Simon Katan on teaching peripheral skills around computing, computation, and code. I agree wholeheartedly with his description of tools that shield users from complexities to the extent of hiding how things actually work. I also loved his idea of "flour babies for looking after code properly".

Filed away as a nice introduction to computational sensing, vision, and how computers don't see.

Wow, fzf looks great.

Well that seems simpler than wrestling with cURL.

"SendMIDI is a multi-platform command-line tool makes it very easy to quickly send MIDI messages to MIDI devices from your computer."

"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.

"xsv is a command line program for indexing, slicing, analyzing, splitting and joining CSV files. Commands should be simple, fast and composable." iiinteresting.

"Capture screenshots of websites in various resolutions." Oh, that looks awesome. Really, really nice – and CLI-based.

I liked this introduction to D3 that Square give new hires – does a lot to explain the core of what's going on, without disappearing into handwavy magic.

"There was also one late night when a stranger opened the door and walked into the house when August should have auto-locked the door. (The stranger was trying to enter our next-door neighbor’s house and didn’t realize he was at the wrong door.)" YOU HAD ONE JOB etc.

Rather looking forward to seeing this play out: thirty days of processing and spelunking CSV, from Paul Downey. Lots of new tools and tricks emerging already.

Really nice exploration of a small stack for poking data at the commandline. I'm a fan of jq and its ilk already, so this extends some of those techniques.

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.

"websocketd is a small command line tool that will wrap an existing command line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket." iiinteresting.