sink and place the strainer into the sink next to the pot. But my sink wasn’t big enough to hold both. And I couldn’t move the pot back to the stove because I was holding the strainer. And I couldn’t put the strainer down anywhere because it would drain there.

I eventually settled into an uneasy semi-solution to the strainer-draining problem. After the pasta was cooked, I moved the pot to the sink, I then lifted the strainer up out of the pot only halfway, and held it above the water level in the pot, but still inside the pot. I then shook it around inside the strainer, getting it to drain back into the pot. Then I’d move in a hurry to pour it into the sauce pan to continue cooking with the sauce.

The problems with this were that it took a lot of time – not saving me any time, in fact, when compared to my previous method of dumping it all into a colander in the sink – and that the pasta stuck to the edges of the strainer and required even more time and effort to pull all the pieces out.

In short, I regret this purchase and I don’t advise buying the Cuisinart 77-412 if you were thinking about using it for pasta.

Three tweets:

Congratulations to the Bump team for shutting your doors and eliminating the product you worked so hard to build!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

Oooops, please don't read my previous tweet until mid-2014!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

Congratulations to Bump's competitors, if there are any! Bump isn't going to exist in a year!

— Natan Gesher (@gesher) September 17, 2013

From an email today:

Bump and Flock will be shut down on January 31
…
Back in September, we announced that the Bump team was joining Google to continue our work of helping people share and interact with one another using mobile devices.

We are now deeply focused on our new projects within Google, and we’ve decided to discontinue Bump and Flock. On January 31, 2014, Bump and Flock will be removed from the App Store and Google Play. After this date, neither app will work, and all user data will be deleted.
…
we’ve been inspired and humbled
…
Your feedback, enthusiasm, and support
…
we want to thank you all
…
Bump was a revolutionary product that inspired
…
push the world forward
…
our new creations at Google
…

Blah blah.

Google has killed another good product. “Don’t be evil.”

R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013:

… as someone who’s been [blogging] since 1998 and still does it every day, it’s difficult to ignore the blog’s diminished place in our informational diet.

… I used to keep up with hundreds of blogs every day and over a thousand every week. Now I read just two blogs daily… I check my RSS reader only occasionally, and sometimes not for weeks.

Blogging is the new resume: Why less is not always more:

Blogging is an effective way to illustrate expertise, personality, and most importantly, thought process. The way product managers, UX designers, and other “non-technical” roles think, communicates their ability and culture fit. Resumes lack this entirely… blogging amplified peoples’ interest in me and helped market my expertise… blogging is an excellent vehicle to share ideas, expertise, and interests. It’s an evergreen resume… If you read my writing, you will know how I think. If you agree with my analysis and recommendations, you will trust my product decisions. If you disagree, then we shouldn’t work together anyway. Resumes fail to communicate any of this. I hope to never touch my resume again.

I’m a longtime user and supporter of Instapaper, including paying money for the Instapaper iOS app and buying a monthly subscription to it. But for a big chunk of 2013, since Instapaper creator Marco Arment sold it, I’ve actually been using Pocket, its free competitor.

About ten days ago, I switched back to Instapaper to see if Betaworks, its new owner, had introduced any new features that would compete with Pocket’s features.

Now I’ve seen enough and I’m ready to share what I think about each of the read-it-later services:

Instapaper

• Prettier text options. Marco put a lot of effort into offering beautiful display options to Instapaper users, and it shows. I love that I have excellent options for reading on Instapaper.
• Tilt scrolling. It’s perhaps a little gimmicky, but I’ve used it.
• Automatic dark mode. What this means is that I allow Instapaper to take my approximate location so it will know when sunset happens where I am. Then during the daytime, Instapaper shows text that’s black on a white background; at night it flips to text that’s white on a black background; in between, the text is black on a sepia background. This sounds lame, but as someone who loves to read at all hours and in bed when I’m supposed to be sleeping but actually kind of wish I was sleeping, I can’t praise this feature enough.
• Better batch editing/moving articles to folders.
• Costs money. This may seem like the opposite of a benefit, but I’m happy to pay a few dollars for a quality app, and $1/month for a subscription to it, in order to ensure that there’s a financial incentive for the developer to keep working on it and making it better. It doesn’t make me feel like any kind of partner to Marco or to Betaworks, but it aligns my interests as a customer with theirs as a business and disincents them from finding creepy or annoying ways to make money off of me.

