aminsblog

BitCoin is to banks, as what Email is to post offices

What if Facebook would call Facebook friends amigo’s? The world would be a different place.

Click.

“Nash rarely attended class, claiming it would blunt his originality.” – A Brilliant Madness

It’s about the brand.

Revenue tells you how relevant your company is according to the world.
Profits tell you how well you have exploited your companies relevance.

It’s OK if you don’t get it.

“We have over ten thousand passengers per employee. Britsh Airways has 750 passengers per employee. Our people are 14 times more productive.” – Michael Cawley (Interim CEO RyanAir)

over stability

Designed this one page layout while not being able to sleep.

I hate cables. I have a lot of cables; Wacom, Lightning, speakers, headphones, MagSafe etc. The person who can solve the world’s cable problem will definitely add a lot of value to our everyday lives. That’s why I dislike education. Schools sometimes want to teach you to be creative, which in essence results in quite the opposite. They might come up with an exercise where you have to think of all sorts of solutions to solve the cable problem. But if you just let people do what they want, they will automatically think of many solutions for problems that bug them out. Their solutions might not have anything to do with the cable problem, but it could still be significant in another field.

should not try to be good programmers, and vice versa.

Sometimes I think Steve Jobs was just as fascinated by Kubrick’s 2001 as I’ve been.

iPod // “Open the pod bay doors hal”
iPhone 5 // Black monolith
Siri // Hal 9000 Apple Hal 9000 Ad

Many companies are started every day. Not all companies add actual value to the market. The ones that do have a clear right to exist. So how does a company go about adding value? Only two options appeal to me:

1. You offer a product that is new and innovative
2. You offer a product that is similar to the ones your competitors already offer, but it is priced at a much lower rate

In both cases, whether we’re talking about a product or a service, real value is added to the market. Customers love paying less for the same product, and they don’t mind paying more for something that is more useful than a less capable product. Who decides whether a company has the right to exist? The customers do, the people of the world. They vote with their money by choosing carefully on which company they want to spend it on. People spend money only in their self interest. A company that wants to stay relevant and secure it’s long-term existence should do no other than serve it’s customers best.

when I feel bored.

Here’s my initial sketch for the skull anchors. We chose to go with the one in the upper right.

Ubersuggest is a cool tool that lists all of Google’s autocomplete search suggestions for a specific query. Suggestor is also nice.

Some insights in some of my explorations in developing the trashness store.

cyberpunk

Throughout the world governments always professed to be forward looking, in practice they are always backward looking, either protecting the industries that exist or making sure that whatever ventures they have decided to undertake are encouraged and develop. – Milton Friedman

with the beautiful mind of Milton Friedman.

Big fan.

In BigCartel prices are shown as ‘$14.00′ instead of ‘$14‘. If you want to remove the ‘.00′ from your prices, you can edit your HTML to remove the cents from displaying by using the “remove” filter. So your HTML would look like this:
{{ product.price | money_with_sign | remove: “.00″ }}

Less CSS is to CSS, what jQuery is to JavaScript

is as little design as possible.

I’ve fallen in love with the OD-11, a cloudspeaker from Teenage Engineering.

“Virtually every important service that you use, online but eventually offline too, are going to get remade and designed from the botom up with people at their center.” – Mark Zuckerberg

trashness tumblr

is an unproductive day

His name is Anas. At only 14 years old, he’s learning way faster about web, tech & coding than his spoiled counterparts from the western world.

The only thing I’ve really done is followed my curiosity wherever it led, even if that meant crazy things like leaving school or not taking a “real” job.” – Aaron Swartz

Explained in a simple video by Richard Dawkins. His floral shirt ♥

If you think it’s cool to be rich, think again. It’s cooler to be broke. Being broke forces one to think outside the cube. You have no other choice than to carefully choose what horses to ride on. It breeds creativity and thoughtfulness. It makes you a jazz performer – you have to improvise with whatever tools you’re given.

Sunita Williams guides you trough the International Space Station

The more choice you’re given, the less likely you are to choose anything.

Perhaps nobody will find this interesting, but I’m fascinated by product manufacturing and have never read something explaining the creative process in a non-boring way for mere mortals. So in this post I will try to explain how we made our skull knit tie’s.

