When there’s just too much video streaming content to choose from, viewers turn to a trusty old friend: broadcast television.

Hogwash. I don’t have broadcast TV, and don’t intend to ever, and I suspect more and more people are turning to that. My theory? When we find nothing to watch, we go into mindless browsing mode, and there’s nothing better for that than YouTube. Check those numbers!

I just installed this and it works really well with the OS X dictionary app. I love Terminology for iOS for its simplicity and how easy it is to share a word to it from almost any reading app I read on.

Someone built an Electron Linux client for Notion… and called it Lotion… 😂😂

People always find me to ask - does this phrase look right? Most of the time, I end up doing a Google search for the phrase and if it’s been used enough historically (specially in Google Books) then it’s fine to use today.

This service automates that process in a great way! A simple search reveals similar strings, common uses, etc. Love it!

Paired with Hemingwayapp and Gingkoapp, the web is becoming a powerful place to write! (Scrivener beware!)

Hmmm. Seems like a good replacement for my liveblog. I don’t want to move my long form blogging from WordPress to anything else, but liveblogging and linkblogging can go to something more professional, and this does seem nice!

Sample site where I discovered this service is here - https://v2.jacky.wtf/stream

A simple online tool to edit text from a PDF in-browser.

You can edit lines but adding new ones is not easy/possible. But it works in a cinch and kicks Adobe to the curb, which couldn’t make me happier.

Was looking for this solution for my Ubuntu box and my boss Todd linked me to it. I discovered a few things - vimcat, the fact that I can install homebrew on linux, and that I love syntax highlighting!

‘nuff said.

It’s a simple app - it gives you journal prompts for when you’re out of ideas about what to write. Enjoy!

Two answers -

uuidgen and random/uuid

I like it! I used random/uuid in a project at work. It’s nice!

In a way, it doesn’t matter, as long as entire generations are not doing this, and if your kid doesn’t have sickle cell because you didn’t bother to get checked.

But the privacy implications of 23andMe keep popping up and get uglier every time.

What a strange thing knowledge is.

Also, nice word towards the end of article - imprimatur. It means “formal approval”

I’ve been saying this since some time now. Good article. A crescendo of voices must be risen in the media to make this happen.

CC Search is out of beta with 300M images

This is pretty awesome. I love using Unsplash to find beautiful images for my blogposts on WordPress. I use the Instant Images to do so. Hopefully this new Search tool will have API access that plugins will get built around and we’ll be able to access some amazing photos from around the world!

It’s pretty stupid that FB’s ‘bold new vision’ for privacy is all about two things - groups and events. It’s stupid because -

1. It’s not. It’s really not. Facebook has had years to get Events front and center. It can be the powerhouse in that field. But I can clearly see that terrible video tab. And I can see that Stories are front and center.

2. Groups. That’s cute. WhatsApp circa 2010 you mean? Groups have existed forever. Relabeling the UI and putting Groups to the center is nice, but it doesn’t solve the problem of privacy or hate speech.

Also, Facebook killed their awesome Groups app years ago. Now they want to bring it back? What happened? All else failed? Bah.

This is great! I expect to see loads of Instagram stories with podcast clips now. Maybe.

Since the service worker is running in the context of the browser, most anti-virus software packages will give the traffic and processing a pass.

This is scary. As our tools mature, including new ideas about notifications and such, hidden things are being added to the back to get the work done. This is great because it brings technology closer to magic, but it also means that the assumptions we make about technology are mostly wrong.

The article mentions that 12% of people who see the notifications prompt accept it. This is bad. Web browsers should make it more difficult for websites to ask for permission to create service workers. Instead, firefox makes it more likely for a user to click Allow. I always click Deny, because I sure don’t want notifications on desktop from random websites. But I guess most people can easily click Allow. The buck for this stops at the browser’s design team.

I’ve visited tech news sites that have maybe one or two articles of interest, which have asked me for notifications access every time. This should not be normal behavior.

no comment. Just funny. And deep. Those are the best kind of comics!

Gah! What is this place?? People hosting their Calibre libraries online, sharing eBooks like it’s 1999?

h/t Kicks Condor

Sometimes we just need a solution that gets us out of the walled garden. This is such a shortcut. Thanks endonend!

For those that directly want the shortcut

“Amazon Crossing introduces readers to authors from around the world with translations of foreign language books, making award-winning and best-selling books accessible to new readers.”

This is amazing! What’s also interesting is that Amazon has sorted the books into “from countries”, typical categories like “historical fiction”, and you can filter to Kindle Unlimited or Prime Reading. All great ways to get your hands on interesting reading from other countries and perspectives.

This has existed since 2010 and today is the first I’ve seen it! It’s ridiculous that Amazon has all these amazing things going on in the background and some of us don’t even know!

People are being murdered and our governments are a shambles, and the big players in social media like to pretend that they are apolitical purveyors of totally free speech. Nothing is apolitical, and free speech has become an empty mantra recited by the deplorables to defend shitposting. Thanks to you.

• Our useless social media

Excellent ideas on how to start and keep a blog, and why.

One of my favorite websites and ideas around writing! “I made tea” is just gorgeous!

This is something I and my brother have been looking for since some time now!

As is often the case with unthinking smart systems, it is a highly individualising interface, revealing no trace of others.

