Whitson Gordon

So my brother got a Nexus 7 yesterday, and instantly became addicted to Pocket, the app that easily saves articles and formats them for reading later. After sending him a bunch of my favorite articles to read, I realized: I should really just put these up somewhere. Like that blog I never write on!

So, here it is. Two top 10 lists: one with my favorite articles from around the web, and one with my favorite articles from Lifehacker (more on that in a bit). Get your Readability bookmarklets ready.

Note that these lists are in no particular order, and I’ve probably forgotten a ton of them, but these are just some that stand out in my mind.

My 10 Favorite Web Articles From 2012

Update: It looks like while most of these were from 2012, a couple were actually from a year or two ago. I decided I don’t care. I read them in 2012, so they still count to me!

1. Can You Die From a Nightmare? (Buzzfeed): This is some really scary stuff. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have such fierce night terrors. Really shows you some of the crazy stuff your mind can do to you.
2. What It’s Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time (The Atlantic): Music might be my favorite thing mankind has ever created. Every time I have the “would you rather be deaf or blind” conversation with someone, they look at me like I’m crazy when I say I’d rather be blind every time. Hearing for the first time must be an insane feeling (as hours of sifting through YouTube videos like this one will show you), but hearing music for the first time must be one of the most out-of-this-world experiences one could possibly have. This might have been my favorite article of the year.
3. A Tax Plan That Economists Love (And Politicians Hate) (NPR): If you haven’t listened to NPR’s Planet Money yet…do it. And start with this story. I’m cheating a bit here because it’s a podcast episode and not just an article, but listen to it. It’ll open your mind to all sorts of crazy stuff. Afterward, listen to the other followup stories on their “fake candidate.” While you’re at it, check out this fantastic, related article from Bloomberg about how the U.S. economic policy debate is a sham.
4. Looking For Someone (The New Yorker): I started online dating in November of 2011, and after only a week of it met the amazing girl who I’ve now been with for over a year. So I guess I’m kind of a sucker for articles about this “mysterious online dating world,” because as crazy as it seems…it’s actually awesome.
5. Bizarro World (The Boston Globe): Journalist marries woman, woman discovers she’s the world champion Tetris player and didn’t know it. Hilarity ensues. This is just awesome.
6. Rewrite (5280): Do not read this if you aren’t in the mood for some seriously heavy, emotional stuff. But holy geez, read it.
7. I Used to Love Her, But I Had to Flee Her: On Leaving New York (Gawker): A really interesting look at New York that pretty much validated all of my feelings about the city. I love visiting, but the idea of living there scares me like crazy.
8. Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered (The Trichordist): Let’s be honest, we’ve all pirated a fair amount of music in our day. But this is a really good look at why, pirate or not, you really really should buy music from artists you listen to.
9. Sad But True: We Can’t Prove When Super Mario Bros. Came Out (Gamasutra): The title of this one caught my eye, and then I proceeded to waste 15 minutes of my life reading a very detailed story that does not actually matter in any way to the world. And I freaking loved it. If you like this, you should also check out NowGamer’s The Making of Goldeneye.
10. Pushing Buttons or Pushing Boundaries (Bassnectar.net): Because I know everyone wants to know: what the hell do guys like Skrillex actually do at their live concerts? (Note: I’ve seen Skrillex live and it was one of the best live shows I’ve ever been to).

My 10 Favorite Lifehacker Articles From 2012

I wasn’t originally going to do a Lifehacker list (as it seems a bit self-serving), but I realized that–while we do have our Best Of 2012 lists–the articles that stand out most to me weren’t always the same as the ones that got the most pageviews. So, if you’re looking for a little more Best Of Lifehacker 2012, here are a few others that I really liked writing, reading, or just plain liked a lot.

1. Why You Should Care About and Defend Your Privacy: I never really cared about my privacy before. Thanks to this post, now I finally get it.
2. Why Does Everyone Hate Windows 8? Should I Upgrade? This one had been boiling up in my brain for awhile. Windows 8 may not be an incredible leap forward for us old-school desktop users, but it didn’t deserve all the hate it got.
3. Turn a $99 Nook into a Fully Fledged Android Tablet in Four Easy Steps and Turn Your Rooted Nook Into the Ultimate Ereader with These 10 Apps: This was my favorite project of the year. I’ve been wanting an E-Ink reader that I could use for Readability and other articles for awhile, and this was just an awesome, awesome solution. I highly recommend this to folks that like the idea of E-Ink, but don’t really read books.
4. Is it Bad to Shut Down My Computer Regularly or Leave It On All the Time? I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW THIS.
5. How to Cheat at Online Video Games: Gamers are crazy. We write a whole week of evil posts, and yet people go insane over this one. As if somehow, cheating at Counter Strike is a worse sin than breaking into someone’s computer or stalking them.
6. How Do I Torrent Safely Now That Demonoid Is Down? Someone needed to say it: Demonoid was not a private tracker. PeerBlock is pretty close to useless. Not all VPNs are created equal. This is must-know information for all BitTorrent users.
7. How Will the New Health Care Law Affect Me? One of the biggest political stories of the year, and we were able to cover it without getting into the politics. Sometimes, you just want to know what’s going on from someone who isn’t trying to shove their beliefs down your throat.
8. What’s All the Fuss About Evernote? Should I Be Using It? Not only have I been wondering this for awhile, but this article finally got me to try Evernote again. We’ll see how that goes.
9. The Best Holiday Gifts and Deals, Facebook’s Fake Privacy Notice, and Noisy Neighbors: My favorite episode of the podcast this year. Though the one where Dachis and I talk about porn is a close second.
10. A Guide to F**king Up in the Digital Age: I’m embarrassed to say I probably need this.

