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Looking for a podcast? Like childish humor? This episode of Stop Podcasting Yourself is damn good. It’s Scott Simpson for almost 2 hours. There’s nothing more to say. El BJ was my favorite president too.

An interesting story from Business Insider that reads like a slow-motion bus crash. Startups are supposed to fire fast, and in Clinkle’s case, it had quickly become apparent that hiring a sales team without a product to sell didn’t make sense. Some fired employees say they understand that now, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t sting. The entire way through I was thinking “how could they not see this coming”.

As a nerd, one of the hardest things I do is to explain good password management to people that just consider them a nuisance. On the latest episode of Technical Difficulties Erik and I kick around the topic of passwords. We’re partial to 1Password but there are a lot of other good tools out there. The challenge remains getting people to use any of them as intended.

Disturbing and great. The video is below but the Grantland story is pretty interesting, so don’t miss it. By way of Spirit of Nine.

A very nice web form for quickly generating Markdown, LaTeX, and HTML tables. I appreciate all of the little formatting options too. You can also import CSV data to create the table too. Well done. By way of Rants and Rambles

What a great overview of someone that made an indelible mark on computer interfaces and user expectations. Kare was subsequently offered a fixed-length, part-time job designing fonts and icons for the Apple Macintosh; her business card read “HI Macintosh artist.” She’d never worked on computer graphics before Apple, but quickly made strides to adjust to her new medium. “I remember I didn’t really know anything about digital typography, but I got as many books on it as I could,” she recalls.

Portia looks like a handy tool for easily scraping websites. It’s available on Github and is expected to be available soon as a hosted service.

There’s no show this week but last week Erik and I discussed how we read news, books, and blogs on the last episode of Technical Difficulties. You also get a bonus photo or Erik and I enjoying a tender moment.1 As usual, the audio is really just half of the material. The show notes are where the party is. Yup. Made me throw up a little too. ↩︎

Erik, my Technical Difficulties co-host, and I were interviewed on Pulling the String with Ben Alexander. Good title. I like the analogies in the show notes too: These guys went the other way. They built a little boat. Caught some fish. And then they burned that first boat on the shore. Then they built a new, bigger, better boat. And that does perplex me a little bit. Their dedication to craft, rather than commerce, is rare.

This article is about more than beer: The true apex of appreciation is the ability to locate the sublime in any style (not, of course, any beer). This means being able to pick up a glass of helles–or English mild or Belgian bière de table or even a characterful mass market lager (of which, admittedly, there are not a great number)–and find the flavors as pleasant and satisfying as when you heft a barrel-aged imperial stout.