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Interesting tidbits from around the web (May 25th):

• Learn LabView –
• Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDF Templates – Smashing Magazine –
• Paper Browser: It’s a Browser only in Paper –
• Rethinking Cron –
• iPad as desktop status monitor –
• PhoneTell Adds Caller ID and Canned SMS Responses to Android –
• A List Apart: Articles: Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing –
• Inductor :: Mount Rack apps in Rails 3 –

Browser wars are still alive and well on my desktop. I love chrom*’s speed and each tab as a force-killable thread if needed. Not a fan of 1password integration, no form filling atm. Firefox is a beast and Safari, well, meh. Chromium’s my new default, we’ll see how long this lasts.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Forrst – designer and developer inspiration sharing.
• Mint – on my Droid now.
• MacRuby: The Definitive Guide – Matt Aimonetti’s Open Feedback O’Reilly book.
• Interface – iPhone mockups and prototyping, on the iPhone.
• heroku-sql-console – sometimes you need to get your hands dirty with SQL.
• George Starcher’s YouTube Channel – he’s got some great videos on how to set up a Mac to do podcasting with a lot of attention on getting really good sound as a source. Applying this to the next round of BDDCasts we record.
• ice cube – more recurring events.
• iPad Cabinet – an interesting kitchen hack. Recipes are a nagging problem in my attempts to be paperless.
• How to Set Up Your Freelance Business for the Long Haul – lots of things to do when you start out freelancing, this is a pretty good list.
• Ultimate Collection of Google Related Mac Apps – I had no idea there were this many. Calendar, Mail and Contacts are my main ones. They get sync’d through at least 4 different CRM-ish systems.
• Pimp Your Tables with CSS3 – prettier tables.
• Linode Backup Service – announced.
• Get your garage ready for summer – I just spent part of this weekend doing that. I’d buy less tools if I did this more often. Because I could find the tools.

Well, the Redskins managed to deliver on yet another loss. They actually played decent football for the most part.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Taking snapshots of web pages with Ruby – Ben Curtis talks about taking snapshots of web pages, something I’ve found that might help me in a marketing mission. He links to two other libraries that helped him get started, this one is wicked fast, and webkit makes for some gorgeous snapshots.
• Troubleshooting Christmas Mini-Lights – Going to try the LightKeeper Pro tomorrow, put up our artificial tree today, live one probably by the weekend.
• Rubular – rocks as an ajaxy regex tester/editor, but the best thing is being able to create a permalink to the regex to get or give help.
• Roll Your Own Ubuntu Private Cloud – Is this a better use of your hardware resources? I don’t think I’ll ever do this, not really sure I get the point.
• FaviconizeTab – AppTabs never really worked for me, going to try this one.
• RubyConf 2009 Videos – Confreaks is the next best thing to being at a conference, maybe the best thing if you’re not into networking, don’t like paying to travel, etc. Transmission is standing by and I’ll have to carve out a few hours over the next week or so to watch.
• Fring for Android – I guess this was a big deal on iPhone, I have Google Voice on my Droid, I guess Skype might be nice.

Got through the weekend of client work and Monday didn’t do too much damage. I’m still working on that whole work/life balance. I picked up a copy of Get More Done, Make More Money today, read it and submitted an RFP or two for some Virtual Assistance. Hopefully over the next week or two I can get to a short list of potential VA, or have found one. WWD had an interesting post on How to use a virtual assistant in your business.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Web Developers Can’t Sell. Sorry. – No reason to apologize, for the most part, we can’t. A good set of tips if you still want to try to do this on your own.
• Cleaning user’s input – This has been coming up a lot today, maybe it’s taking long enough for Rails 3 and this is such a no-brainer idea that people are looking for workarounds. Who knows?
• Beautiful-HTML – I half hoped, half thought this was going to be something with HAML.
• 7 Ways to Get More Out of LinkedIn – Alright list, I’m still trying to figure out how to use LinkedIn more. I have found more work through Twitter than LinkedIn. I’d update my status more if I didn’t have to go out to LinkedIn (can’t get ping.fm to work, and they’re support folks aren’t getting back to me).
• Meet jQuery – from PeepCode, bought and on my todo list for tomorrow.
• Python Language Moratorium – interesting.
• Smart Email Marketing – Some good tips. For the haters that think this is spammy, email marketing also gets people to attend conferences, usergroups, and a host of other things.
• Basic postgresql server setup – One day I’ll look at postgresql.
• A first look at the Droid – On my tobuy list.
• The difference between motion and action – or, as one of the comments note, “Never confuse motion with action” – Ben Franklin. Leo has a better post, IMO, The Little Rules of Action.
• Rails on Karmic Koala – For when I’m brave enough to take my production boxes from Hardy to something else.
• I’m an idiot for not using Heroku – maybe you are too. I’ve got a couple things in my idea pipeline that would be good candidates to test out Heroku.

Code, watching Keira play soccer, hanging out with the family. Today was a pretty good day. Tried to scratch together a list of items that I’d like to hand off to a virtual assistant. That quick exercise yielded 25 things, I might need a fleet of assistants or a reality check. Probably the reality check.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• RSS Feed + GeekTool – teh awesome. I needed a way to focus on a couple RSS feeds without all the noise in NetNewsWire, specifically my Github and Pivotal Tracker dashboards. I had a problem with https in the beginning but simply dropping the SSL made things work like a charm.
• Wave back channel in conferences – sounds like a pretty good use.
• 10 Droid Apps – PC World’s list of a starter set of apps. A few of them looked really cool; Twidroid, Compare Everywhere and Key Ring.
• Missing Drawer – We got some feedback on BDDCasts to use something like ProjectPlus to deal with TextMate’s drawer. I’ve never had much problem with the drawer, sure it opens on a side depending on space, but meh. I tried out Missing Drawer and so far I’m liking the feel of it.
• Nice Find – Continuing with the TextMate theme I wanted to see what other useful plugins were out there and came across this, asynchronous find in project that can use git-grep. The other one in this category would be “ack in project”.

Seems the cough & cold has moved to the other half of the house, the half including me. Hopefully I’m through the time change 3 am insomnia and can move back to my usual 4 or 4:30. Verizon Motorola Droid pricing was released, I’ve talked to VZW to find out how much it will set me back to “upgrade”. Still loads cheaper than switching to iPhone and I don’t have to put up with AT&T’s horrible service–at least according to all my friends.

Pretty quiet day, calm before the storm tomorrow I guess. Quiet except for the cries and tears of Redskins fans morning yet another loss, this one at home. We [the Redskins] are the streak enders, just the wrong kinds of streaks.

Interesting tidbits from around the web

• Droid – Rumors appear to be true about Verizon, Motorola and Google coming together to make a killer phone. A few pics here.
• Pull out login system – Actually, it’s a really long name post, but that’s good enough. I think I’ve seen something very similar to this before. It’s PHP, but I’m guessing anyone interested should be able to port it over to their own framework/language.