There you have it. My favorite stuff from the internet in the year 2012. Excluding my favorite JPEG I discovered this year, or my favorite YouTube video from 2012. Maybe I’ll have to make another list for those.

Happy 2013, everyone! And if there were any awesome articles I missed from this year, leave your favorites in the comments…I’m always on the lookout for good stuff to read.

I’ve been out of the iPhone closet for awhile now, but I never did get a chance to fully explain my decision apart from a few tweets–and a lot of you have been wondering, so here it is: my decision to move from Android to iPhone.

I’d been an Android fanatic for a few years, ever since the OG Droid came out and Verizon users like me were forced to use it if we wanted a smartphone that wasn’t a BlackBerry. At the time, I was pretty stoked because it was supposed to have a ton of advantages over the iPhone, and in a lot of ways, it did. But, after a few years, I found that it also had some disadvantages that I didn’t want to deal with anymore. Here’s the breakdown of what made me switch:

• Android’s UI is a still little laggy and a lot inconsistent. I just couldn’t take it anymore. You can do a lot of things to speed up an Android phone, but every time I used my iPod touch, I’d just be amazed at how fast and smooth things are. There’s no jerkiness, no built-in back buttons that take you to the home screen instead of the main screen of the app, no apps that make your entire phone unusable because of one bug you can’t seem to figure out where it’s coming from. I was just so tired of it.
• Bad battery life makes me sad. Why did I even have an iPod touch, you ask? Because if I used my phone to listen to music more than just a little bit, it’d be dead before the day was even over. I shouldn’t have to explain anything beyond this.
• I’m still waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich. There’s an article floating around today about how Ice Cream Sandwich already has everything that iOS 6 will have. Technicalities aside (there are a few of them), this would be great if people actually had Ice Cream Sandwich. Seriously. I was using an HTC Thunderbolt, a very popular, heavily advertised phone, and it still isn’t running the latest version of Android. This fragmentation thing really is as bad as everyone says. Ice Cream Sandwich was announced and released in October. It is now May, and HTC is saying the Thunderbolt won’t have ICS until July or August. Ugh. Even if ICS did fix all of my other problems with Android, I don’t want to wait another year for it to happen–hell, I can’t even get a working ICS ROM on Android, because we need HTC to get cell data working. The Thunderbolt is barely a year old. I hate it, but I’d rather have a phone that I know will be current for at least the amount of time that my contract lasts. So far that hasn’t been true for any of the Android phones I’ve owned.
• Google integration is great, but no longer special. The main thing that made Android really, truly awesome was its seamless integration with Google services, like Gmail and Google Voice. That’s no longer really a problem on the iPhone. There are multiple ways to use Google Voice on iOS now, not to mention Sparrow, which works with Gmail beautifully (and, if we’re being honest, was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and got me to seriously consider switching).

This all may sound a little Android hate-y, but I assure you there are still things I love about Android. The wounds are just a little raw, if you will. You know how when you break up with a significant other and you have so much pent up anger that you just hate them even though they’re actually not a bad person? That’s how I feel about Android right now. I know it isn’t bad, I’m just not ready to be friends again yet.

That said, there are still things I’ll miss a lot. Google’s navigation is still the best navigation around (sorry Waze), and the ability to set apps as the default for specific actions is something you don’t appreciate until you don’t have it anymore. I just feel like no one at Google is actually using these phones. If they were, I just know someone would be going “DAVE WHAT IS UP WITH THIS BACK BUTTON, YOU’RE FIRED AND LET’S RE-CODE THIS THING.” I hope that day happens soon.

Until then, I’m loving the selection of apps I have on iOS, not to mention the jailbreak community. Oh my God, I love jailbreaking on the iPhone…it’s a lot less stressful and time consuming than tweaking a rooted Android phone. I’ve already talked about that at length on Lifehacker (boy did that one get some people mad), so I won’t go through that again here. But it really is awesome. I still don’t like the way Apple does a lot of things, but in the end, I just think they make better products…at least in the areas I currently care about. So I gotta do what I gotta do.

This probably isn’t everything that influenced my decision, but it should give you a pretty good idea. Like I said, I’ll probably be back one day. I’m the kind of person that can’t stick with one thing for too long (after all, I’m also back on Windows after 4 years with OS X and about one with Linux). Until then, I’m just going to sit here and continue drooling over this retina display. Keep me up on what CyanogenMod is doing, won’t you?

In other news, I’m actually planning on doing some writing on this blog, maybe even doing a few YouTube videos on my currently half-existent personal channel. It’ll be stuff that doesn’t fit on Lifehacker, reviews of cool little products I like, and probably some fun hardware stuff concerning my rig, which I’ll be doing an update to this year. You know, just because I know you all like hardware porn as much as I do. So, stay tuned.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails (and Google searches, remarkably) wondering what my Android theme is (my Mac OS X theme, too, but that’s another post if and when I can round that stuff up). It’s quite simple; I run CyanogenMod on my Motorola Droid, and while I have used a few different themes over the past year, I am currently using a Smoked Glass mini-port with HTC icons (for CyanogenMod only). There are also good themes in ROM Manager, if you don’t like that one. My wallpaper is one of the wallpapers that comes with CyanogenMod 6. I’m also a fan of Beautiful Widgets and LauncherPro.

Oh, you best believe I’m leaving this post here.