We came up with the idea to create a knit tie with an all-over skull pattern. I started sketching a bunch of skulls, chose one, and finalized the design. We manufactured a sample knit tie from our design. The problem was that because we used a knit tie as our ground fabric, the skull embroidering looked a bit rough. The first couple of prototypes were not meeting our expectations. To get where we wanted to be we had to change the way we embroidered the skulls, but also the base fabric of the knit tie. This is why the skull knit tie is knitted extremely fine compared to our other knit’s. The final prototype looked very neat, and we decided to start manufacturing them in large quantities. In this stage, we’re just betting based on our instincts that our customers would love this tie as much as we do.

Apple should acquire this.

swim with the current

“Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.” – Wikipedia

that nobody else agrees on?

don’t apply to me.

“Common sense is not so common” – Voltaire

I redesigned PopularFollowers. Fack yeah.

(Indians used to say this about white people)

is the new rich

is more professional than being professional.

is bigger than power.

Of all the barriers that prevented me from learning, school was no. 1 by far

I’ve got two invites for Dribbble. Shoot me an email and I will consider your work.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”

No reward

Oracle founder Larry Ellison explains why Microsoft is a huge dickhead.

My friday eve. We’re going to need some help at the trashness store.

Two great stories about it.

“That 30 people learn best by sitting silently for 50 minutes while someone talks at them.”

Fuck school.

“Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest.”

Richard W. Hamming

Thoughts on Design, Paul Rand
Thoughts on Flash, Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs on Paul Rand

Here’s some things that happened within the first 24 hours after the trashness store launch:

• First sale within 4 minutes
• We received orders from 10+ different countries
• One of the items was sold out within hours
• Maarten and I popped one of the finer bottles from Moët & Chandon

“PayPal said its total payment volume in China was more than $4.4 billion in 2010, up 44 percent from a year ago.” – Reuters. Up 44%, damn.

Get it done boy!

I’ve been a player on Dribbble for about two months now, and I’ve just uploaded my first shot! And, what’s more, it has 22 likes. I’m in AWE! Peace out mothafuckaz!!!

Trashness is now using the multiplication sign in blog-post titles instead of a normal x. old: x × :wen

Fuck LinkedIn.

“My lack of knowledge in the beginning really helped” – Scott Schuman

“I wasn’t a student for very long, but I was more a student of life once I left school” – Richard Branson

Owww shiii.

Let’s say – hypothetically – Company A is worth 1 million dollars, and Company B is also worth 1 million dollars. Both companies are completely identical to each other, except for the fact that company A has $100.000 worth of savings in the bank. If the difference becomes known to the public, traders will prefer buying the stock of Company A, making the market cap rise quickly to $1.1 million. My point is: dividend is nothing more than getting a tiny piece of the stock value as real dollars in your bank account. If you want dividendmoney, go ahead and sell a couple stocks.. Don’t make Apple fuck up their awesome amount of bank savings.

There is one real value in dividends, though, it’s called a dividend reinvestment plan, or DRIP, which – if the company ‘supports’ it – allows shareholders to receive dividends in the form of new stocks instead of cash, often without having to pay for any extra transaction fee’s. On long term, this is a true wealth machine, because if you own a thousand stocks at first, you might own 1.025 at the next dividend pay-out, so that at the next dividend round you will receive dividends payed out over 1.025 stocks instead of 1.000, this can go on and on forever, creating exponential growth. Apple currently doesn’t offer DRIP to their shareholders, I emailed them in 2011 to ask them why not? Their answer was “Sorry, currently we don’t have plans to support a DRIP”. Can’t believe Apple allows fuckups to work at their IR department.

is not happening fast enough for me. Not kidding, either.

is the enemy of great.

Here’s a trailer.

for Internet Explorer. this site is now also dark to IE

At Charlie Rose to discuss the iPhone 5.

An artist took all kinds of drugs and made self portraits while high on them. Flabbergasting project.

“I was aware of the character flaws that people have described about Steve. For me however, my interaction with him revealed none of these views, although I don’t doubt the anecdotal stories about his impatience and qualities of dictatorial control. What I did discover, and this is true with other artists, that once they trust you, that level of control tends to fall away. – Seeff

Bob Cringely: Are you a hippie or a nerd?
Steve Jobs: If I had to pick one of those two I’m clearly a hippie.

“The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites and rare who are going to rule”. – Oscar Wilde

You will find a way.

You’ll find and excuse.

I’ve been working on a fun project which is called Popular Followers. It allows you to sort your twitter followers on the amount of followers that they have. I wanted to find out if my trashness twitter account had any celebs/high-profile people following it, and didn’t want to manually scan our 1500 followers. Google showed me there was an awesome programmer (Raymond Camdon, he works for Adobe, is extremely productive, has adopted children) who had already tried to create such a tool, I emailed him to ask if he’d be interested to collaborate with me on creating this simple tool for the masses. His job, to code, my job, to built the interface. His job was done in about an hour, mine too. But designing such a small tool is easy, since we didn’t need much more than a background, and a big-ass form box. The complete project, from my initial email to him, to deciding on a name, registering a domain, was finished in 24 hours. It took a bit longer before we actually launched, though, but this was nevertheless the most productive collab I’ve ever had. So hereby, dear readers of my blog (facking nobody), I proudly present to you what is probably the tiniest Twitter tool of all times: Popular Followers.

“It’s more than a place or activity, it’s a way of life.”

Oh fack yes! I got invited to Dribbble! This is awesome.

knows something you don’t.

I use the word “lean” a lot. Let me clarify different uses of the word with some examples.

• Yo, wanna lean tomorrow? {Yo, wanna hang out tomorrow?}
• Where can I get lean? {Where can I buy syzzurp?}
• I’m very lean. {I am not skinny, but rather lean; masculine and lacking body fat}
• He was leaning against the wall. {He was balancing himself using the wall}
• That’s a lean startup.{that startup company is organized efficiently and intelligently}

Whatever I’m wearing, I’m always wearing jogging shoes. And this is how I feel about it.

“Each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined.” – Phil Schiller

I’ve opened some photo’s to be publicly viewable on my flickr account.

So happy with my new Dribbble t-shirt! Every graphic designer should know about dribbble.

“The only greatness for man is immortality.” – James Dean

Designed to make intercourse in space possible.

“I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”

Giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive.

A pinky swear is – in my opinion –  the highest level of interpersonal agreements, leaving contracts and verbal agreements far behind it.

Holy fak. I love how extremely responsive it is. This is a no-brainer, Apple should buy this company pronto.

So, two days after I received the latest MacBook Air 13″, it’s time for a very short comparison with the previous 2011 13″ model, nobody reads my website anyway so a long review is not in place here. Here’s a list of differences I’ve noticed so far:

• They’re both extremely fast. It’s hard to say the new one is faster, even though benchmarks will tell it is, but I haven’t used it for extremely CPU intensive tasks. Photoshop, HD video editing and such things already were lightning fast on the previous model. The difference in speed is hardly noticeable.
• Update: Holy smokes. I just ran the stopwatch while booting the 2012 Air. It’s fully loaded within 11 seconds. Sweet Moses smell the roses!
• From the outside, you won’t be able to tell ‘em apart, but if you look closely, you might notice that the keyboard is slightly better looking, the buttons are thinner, but somehow feel much better while typing. This is the most noticeable difference. Typing is heaven on this thing. It’s a $80 MIDI keyboard versus a Bosendorfer grand piano, the buttons have a soft, organic pressure to them. It’s details like these that only Apple is anal about.
• When waking up from sleep, the Wi-Fi reconnects even faster than the previous model. By the time you’ve opened your Air you can already browse the internet (it’s like 1,5 sec vs 2,5 sec).
• The internal speakers sound a bit different. The 2012 model has a much better, cleaner sound, but is lacking bass compared to the 2011 model. As if we weren’t lacking bass already. To be honest, I prefer the sound of the previous model.
• The new FaceTime HD built-in webcam is much, much better. Not only a shitload sharper, but more frames per second and greater dynamic range as well. A huge plus for avid video-skypers or Photo Booth bombers.
• On the older models, audio output was a bit laggy. When you’d plug in your headphones while playing music, you’d hear complete silence for 3 or 4 seconds before the audio finally came out of the headphones. This is now instant.

This post turned out much longer than I intended it to be.

• Eyes Wide Shut
• Baraka
• Fucking Amal
• Leaving Las Vegas
• The Science of Sleep
• Sex, Lies, and Videotape
• Dancer in the Dark Almost weeped from this one
• The Truman Show
• American Psycho
• Clerks
• Beijing Bicycle
• Turtles Can Fly
• Full Metal Jacket The first 40 minutes ♥

“They are simply unconcerned by society’s disapproval of their habits or beliefs.”

Remember BlackBerry? Seriously..

I have it as a MP4 video file on my disk. If you want it, send me an email. I’m not going to publish the link publicly, otherwise it will go viral within minutes, leaving me with a huge fine for excessive bandwidth.

“The only ones for me are the mad ones.” —Jack Kerouac

Fascinating.