Nest and Google
The one thing that stuck out to me about Nest was how much the design embodied Apple’s, or should I say Steve Jobs’, philosophy. Simplicity, elegance, purposeful.
I know Nest was started by former Apple employees Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell. These two designers were heavily involved with the iPod.
Frankly, I think these two men "got it" when it came to what Steve Jobs wanted to see. And what Steve wanted to see resonated with consumers.
This acquisition by Google isn’t just to buy Nest, it’s to bring Matt and Tony into the Google family. They’ve proven themselves, their ideas, and their approach.
Why were these men at Nest and not still in the halls of Apple?
Why was Apple apparently not interested in bringing them back?
The same reason the left? Were their ideals and approaches swim too much against the stream of Apple’s new management?
The Internet of things is coming.
IMHO, the acquisition of Nest is more than just thermostats, it’s the acquisition of vision of design and execution.
That, IMHO, is worth every penny Google spent.
Conquer the infamous Velveeta Shells-n-Cheese packet
I can’t help myself. I love to mix various things into macaroni and cheese. My current favorite “macaroni and cheese” product is Velveeta’s Shells-n-Cheese.
I’ll mix almost anything into it. Such as a can of strained tuna, or hot sauce, or chili, or stewed tomatoes, or bacon, or almost anything else. Wrangling the cheese packet, for some reason, has always slightly irritated. Well, no more! Check out my solution in this 40 second video.
epath.exe: View %PATH% broken out in lines from the command prompt
Sometimes when I’m fighting some issue on Windows, I have to examine the PATH to make sure the JAVA path is setup right, or that certain folders show up before others. %PATH% can become a tangled mess of various folders and variables that makes parsing it from the command prompt a pain the rear.
If you, like me, hate having to parse a long string of characters and identifying the semicolons to simply verify if a folder is indeed in the path, then this utility might be helpful for you.
epath –? generates a friendly help output: