Yeah, I’m sure all of this would have been addressed without Snowden. From the Guardian:
The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to “covertly influence” their product designs.
I guess I’m not surprised about any of this, but this will seriously undermine the tech sector. It’s already going to impact sales of Windows. If you were the Chinese or German government (or pretty much anyone), would you want to run software from a US company?
O’Reilly has a nice sale on their eBooks until September 10th. 50% off pretty much everything I’d be interested.
Patter was just updated with a nice visual overhaul. For the uninitiated, Patter is the group private-chat portal built on top of ADN. I use Patter almost every day. It’s fast, has notifications, allows organization by “rooms” and available on any platform with a web browser.
As you’d expect, David does a bang up job on this iThoughtsX overview with a super classy video of the Markdown support.
Cloudconvert.org is kind of crazy-bonkers. It’s an unreal service for converting some things to other things. For example, check out the PDF conversion options. If that’s not enough, there’s a pretty good looking API available. You can bet your hind-quarters I’m going to be doing some stuff with this. Bonkers.
By way of OTW
I don’t really get Burning Man because I’m old and have stuff to do. But these photos from Trey Ratcliff are beautiful.
Derek Lowe on the limits of cancer research:
To the extent, though, that people are told that “More Money” is the answer in this field, I think it’s good to make the point that it isn’t necessarily the limiting factor. Problem is, there’s no way to hold a charity insight-raiser, or to set up a box to Donate Good Ideas For the Cure. Medical research, whether industrial or academic, is a pretty esoteric field to most people.
You know, I kind of miss my crazy Mac icon themes from my youth. I have a longing to create an Adventure Time theme that starts with this.
Rob Trew put together a great Editorial workflow for converting a Markdown outline into a tab-indented outline for iThoughtsHD. The really amazing bit is that it preserves Markdown headings, tabbed lists and code blocks.
What a fantastic Python intro. As Chewing Pencils says, this is great for people getting into Editorial.
