My browsers are crashing which means I have too many tabs open. This post collects the interesting tabs as I close them.
Reading and Writing
- Top 10 Books Recommended for Writers – interesting list, four of which I already own.
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – an extraordinary Harry Potter fanfic with a strong premise and a rigorous approach. Highly recommended.
- NaNoWriMo Merchandise – time to get my 2015 T-shirt!
- 10 (SF/F) Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them) – an interesting reading list of which I have read three and thrown one against the wall.
- Humble Bundle – charity-supporting bundles of books, games, and other downloadable things.
- The Plot Whisperer – workbook for novel planning.
- How to tell a story – TED playlist about storytelling
- An Easy Approach to Story Building: The Bedtime Story Model – a story creation approach.
- Intelligent Characters – how to write characters that might be smarter than the author, from the writer of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
- Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published – advice on navigating the publishing landscape.
- How to Buy Ebooks From Anywhere and Still Read Them All in One Place – how to hack your ebooks so you can read them on one device.
- Writing Around A Day Job – a perspective on fitting your writing in around a day job.
Games
- Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game – Jeff Noon’s Vurt is an amazing book which I should probably reread and then write about, and an RPG based on the setting sounds like an amazing idea. Not sure it would fit my group, though, and at the time the Kickstarter was running I was all out of Kickstart funds.
- deckbox – online storage and editing of Magic deck lists and card inventories. Intended for trading, although I only use it for recording what I have.
- Gatherer – the official database of Magic cards
- TCGPlayer – the generally accepted baseline for Magic card prices. I use this partly to ensure that I am trading fairly with my kids.
- EDHREC – Magic Commander/EDH deck database and query engine. Have a commander in mind? See what other cards people play with that card. Have a favourite card to include? See which commanders make best use of its capabilities.
- What’s In Standard? – a listing of which sets are currently legal in Magic the Gathering Standard format matches, and what’s rotating out.
- Time Vault Games – my LGS closest to the day job with a strong Magic side to the business. Fair prices on single cards, accessories, and sealed product. I try to buy things here for the events I run at the day job so as to support them. I also understand their Monday night draft is good.
- The Real Issues With Encounter Balance – why balancing roleplaying encounters may not be the right thing to do.
- Will Hindmarch on Medium – will write interesting things that I like to read.
- Limited Resources – Magic podcast about drafting.
Tools
- LastPass – password manager with a plausibly secure distributed architecture.
- Digital Note-Taking – I’ve written about how I parted ways with Evernote [link] and this is my friend/co-worker Brian’s response to that post, describing his note-taking setup. My setup now is similar, although I’m not quite ready to describe it in a new post here.
- Google Calendar – I recently abandoned my paper diary for keeping track of appointments because I wasn’t able to keep it up to date, and there were many times when I just wouldn’t have it with me. Now it’s on my phone or anywhere I log in to Google.
- Friends of Gabriel Park: Maps – our local park has been mapped in some interesting ways.
- Audio Hijack Upgrade – I’ve used Audio Hijack for many years to record streaming audio. I need to upgrade since the version I have is no longer compatible with the latest version of OS X.
- YouTube – have you heard of this great site called YouTube where you can upload videos and watch videos uploaded by other people? It’s neat!
- The Meadery – Magic the Gathering social network. Also includes useful tools like this proxy generator.
- XMage – I can’t run any MTG Online on my computer, nor Duels of the Planeswalkers, because I use Macs and have no Windows machines*. XMage is a platform-independent online Magic game.
- XMage help forum – help forum for getting XMage going, a depth so far unplumbed.
- Bullet Journal – an active paper-based logging system.
- Feedly – the RSS reader I use. I still miss Google Reader.
- Fitbit – I have a Fitbit. This is where its dashboard can be accessed.
- Bike Commute Challenge – September is the Bike Commute Challenge month, which I have participated in for the last four years.
- Twiddler3 – a one-handed keyboard and mouse which I would like to try before spending $200 on.
- Draft – collaborative document creation tool.
- Habitica – habit-building app. Haven’t used it yet, but might be worth a go for beneficial habit creation through gamification.
- Meetup – find groups with common interests in your area to get together with
Programming
- Welcome to the Dark Side: Switching to Emacs – I’m a moderately sophisticated vim user, but I also dabble with Lisp which makes emacs attractive. I have yet to switch over to the emacs side, though. Maybe one day, if I figure out an easy way to deliver usable keybindings everywhere I would use the editor.
- Getting started with Clojure in Vim – because I still prefer vim, even for Lisp.
- How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors – an interesting discussion of how one of the most powerful tools available to programmers made its way into Algol-60.
- Stack Overflow – unbelievably useful Q&A site for resolving programming and software uncertainties.
- Mosh – mobile shell to manage flaky connections.
- Neovim – a new version of a vi-like editor.
- Multiline shebang – using languages which weren’t really intended for scripting for scripting.
Miscellaneous
- How I limited screen time by offering my kids unlimited screen time – parenting idea about how to get kids to actually do their chores.
- BBC iPlayer Radio – I listen to a lot of BBC radio, particularly Radio 4.
- How Tesla Will Change The World – well-researched analysis of the Tesla car company and its likely impact on the world.
[*] Wizards seem pretty obstinate about not supporting Macs, which is probably for the best for my wallet and time.