Monday Links - Week 239

Measures/Countermeasures

An extremely readable overview by Tom Taylor to one new technique being developed by advertisers to track behavioural patterns: beacons in recycling bins are tracking phones using their MAC addresses. Tom also hints at some ways that you can defeat the tracking too. — JA

Braun and Dieter Rams

I would gladly own any of the products pictured in this photo set. A great collection of truly inspirational design (h/t @benterrett and @markhurrell. — TW

Showterm

Really simple recording of terminal output, that can be replayed on the web, or embedded in presentations or on your own site. Here’s one I prepared earlier, using the brilliant Qlobe quine. — JA

Enterprise Wiki

This simple wiki lets you edit its contents in Markdown by just hitting ESC and typing. It looks like it’s using Operational Transformations behind the scenes to make saving the contents relatively seamless. — JA

5 Steps to $5,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue

I thought this was a good writeup of how StatusPage identified a problem worth solving and built a product to solve it. I was particularly interested to read how they went about finding new users. — JM

A 451 response in the wild

The notable thing about this link isn’t so much the content, but instead the response you get (when accessing from the UK at least). It’s the first instance in the wild I’ve seen of the 451 status code. Proposed by Tim Bray, it’s for legally restricted resources. I don’t know if this article is available outside the UK, but given the libel laws in this country, the URL itself gives a good indication as to why it might be blocked over here. — TW

Noon

A neat little wireless flash for your iPhone. — JM

Why I publish my blog posts before they are ready

I’d like to blog more. I tend to struggle at two points in the writing cycle - getting started and pushing the publish button. Mariana’s trick might help me solve the latter - just publish before it’s ready and use the fact that it’s live to drive you to finish it. — JM

Persona makes signing in easy for Gmail users

Mozilla’s Persona seems like a really promising authentication system and now they’ve built an Identity Bridge for Gmail, so now you can login using your existing Gmail credentials. — JM

Stringer - A [work-in-progress] self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader

I’ve been using Stringer as my RSS reader since Google Reader shut up shop. It’s a Ruby/Sinatra app that runs just fine on the free Heroku plan, and so far it’s working out pretty well. It struggles a little when you have lots of unread items (a situation I ran into after being on holiday for a week) but works great on laptop, tablet and mobile for normal use. — CR