I’m continually surprised and delighted by Wolfram Alpha.
This is pretty great, although it was not the word I was thinking of:
Here are several lists of ways Wolfram delights:
Wolfram Easter Eggs
More Wolfram Easter Eggs
Yet More Wolfram Easter Eggs1
A really complete, user-submitted, list on the Wolfram forums
Mashable sure does like Wolfram Alpha. ↩︎
Writing a review about TextDrop would a be a bit like writing a review about my wife. I’ve already fallen in love. The review would pretty much be a love letter at this point.
I’ve written earlier reviews about TextDrop (intro, 3.5 Update, Sort by date update) but this week the service received a huge update that warrants a couple of fist pumps and high fives, bro.
What is TextDrop The developer of TextDrop makes no secret about his inspiration.
Amazon just announced that S3 now works for hosting static sites at the root level of a domain. That means static sites can be hosted at something like “macdrifter.com” instead of “www.macdrifter.com”1
This site is hosted at Webfaction, not Amazon S3. ↩︎
These are the things that shape my life:
In 2012, a self deprecating, hobo-chic, youngish gentleman posts about super heroes and little girls.
Later, that same year my 4 year old daughter sits on Santa’s lap for the first time and asks for one thing, “An X-Mann. The scratchy guy."1
Don’t tell me the Internet isn’t the single greatest achievement of humanity.
So, thanks to all the little stones out there that add character and influence to my world.
Part deux in my Blogroll series. (Episode I)
I’m opinionated, reactionary and methodical in my RSS reading. These are sites that I like to read:
Hypertext.net: Justin Blanton writes here occasionally and I don’t want to miss any of it.
In the Pipeline: I link to Derek a lot. This site is mostly chemistry and pharmaceutical centric but many of his ideas extrapolate to any significantly advanced endeavor.
OneThirty Seven: I like smart, wordy brits with opinions.
I’ve used OmniFocus since the first week it was released. I’ve reached a professional tipping point. I manage some large projects with dozens of contributors that span several years. My OmniFocus database has many, many hundreds of tasks. Six months ago I realized that contexts were becoming irrelevant in an always-available and online world. I can do email at any time. I can write or search the web from my phone.
NerdQuery moved to a new server yesterday and the speed improvements are noticeable. This is the value of a good hosting provider. I moved Macdrifter to WebFaction1 a little over a year ago and I’ve been very happy with the service. But a few weeks ago I noticed that NerdQuery, which does not run on the same host as Macdrifter, was very slow. I submitted several support tickets and the responses from WebFaction support did not seem satisfactory.
Another week without a sponsor so another week of Pinboard tips instead.
Before we begin, go ahead and get Brett Terpstra’s CSS for beautifying Pinboard. That’s not a tip, it’s a pre-requisite. It’s pretty.
I’ve written of other ways to beautify Pinboard, but Brett’s is the easiest and I neglected to mention it before.
Quick Edit Groups Pinboard is my archive of web content. To get the most value out of the resources I like to go in and clean up meta data.
Darren Nix describes how one service can track you and share your name, email and company with every other site you visit:
When a user visits a site without ever having voluntarily supplied information to that site, should the user have an expectation that their identity is private until they chose to reveal it?
Criticue is a website where you can receive some anonymous reviews of your own site design. I know, I thought that’s what anonymous commenters were for. It’s actually a quid pro quo system. You must rate other sites to get yours reviewed. I’m not sure what the business model is but it’s interesting.
