links & other things I like

Published 2020-02-15

Table of Contents

Websites

Idlewords

The essay blog of Maciej Cegłowski, the brilliant and somewhat iconoclastic anti-entreprenuer and founder of Pinboard, the anti-social bookmarking service. I especially enjoy Shuffleboard at McMurdo about his tourist trip to Antartica.

Kicks Condor

The blog of a guy passionate about personal websites, the indie web, discovery, and oldschool blogging (maybe?). Lots of links to lots of treasures in here. This site got me excited about personal websites again. I’m not allowed to link to him^[1] so you’ll have to type the words into your search engine.

Gossip’s Cafe

A tiny online community in the form of a virtual cafe. I love this so much. The cafe is only open from 8am - 7pm daily. You can chat with other visitors to the cafe, but all messages disappear after 8 hours. There are sections where you can post songs and another for interesting links. During closed hours you can drop by and leave an emoji, which shows up in the lost+found section when the cafe opens. The whole thing is just so sweet. I love finding community projects like this.

Special Fish

Another tiny whimsical social network by the same amazing community builder as Gossip’s Cafe. You get to choose a username and a color, you get to choose a community to reside in (represented by a little symbol), you get to post lists of things, you get to be a fan of 9 other users, and…that’s it!

Fee.Cool (Formerly blueskunk.club)

A really neat handbuilt personal site by my friend Jake. I especially like the interactive blog posts and the collision of craft and technology. Check out the loom simulator!

Apps & Services

You Need A Budget

YNAB is a zero-based envelop budgeting system. Any time you earn money, you immediately assign each dollar to a category for its intended purpose until you have zero dollars left to assign. This is an analogy of the old envelope-based budgeting where you put money into physical envelopes for rent, groceries, etc. In YNAB, once a category is empty, you’re out of money to spend on that thing—you can easily move money from a different category to cover it, but it forces you to be intentional about it. You’re making a choice to move available funds from your Vacation category to your Dining Out category. You immediately know what the repurcussions of buying that burger are going to be. It takes a bit to wrap your head around the YNAB methodology, but it’s well worth it.

DaisyDisk

The best disk-space analyzer for mac. Beautiful interface and that polished feel of a nice indie mac app.

Footnotes