"I spend every day writing Rails code in vim, and I’ve optimized the heck out that process. The screencast contains the best of what I’ve learned for creating and editing Rails code at top-speed. Come look over my shoulder and I’ll show you my best stuff." Might give this a pop at some point.

"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.

The ninth day of the Hindu Navaratri festival, the "Worship of Implements", where "weapons are worshiped by soldiers, and tools by artisans"; "In the cross cultural development that has revolutionized the society, with modern science making a lasting impact on the scientific knowledge and industrial base in India, the ethos of the old religious order is retained by worship of computers and typewriters also during the Ayudha Puja, in the same manner as practised in the past for weapons of warfare."

"The easiest way to share localhost over the web." Very nice. Smart pricing model, too.

Nice post on Awk basics - most of which I knew, but the examples are still great, especially those involving variables. The links out to the Hacker News and Reddit threads are also full of good stuff.

"By decoupling their data to minimize exporting, they said their polish actually became fun, not to mention efficient. I think many projects would benefit from finding a way to similarly decouple their tunable data." Yup.

"ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations. ImageOptim combines various optimisation tools: AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT. It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller." Ooh, looks excellent.

"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."

"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.

"Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online." Ooh, that's useful.

"Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git." An explanation of what Tig does, and why you might find it useful.

Ooh, nice - online favicon generator and editor. Might be useful one day.

"Local devs, running local services, but how to share with everyone in the room?" Answer: rebuild all your tools to work across Bonjour. Slightly bonkers but very cool.

"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.

"With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way." Oh. Now that looks interesting.

Jolly good - easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!

"Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input." Which is interesting. I know it's only a research project, but it'd be lovely to play with some time.

"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.

"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.

"The rest of this article will be a tutorial showing you how to host and manage Git repositories with access control, easily and safely. I use an up and coming tool called gitosis that my friend Tv wrote to help make hosting git repos easier and safer." Nice guide to getting up and running with gitosis.

"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.

Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.

This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming...

"What I want to argue is that humans are uniquely talented at ‘thinking with our hands’, and its wrong to discard ‘intuitive’ engineering as a historical curiosity." Tim Hunkin, on fire, about the importance of making.

"SOAP Client is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you access and debug WSDL & SOAP-based Web Services from the comfort of your desktop." Yuck, but might be useful.

Bundle for TextMate that lets it edit (and use) the Taskpapers file format. Nice, simple. Might be effective, but there's always that problem of distribution... so I might still be in Backpack for time being...

"When a work of art becomes useful, it becomes a craft, or it becomes propaganda. When a toy becomes useful, it becomes a tool, or a weapon."

brothercake does the CSS-redundancy malarkey but as a Firefox extension. Which is definitely more immediate/accesible than my version... but still only handles individual pages. Great to see the idea in so many formats, though.

NNW hits 3.0. Time to upgrade.

Code review software from VMWare, powered by Django, works with Subversion and Perforce.

"...this is tool thinking. It’s deferential, subservient and polite; normal web services are arrogant."

A few things in here I've not seen before; worth a bookmark.

Sometimes, you need things Basecamp can't give you - or workflow it's not capable of.

Some nice tips on using sips with applescript

Featuring, of course, Remind.