My partner for the Nerds on Draft podcast makes his illustreous return in Episode 46. Not only do we talk about a Stickee Monkee but we chat about music services. More importantly, Jeff relays his literal near-death experience that put him in intensive care. Were it not for his iPhone, this episode could have been much more depressing. He’s recovering as quickly as can be expected and this episode was a relief to get out.

I’m really impressed with iOS 9. Not only is it the most stable major iOS update I’ve used in a while, but it’s added functionality that is useful in surprising ways. The Notes and Reminders apps perfectly encompass the small focused set of features that have become a solid toolkit for getting things done with iOS 9 The trick for me was to realize that now Reminders and Notes are siblings.

If you use Workflow for iOS (if you’re reading this site, you probably are) then you definitely need to checkout this new site by Jordan Merrick: Workflow Directory. It matches the Workflow aesthetic perfectly and even has an RSS feed. You know an app is great when this kind of stuff crops up around it.

A fascinating article from Timothy Snyder: Hitler’s alternative to science and politics was known as Lebensraum, which meant “habitat” or “ecological niche”. Races needed ever more Lebensraum, “room to live”, in order to feed themselves and propagate their kind. Nature demanded that the higher races overmaster and starve the lower. Since the innate desire of each race was to reproduce and conquer, the struggle was indefinite and eternal. At the same time, Lebensraum also meant “living room”, with the connotations of comfort and plenty in family life.

We’ve shipped two significant updates to our beer-hobbyist app TapCellar in the last 3 weeks.1 The first update included a large number of performance improvements, increased the off-line database to over 45,000 craft beers, changed the way we sync with BreweryDB, and added several new In App Purchase features I’ll describe below. The second update made the IAP actually work (sorry about that). New Features There are a couple of new features we added as part of the “Pro” upgrade in TapCellar.

This is an incredible deal if you like Neil Gaiman. If you don’t, then you need to read more Neil Gaiman anyway. It’s a Humble Bundle of 18 or so rare Gaiman books and comics and pay what you like. You can also designate how much of your payment goes to charity, which is very cool. Totally worth it.

This demo of IPython notebooks by Nicholas Krutchten is one of my favorite things today. I’m overly excited about spreadsheets this week. By way of @alexchabotl

Zite is (was) an iOS news service that’s unlike anything else I’ve tried. It applies the mundane methods of up and down voting to create a tailored feed of articles that fit my tastes better than most of my friends can. It took some time and effort to customize my Zite experience (mostly though uploading feeds, selecting preferred subjects and rating articles) but after a few years I’m giddy with what I have.

The folks at Fastmail know how to make awesome web tools. They’ve made a freely available HTML5 based text editor called Squire and it’s available on Github The general philosophy of Squire is to allow the browser to do as much as it can (which unfortunately is not very much), but take control anywhere it deviates from what is required, or there are significant cross-browser differences. As such, the document.

I don’t really agree with the rankings but it’s hard to argue with a blind tasting, not to mention these are some of the best IPAs on the planet.