link

If you’re into URL schemes, there’s a minor update to the specification that now lists security concerns as well as new parameter for canceling an action.

From Ta-nehisi Coates regarding Andrew Sullivan’s retirement from blogging: Andrew taught me that you do not have to pretend to be smarter than you are. And when you have made the error of pretending to be smarter, or when you simply have been wrong, you can say so and you can say it straight—without self-apology, without self-justifying garnish, without “if I have offended.” And there is a large body of deeply curious readers who accept this, who want this, who do not so much expect you to be right, as they expect you to be honest.

What a fun Python module and set of examples. As the name implies, it generates color scales but the neat trick is that it outputs HTML for viewing the colors. Here’s a more extensive look at what it can do.

I’ve used the Surveillance Station on Synology for a couple of years now and it’s great. It’s revealed misbehaving teenagers, dishonest house sitters, rafters of turkeys, and drunk trash can bulldozers. I’m mostly happy when I don’t need it but when I do use it, I’m really impressed by the features available in a piece of software that comes with my NAS. Version 7 is a minor step forward for my use but I’m thrilled that it keeps improving.

This week’s episode of Nerds on Draft is pretty long, but for the investment, you get talk of two terrific beers and our thoughts on managing money. If you struggle at all with budgeting, this episode has some tips and will also add to your list of worries. Oh, and there’s a little bonus surprise at the end if you make it all the way through.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is shutting down. I liked many aspects of TUAW. They had an enjoyable “voice” and I’ve seen many Apple product launches through their eyes. I also appreciated that they did attribution right and links went to actual products, not to more TUAW articles. They seemed to respect their readers. A quick search of my Pinboard account shows that I have 118 TUAW bookmarks. That’s a lot for a mainstream news site.

This week’s Nerds on Draft spirals out of control talking about time and money. It’s hard to blame us when we’re drinking a rare treasure like the Four Roses Eclipse Stout from FiftyFifty brewing. We discuss options for buying back free time and the guilt of spending money for our leisure time. Here’s a bonus zip file containing my notes for the show.

From GeekDad …careful observation will reveal a camera cut between Andersen’s firing and the close-up of the arrow supposedly splitting One advantage of being grotesquely cynical is that I don’t spend much time reading about stuff like this. I did enjoy the GeekDad deconstruction of the bogus narration. Unfortunately this will never be linked as much as the potentially fake original because it has text instead of a video.

Now, this is a lovely little guide to punctuation. Notwithstanding its versatility, the em dash is best limited to two appearances per sentence. Otherwise, confusion rather than clarity is likely to result By way of Lifehacker

I played the heck out of StarCraft. I’m not sure this essay by Patrick Wyatt makes me feel better about all the crashes, but it does make me feel empathetic toward the developers. Working these long hours made people groggy, and that’s bad when trying to accomplish knowledge-based tasks requiring an excess of creativity, so there should have been no surprises about the number of mistakes, misfeatures and outright bugs.