The Distance is a new magazine dedicated to businesses who haven’t gone out of business — though most (if not all others) have. Their first issue covers the Horween Leather Company who still tans leathers the old fashion way in Chicago.
It’s a family owned and run business and their products are used in many other hand-made products like footballs, shoes, wallets, and other accessories.
via Unretrofied
Sometime last year, Google announced it was going to do something stupid like force everyone to use G+ accounts, or changes the ToS to a popular app company they bought. Whatever the reason, there were a few tech blogger who suggested we switch back to Yahoo or try Bing or something. But a smaller search engine is what I’d recommend people try: DuckDuckGo
I’ve written about them before when “Buying Sprees” were the topic du jour a few years back and I make my recommendations for Apple. I sill stand buy them and if Square is pivoting at the moment after just releasing a ‘Pre-Order’ app to replace the PoS app they’ve had for years, it might be an even better pick.
Anyway, Duck Duck Go just launched a new version of the site and I’m very impressed with what it does. It scans Yelp, Wikipedia, and other data sources t the search results. Yes, Google and others have been doing this for years but Duck Duck Go doesn’t track you behaviors and if you want to see ads, you have to turn them on yourself. It’s a much different experience and one that I prefer over the mangled look of Bing or Yahoo.
I’ve used it for almost two years and can’t be happier with my results. They just made it more “Apple-Like” in serving my search results.
So… apparently there is a whiskey shortage and people are starting to panic about high prices from the supply/demand imbalance. Over at The Awl, they’ve come up with a pretty good solution: drink rum.
It sounds like a good idea until you realize it’s rum which is the fermented leftovers of sugar cane production i.e. molasses and is popularly known for being watered down on sailing vessels and turned into Grog — the algae filled stagnant water brought on board for the naval ships that took part in the trade triangles.
And since Rum is nothing but a drink made of dirty sugar remains whose only real use was to make shitty drinking water less shitty, I’ll stick with my shortage and drink my craft beer.
NPR handpicked over 300 commencement speeches from 1774 onward. Going to the site lists the speakers by alphabetical order by first name (an odd choice if you ask me). Where there is video, they include a link to it and you can search by speaker, school, and year; clicking on a theme filters and YOLO is one of them — the oldest of those going back to 1975.
Some links only have partial transcripts but the quotes NPR has pulled from them are great words of advice and inspiration.
via Kottke
Watch (well, listen) to 33 exotic classic cars roar to life. It’s like music to my ears.
via Arrows