Let There Be Light Switches — R / D

What a beautiful essay about light switches and light and darkness and design. Beautiful intersection of things and ideas. Also takes a dig at smart systems for being hyper-impersonal while being highly individualistic. Hence the beautiful and dark quote above.

The thing is that the details of how to build something are worthless compared to reasons why you need to build something.

I believe that when you’re learning a new language, the best way to do this is to pick up a real world problem you’re trying to solve, boil it down to the simplest version of the thing (no remote hosting, no paid API access, etc) and just build it as you go about learning the language.

When I learned python, I didn’t learn the ins and outs of python before I built something. I tossed the python language books into the trash and just built something, going along as I did. This is not the ‘right way’ of leaning Computer Science, but most of us aren’t trying to learn computer science, we’re trying to build stuff.

So this is great advice.

Yikes. This should not happen. There need to be backups of everything, including passwords, no matter how blockheaded that feels. If nothing else, 1Password shared vaults should allow important access. Or, if you’re sitting on $137 million in a computer, you better have the password of the device written down and sitting in a vault!

RIP Gerry.

I really wanted to get random posts on my blog. This does it perfectly, using a page template in a child theme. :) Now nitinkhanna.com/random is a very nice place to be :)

I’m a little bit surprised and embarrassed at how easy it was to setup SSL using this tutorial. I haven’t bothered about it in a long time, but it’s done now. Hopefully, that didn’t break much!

Nice poem :D

Damn. Now that’s an event! MS tossing their IE code in favor of Chromium is a massive shift in their thinking! Now, does this mean they’ll fix years-old Chromium bugs? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I just discovered Kill the Newsletter and used it to get an RSS feed of recomendo.com I can’t bear to have more email flooding my inbox than already shows up and I’ve actively avoided newsletters before this point! I can’t believe I’ve never gone looking for something like this before. But all’s well that ends well, I think.

Hopefully Kill the Newsletter will do its thing for a long time to come! :)

I don’t contribute to Quora. Here’s why.

More free coding courses anyone?

It’s easy to laugh at this product as a three hundred dollar sweater. So, yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

.@2nipun dude Valve VR!!! And a new Half Life!!!!!!!!

I hate twitter and Instagram ads because of their absurd frequency. The second tweet and the second post on the respective networks are ads for me. Same, it seems, for CogDog.

This is an interesting way of studying the algorithm and critiquing it. But I won’t do it because I’ve found ways around seeing these ads and I’m happy with the solutions I’ve found.

Nice note by The Hustle about Musk’s moves to secure his companies from market forces. Musk may be considered a genius, but more importantly, he’s a pioneer, with a pioneer’s thinking - the grit to find solutions to problems people think are impenetrable.

That’s what makes watching his career so interesting.

Sometimes, the answer finds you.

Nice set of rules Tim Cook is plugging for increased user data privacy. It’s all the more interesting that Apple’s faux pas don’t happen in that space that much. Apple does lie to people about battery consumption but doesn’t stealth send people’s photos to their friends.

Nice kvetch.

I like Windows tools and I like scratchpads. Electron is doing well these days.

Thread by @morganknutson -

This is an excellent read on the pathos in Google from the point of view of a designer. It’s a twitter thread, so I’ve linked threadviews instead.

There are two services I’ve seen that collect threads on twitter. I wonder which one you’d prefer -

threadreaderapp

or

threader

Now that Workflow has been relabeled as Shortcuts, there are websites popping up that deal with sharing the same -

shortcutsgallery

sharecuts

People are really loving the dot app domains, it seems!

We were having a conversation around offline reading, PDFs, notes, annotations and the such recently. I’ve been looking at Polar for a while now. Worth downloading and using?

“Amazon employees could suddenly be making more than nurses”

This is such a BS thing to say. It’s like saying “your company is doing something to prevent global warming, but this other company isn’t, so your company will end up doing more harm than good.”

Amazon can lead by example here. It should.

My new favorite YouTube channel - Peaceful Cuisine.

The last thing I truly liked on YouTube/Netflix was Slow TV and it’s amazing train journeys.

This channel is just as therapeutic. The sounds in the No Music versions are all just the chopping, pouring, scooping of the ingredients. It’s amazing!!

What’s part of a Senior Engineer’s job?

Making Money from Webcomics

Against Waldenponding - It’s a critique of tossing your phone in the water/deleting all your social media apps

Workplace topology

The Ghosts of the Glacier

Inspiration -

Be the light or reflect it

Extra (reread) –

Software disenchantment - nice rant!

The Human API manifesto - can this be turned into something actionable?

This is a beautiful and sad page. This story is so raw and the protagonist is so reluctant to be the hero we all easily make these characters often out to be.

Open this door, Apple.

Could not agree more. From the moment the first watch came out, my brother and I agreed that Apple needs to open the platform to third party watch faces. NOT giving us this option is just negligence on Apple’s part and a clear disrespect for both consumer choice and developer capabilities.

I love visiting this page once a while. People are making awesome apps with Electron. :)

This is the first I’ve seen this feed reader, I think. Reeder supports this using the Fever API. It’s both awesome and daunting that so many feed readers out there support the Fever API when Fever is both dead, and had a rather cumbersome API to begin with (it would download the entire block of RSS feed items in one set).