The 5 Best Toys of All Time →
wired.com
Number 1: Stick
November 2011
15 posts
CrashPlan - 50% off →
crashplan.com
CrashPlan, a backup-to-the-cloud system, is running a 50% off sale right now. For a single computer, it works out to only $25 for a year, which is pretty outstanding for unlimited online storage. I’ve used CrashPlan at work and while the application itself isn’t pretty, it seems to get the job done quietly, without fuss.
If you don’t back up your files regularly, you’re crazy.
Hat tip to the excellent site The Wire Cutter for mentioning this deal.
“If we had to get think-piecey about what the Muppets meant in their first mass moment and what their tenderest fans took from them, we might note that the years of Kermit’s ascent coincided with those of Woody Allen’s rise from cult farceur to major American filmmaker, and we would notice that the amphibious banjoist, with his nebbishy neuroses and his Borscht Belt funny bone, strikes some of the same chords as the mammalian clarinetist. While we were at it, we could also observe that in its particular cleverness—in the rude mechanical self-reflexivity of its show about puttin’ on a show—The Muppet Show functioned as an educational program prepping Generation X for liberal-artistic activities ranging from drafting halfway decent papers on Tom Stoppard to overpraising NBC’s Community.”
—Troy Patterson, writing in typically clever fashion, in “Kermit the Frog: my lifelong obsession with the star of the Muppets”
hdapm: A Mac OS X command line utility for setting the power management (APM) level for ATA hard drives →
mckinlay.net.nz
This might solve your problems if you’ve installed a new hard drive in a Mac laptop (a 2008 13” MacBook for example) and you’re wondering why your computer now suffers from frequent, infuriating pauses all the time. It solved my problem of that description: no more spinning rainbow pizza and goodbye strange clunking sounds. The new hard drive in this case was a WD Scorpio Blue.
substr() with negative index in Internet Explorer
I discovered today that the substr method on String in JavaScript is implemented incorrectly in Internet Explorer 7 and 8. The documentation says that substr can take a negative number as an argument to return n characters from the end of the string, for example:
> "foobar".substr(-3)
"bar"
In IE7/8 though, this just returns the entire string, as if you’d passed 0 or nothing instead.
I’m amazed that in November 2011, I’m still discovering new, not-previously-encountered IE bugs.
Prevent less.js @import caching madness
If you use less.js to compile CSS for your site, you probably do development using the nifty client-side compilation. (And if you’re crazy, maybe you even serve your site that way.) You may also have noticed that LESS uses a cache, and in particular it aggressively caches any .less files you include via @import statements. Worse still, emptying your browser cache won’t actually clear this cache because…drumroll…it stores the CSS in the browser’s localStorage (assuming you’re using a modern browser that supports that), which isn’t part of the cache.
When I finally discovered this last fact, it helped restore a bit of sanity. What helped even more though, was writing some JS that would clear this cache on every load when in development because I don’t ever actually want caching while developing the site.
I’ve posted the full solution here as a gist on Github.
What’s really up (and down) with incomes →
www2.macleans.ca
Canada doesn’t seem to have the same rising inequality as the US.
October 2011
11 posts
Introducing Instapaper 4.0 for iPad and iPhone →
marco.org
Instapaper continues to be one of my favorite applications, and this update makes it look even better. Over at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann explains why you should be using it.