Pocket

• Video. It’s not ideal on Pocket, but it’s practically nonexistent on Instapaper. Some of the things I want to save for later and check out in a different venue / at a different time are videos. Some of the articles I read have videos in-line. I simply can’t figure out why Instapaper does such a shitty job, or refuses to do a better job, showing video content. For reference, here are two pages with video that I saved to Instapaper in the past few days: News report from 1981 about the Internet, This Video Will Forever Change The Way I Sleep. Neither worked in Instapaper. Both worked in Pocket.
• PDF. Similarly to videos, Pocket displays PDFs and Instapaper does not.
• Mac app. It completely baffles me that Instapaper has no native app for Mac. There are a lot of times when I want to read articles on a laptop, such as when I’m following instructions from an article and using them to do something on the computer. Pocket has a Mac app and it’s just like the Pocket website. It couldn’t have been difficult or expensive to develop.
• Unread article count. Pocket shows me a count of my unread articles in iOS. Instapaper doesn’t. This has got to be insanely easy to do, and it just makes no sense to me why Instapaper hasn’t done it. How am I supposed to know how many unread articles are even in my Instapaper account? What do they gain by concealing this super basic information from me?

Both Instapaper and Pocket are in IFTTT and this allows me to set up an easy push from one to the other. But the two don’t support mutual two way syncing, which I would really like to use. I’d keep Instapaper and Pocket in sync because I think they both have excellent strengths, like Instapaper’s dark mode and Pocket’s ability to display videos.

Both are supported by Flipboard, Feedly, Twitter for iOS and Chrome’s Defer extension. Both rather suck at getting articles saved from either Chrome or Safari on iOS.

Both have made the insane UX decision to place the button to archive an article right next to the button to favorite it. I read a lot of articles that express opinions with which I disagree vehemently and which I would not want to favorite, so every time I go to archive one of them, I have to be super careful not to press the button to favorite it.

It looks now like I’m actually going to switch back to Pocket, though I look forward to Betaworks building more features for Instapaper and, particularly, reaching feature parity with Pocket, which could certainly be done in the first half of 2014 with the right investments.

I’m trying to choose a new security question on the Verizon website. Here are my options:

1. What is the name of your first school? Is this meant to mean my pre-school, my kindergarten or the elementary school where I went to first grade?
2. What is the title of your favorite book? I own thousands of books and easily a hundred of them could be considered my “favorite.”
3. What is your favorite vacation spot? Does this mean my favorite place to take a vacation or the place where I’ve had my favorite vacation? Or, since I like every vacation I take, what if it’s just my most recent vacation? Or what if my favorite vacation involves travel itself, like a cross country drive?
4. What is your favorite food? See above.
5. What is the name of your first pet? My family’s first pet, a dog that died when I was seven? Or the first pet that I named and fed, a goldfish that lasted about a year? Or the first pet that I adopted and raised on my own as an adult?
6. What is the last name of your best friend? I don’t have a best friend. Nor do I think I should need one.

“What is your favorite food?” is the security question that I have to answer to log into my account on Verizon’s website. Not to retrieve my password that I’ve forgotten, mind you – I need to know the answer to this question just to enter my account.

If you’re an adult like me, it’s not unreasonable to expect that you might have tried one thousand different foods in your lifetime, liked five hundred of them, loved one hundred of them and consider ten – maybe all at once and maybe separately – to be “favorites.”

Pizza is my favorite food.

Chocolate is my favorite food.

Cookies are my favorite food.

Hummus is my favorite food.

Verizon is my least favorite website.