"pv – Pipe Viewer – is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion." Looks very handy.

Oh, awesome: a Pinboard Share extension for iOS 8.

New Danny Macaskill video: off-road (off ALL the roads) in Skye. Remarkable. Also: so much dronecam in biking videos now. (Nicely shot, thoguh).

Really, really useful: a tool from @mnot to test headers, caching, and responses to webpages. Will be using this a lot in future, am sure.

"The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time." A truly lovely short story from John Chu.

The most useful tips in here: set the right headers; set the body of the response to an enumerator and it'll iterate over it, streaming it.

Some great Chess writing from Slate.

"‘If all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip, archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we deserve,’ the design critic Owen Edwards argues in his book Elegant Solutions." An excerpt from a Joe Moran essay on the paperclip.

"pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors.

Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal." That looks great.

"Something that journalists sometimes do is publish a disclosure statement. It’s sort of like an About Me page except it’s a listing of all their conflicts of interest—all the areas of coverage where you might have good reason to think they should not be trusted. It’ll say things like I once worked at Google or I’m married to an employee of Microsoft. I have never written one of these but I have fantasies about doing a comprehensive one. It would be the length of a novel, I think. An endless and yet incomplete litany of all the blood, privilege, history, and compromise on my hands." I could have quoted lots of this, but I chose this. It's good. It encapsulates the beginnings but not ends of lots of thoughts, and reminds me why, right now, I'm afraid of assuming anything about anything, why stereotyping "big companies" as being identical isn't just inaccurate but also unhelpful, and why the point of boundaries is that they always exclude _somebody_.

"Hatoful Boyfriend is the Fifa of pigeon romance and you should buy it for that reason alone." I'm loving the attention Hatoful Boyfriend is getting in the media; this review by Grant Howitt is charming, informative, and on the Guardian website. Brilliant.

Cracking interview with George Saunders, from 2011 (so pre-Tenth of December). Lots about the craft of writing, and about what Just Turning Up looks like. Also, his imaginary writing class in which Hemingway punches everybody out made me laugh out loud.

"Of course this is pure anthropomorphization. Bits don’t have wills. But they do have tendencies." This piece by Kevin Kelly is great – though this line neatly explains my suggestion that 'things' sometimes have 'desires' better than I ever have before.

Good to know SES can just be integrated as an ActionMailer delivery method.

"Given a legacy database, sandman not only gives you a REST API, it gives you a beautiful admin page and opens your browser to the admin page. It truly does everything for you." Very nice.

"Beer comes before agriculture. Gardens too. There are too many generational steps involved between grasses in their natural form and wheat worth harvesting for agriculture to be the thing people were shooting for when they domesticated plants. Drugs and beer and pretty flowers, on the other hand, can be made from a single generation of garden from wildflowers.

We talk all the time about data visualizations and maps that are useful. We don't talk at all about data visualizations and maps that delight you and make you laugh. We should." Yes, Eric.

"I’ve just released a little Mac app I’ve been working on for a while. It’s called Satellite Eyes. It’s pretty simple. It just sits in your menu tray, and changes your desktop wallpaper to the satellite image or map view from overhead." I've had a preview build for a while, and this is just lovely. Well done, Tom.

"Here is a memory-friendly function that should be able to split a big file in individual queries without needing to open the whole file at once:" Yep, that'll do.

"Competitors should take a page from Apple's playbook here and be open about stuff that will give you a competitive advantage and shut the hell up about everything else. Open is not always better." If only because: you get a hell of a launch day. (But also because: you'll never promise things you can't deliver).

"'…consciousness enables us to make conjectures in which someone called “I” can be seen in a hypothetical situation or a story; and from that flows the ability to make judgements, plans, decisions. In short, consciousness takes the vastness of the physical world, whose coordinates of time and space we cannot really grasp, and gives us a model, a working version – a simplified, toy version if you prefer – in which we can more usefully and successfully operate.’" Seeing the "I" in the world, as a way of making things understandable.

"HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more." Nifty.

"That's why guys like Tarn Adams or Vic Davis are a thousand times more interesting. They're making games, not DLC or marketing or anything else. A game, to them, isn't the launching pad. It's the rocket."

Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.

"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.

"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.

"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.

This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.

"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.

IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.

"Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications." Wow – snappy, well-made, and very impressive.

"Slammer gives you any grid you want, anywhere you want: Typographic Grids, Golden Sections, Fibonacci series or Rule of Thirds. Thats not all, Slammer also has Rulers, Crosshairs, Magnifier, Measurements & Screenshots. Slammer is a must have for any designer."

Bleak, stylistically lovely, flash game about the drudgery of existence. Not cheery, but some beautiful touches. And I loved the cow.

"Welcome to the home of the Generic Syntax Highlighter – GeSHi. GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project." As seen on the Panic blog: very impressive, in particular, the clickable documentation of Objective-C keywords.