Microposts

I’m still a Safari diehard, and I also tend to have a lot of tabs open. So last night I started on a command line utility to browse, search, and switch Safari tabs called fari.

I’ll be adding support for iCloud Tabs across devices, as well as features like pulling tabs off into separate windows, recombining them, closing them, sorting them, opening them in other browsers, saving and loading sets, and exporting lists of URLs. It will be the keyboard-focused power tool for web browsing that I’d like to see in the world.

I did it in Python because it’s fun and it seems well suited to this type of utility. So far(i), so good.

Been gradually tuning up my links page to try to catalog the interesting things that I come across on the web. For now, they’ll just live there, but I might do an occasional roundup or something like that in the future. I’ve also got a feed, if you’re (still into that | into that again).

Love this on why it’s great to write blog posts:

In fact, your blog indirectly says a few extra things about you. First, it shows that you have the discipline to take the time to structurally and understandably write down a solution to a (complex) problem. Or that you take to the time to voice your opinion on a subject in a clear and concise way.

I found this very true the first time around in self-employment over at my old blog. I essentially found plenty of work for five years through word of mouth and through my blog reaching folks. It even led to living overseas for a time!

And, regarding teaching as learning:

It happens ever so often that while I’m trying to explain something in a blog post, I notice that I have a hard time putting it down in clear and consise words. Typically this is because I apparently don’t fully understand what I’m trying to write down. In these situations, I dive a bit further into the topic to fill the gaps in my understanding. And this is great! I’m actually learning new things while I’m writing down something that I thought I already knew.

So true.

Sometimes it’s amazing how much an image can shape your understanding of the world and your place in it.

[They] did more […] than just introduce a new keyboard. A new keyboard alone would have been an anticlimax, as [they] realized. Computer manufacturers have been making good keyboards for years. So [they] also promised to give a free keyboard to all current owners of […], and to those who buy remaining inventories of […] with old keyboards.

This generous offer was perhaps the biggest surprise of the day. Plenty of computer companies have made mistakes in the past, but very few have offered free retrofits on such a scale. Still, the offer wasn’t solely an outburst of altruism. It both protects and reinforces [their] all-important reputation for dependability and service. And as [their] publicist confided, it’s also [their] way of acknowledging that it should have designed the […] with the new keyboard in the first place.

Compute! Issue 53, October 1984, regarding IBM’s PCjr