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).

Oh this is exactly what they’re calling it - sublime! It looks a little bare though. I’m looking forward to a myriad themes popping up to make it look as snazzy as people make Sublime Text look! :)

Libraries.io is quite impressive for its ability to search EVERYTHING!

Great read about Kubernetes by the woman who makes it secure!

Bookmarklet maker is a pretty awesome tool! I would love to use it one day.

When I use Press This sometimes I get a “NOT FOUND” page. I just change the address from u=http%3A%2F%2F to u= and it works fine. I do notice I have to copy and paste the new address in a new tab in firefox when doing this.

—Press This « WordPress Codex

Testing this with a bunch of different solutions. Might work.

Link Thing provides feeds that allow you to subscribe to new posts in whatever way you wish. You can subscribe using RSS or JSON feeds.

—Link Thing - Feeds and Data