Links

I read near-continuously, and to keep my habit fed I have a rather large number of blogs I hit on a semi-regular basis (some much more than others). A few of them are high profile, a few of them I suspect I make up a nontrivial fraction of the readership, but since I keep coming back they are all probably worth sharing. I’m fairly arbitrarily drawing the “professional” line at BoingBoing, which excludes the gadget blogs and Wired, but not much else. Ordered loosely alphabetically by name in each section.

Almost all my web-reading of late is via google reader, a not-necessarily-up-to-date copy of my OPML subscription list is stored here. In pre-Plus reader my shared items could be viewed here, they are now mixed in to my plus stream… apparently that is better.

“Famous” People:
Blogs by notable people. Most of these people are only “Internet famous”, if even that; they are more classified by the fact that I don’t know them personally.

  • Adafruit Industries Blog – A blog by Limor “ladyada” Fried and employees of her hobbyist technology company Adafruit, and hobby tech in general.
  • Luis von Blog – An occasionally updated blog by CMU Computer Science professor Luis von Ahn. He has been involved in some fairly high profile social computing sorts of things (recapcha for example) which I enjoy, aside from it just being interesting as a young academic in the computing field.
  • boingboing – The mother of all ephemera blogs, curated by a bunch of high profile “Internet People”
  • Joseph Palmer – An electrical engineer/industrial designer involved heavily in the design of the Macintosh Centris 660AV(my formative computer), the BeBox, and the early revisions of the Hiptop/Sidekick. Lots of good posts about nifty non-engineering topics like musical instruments and peak oil. He is also the owner of a number of gorgeous Birman Cats, of which he regularly posts pictures.
  • Star Simpson – Remember when the Boston police made asses of themselves by reacting to a harmless LED display like it was a terrorist threat? (No, not that time, the second time). That was her. She later started bogging about life as a student hacker, and it’s a pretty good read.
  • Linus Torvalds – An intermittently updated blog by the original author and chief herd-rider of the Linux kernel. He always has an interesting perspective on things, and, as an interesting aside, is responsible for one of my favorite quotes on religion (search “religion” in the interview).
  • Danah Boyd – Both personal and professional web presence of an “internet person” who is also one of the world’s leading experts on computer-mediated culture and identity.
  • Embedded in Academia – The mostly-professional blog of John Regehr, a CS professor interested in compilers and embedded systems at the University of Utah.

People I Know:
Blogs by people I am personally acquainted with. A wide variety of friends’ defunct (or at least currently inactive) projects are excluded. It turns out that restriction kills off a substantial portion of the potential links.

  • free rad!cals (and Here) – Stephanie Lee is an old classmate from middle and highschool who spent several years recently proving herself braver and/or more foolhardy than I by getting involved with Teach for America (an organization about which I have very mixed feelings). The first link is a personal blog, which is amazingly open at times, and the second is a tumblr page which consists almost entirely of awesome found images and quips.
  • 3till7 – A reliably amusing and occasionally technical personal blog by former CS classmate Sarah Vessels.
  • Jafrro.net – The personal page of my lab-mate Frank Roberts

Topic Blogs:
Blogs about particular themes.

  • biofortified – I recently ran into this blog via SBM (below), it is another “blog about a field by people who are actually qualified in that field”, this time about GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). The writing isn’t anything special, but it aggregates information on the topic without any obvious unfounded hysteria or commercial bias, which is a pretty scarce resource.
  • Brian Sews – A blog mostly about vintage sewing equipment.
  • Dark Roasted Blend – Another ephemera-blog, this one often features gorgeous photo sets organized around some improbable topic.
  • EDCForums – A site/forum dedicated to stuff people “Every Day Carry”. The tone tends toward the paranoid-delusional, but the equipment (Multitools, bags, etc.) reviews in the forum are great.
  • I occasionally go into a clicktrance at the (frequently NSFW) geek girl photoblogs at Fuck Yeah Geek Girls and Men Seldom Make Passes at Girls Who Wear Glasses
  • Hackaday – An electronic hobbyist blog, mostly featuring individual projects, but sometimes also delving into tools and techniques.
  • make blog – The big maker hobbyist blog. Art, Electronics, Artisan Fabrication, if it’s a neat thing individuals make it can be found here (except for crafts that get their own sister blog).
  • PostSecret – An incredible art project by Frank Warren consisting of anonymous secrets mailed in on postcards. It has become quite high profile and spawned several books, but there is still a batch of secrets posted online every Sunday.
  • Scanlime – Micah Elizabeth Scott’s ( engineer at VMWare, Hacker) project blog, full of wonderful hacks like using an ATTiny as a programmable RFID and using an IR reflectance sensor to encode motion from a toothed belt.
  • Science-Based Medicine – A communal blog by a number of real medical professionals about, as one might guess, science based medicine. They mostly take on the weird pseudoscience that gets pumped up in the Internet echo-chamber then foisted on the public by media outlets who think they’re being “balanced” by giving the crackpots attention.
  • ToolMonger, Toolguyd, and CoolTools – All about… tools. Hand tools, power tools, whatever devices for extending human capacity catch their fancy. I also lurk the hell out of the General Tool Discussion forum at garagejournal, even though I don’t like cars.

1 Response to Links

  1. Charles Harris says:

    Hi
    I am retired and live in New Zealand a long way from the action. Model railroad project underway.

    Re M302 Card Decoders. Your ref:
    https://pappp.net/?p=1487 and another similar ref:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcZI6fK948w from masterfx2000

    With the M302 being used several hooked to usb hub and using hid, there is no indication from which reader the data tag read came from. Necessary to find in which location the tag is. This on Win7 Excel2016

    Is it feasible with the M302 to have an micro add-on (like the project above) to have the tag read then suffixed (or prefix) by the micro ( a unique code for each M302 reader)and then data with suffix. passed thru hid to the computer with focus on a say .xls column. The spreadsheet would then show tag read with the unique suffix id, so that it can be manipulated in xl.
    I have not found a way for Win7 to do this.
    Your comments would be much appreciated.
    I have not been able to locate an email for masterfx2000 Are you aware of a contact? Thanks

    Charles Harris

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *