This Nerds on Draft episode may cost you some money. Jeff and I talked about gift ideas based on stuff we like. The list has everything from a cedar oil to a nice new mouse. Most of it is from Amazon so you still have time to get it before the holidays end.

The Advanced CSV package for Sublime Text just saved me a ton of time today. It’s spectacular. If you have a huge unwieldy block of CSV text but want to just select a single column, this is the way to go. Before anyone suggest opening in Excel, go ahead and try to do it with data that looks even remotely like a date. Excel forces it to become a new date string.

This is a terrific Vimeo short film. It’s high quality and tells an entire story in undfer 9 minutes.

About damn time. I’ve been so looking forward to this. This is a situation where membership is totally worth it.

I’m either a fortune teller or it was completely obvious that Dropbox has been meandering for the past two years. Today they announced an end to both Carousel and Mailbox. I never understood how Mailbox sold more Dropbox subscriptions. Carousel made more sense but I never got behind Dropbox as my photo service because it was just too expensive for what the value it provided to me. What a bummer for users of those products.

I’m sold. iOS 9 is the best OS Apple has ever made since OS 6. As usual, the documentation is the weakest part of the product. Every week I find some new reason to love my big phone. This week I discovered two revolutionary, if hidden, features. Annotate And Mail I measure the success of iOS by how many times I don’t have to put down my phone. Last week I received a request to complete a contract and sign it.

An interesting study, the data of which, I have not verified. If the poverty rates for each educational bin remained the same, then the upward redistribution of adults from the lower bins to the higher bins would have led to lower overall poverty. But that’s not what happened. Later: The big things that cause poverty for adults over the age of 25 in a low-welfare capitalist society—old-age, disability, unemployment, having children—do not go away just because you have a better degree.

From this analysis on the Candler Blog is an interesting way to think about writing. Should I tweet less? Probably, but I’m already doing that to little effect. So what’s the solution? I’d go one question deeper. So what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?

In the beginning we had islands of data. What was on our computer stayed on our computer. What was on our Treo stayed on its chubby little atoll. Then we had SD cards and USB drives to float between islands. Eventually we got Dropbox syncing and it felt like the future. Every document I wanted was available to me on any computer with an Internet connection. Fast forward and it’s started to feel like we settled a little too soon.

I already own most of these and they are really good if you use Sublime Text a lot. 60% off is a good deal and I’m not sure how long it will last.