One Thing Well

While it's somewhat old, _The Unix Programming Environment_ covers the mindset and a lot of the fundamental tools. _Unix Power Tools_ is another good one. This stuff is particularly novel to people who learned Unix from e.g. Ubuntu + GNOME and worked towards the command line, rather than starting there.

A lot of the tricks listed in the article should be in the man page for sh. I've found a lot reading man pages, but I also use OpenBSD rather than Linux, and its man pages are often noticeably better. (The "we only have a man page to remind you that info is better" pages for GNU utils on Debian are among the worst man pages.) Either way, "apropos" and man pages' SEE ALSO section should help.

I've also found several cool utilities looking at summaries of what was available in the OpenBSD & FreeBSD ports trees, especially in the sysutils and devel categories.

Finally, people who are already using ratpoison/dwm/wmii. as their windowmanager, mpd for playing music, etc. tend to have a common aesthetic, and can usually recommend several other tools. Check out http://onethingwell.org and http://suckless.org for starters.

It was a comment by someone on some forum. Someone looking for similar sites as reddit (so was I) and another user who had replied had mentioned about HN a forum which is almost as good or as bad as reddit just that people on HN like to believe they are inherently better than reddit. I am not sure which forum it was - maybe reddit itself.

MeFi [0] and OneThingWell [1] are the gems I found in the same thread. Sadly OneThingWell's author took a long break due to RSI. Other forums/communities I found in that thread are/were SA [2], SDF, Barbelith [3] etc.

I guess it was just when I had got access to readily available Internet (before that it was weekly an hour or so in cyber cafes). I had immediately signed up everywhere (there were dozens) and SA is the only I never really got used to, never really stayed there.

[0] https://www.metafilter.com

[1] http://onethingwell.org

[2] https://www.somethingawful.com

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbelith.com/

I do think Soulver would be a better choice for many. But it is much more powerful, allowing you to do conversions and labels.

So the simplicity of just having two calculators side by side and a fast way to transfer the results is probably exactly what some people need and want. Zero learning curve, just two calculators doing exactly what you expect.

I'm always fascinated by apps and programs that does exactly one thing, but does it really well (sometimes referred to as the Unix Philosophy). I feel it's harder to find tools and apps like these nowadays. Not sure if there are less or if they are just harder to find because of the huge number of apps overall.

[Edit] Writing this comment actually reminded me of this blog https://onethingwell.org/ which highlights software like this. Gonna try to contact the author and see if they want to add this one :-)

Spot on, Deven.

At the moment, I use an RSS service[0] and reader[1] fed with almost 20 years worth of gleaned feeds to accomplish much the same thing.

The collection grew to such an extent that I had to categorize the feeds, with the most interesting/generally low volume in a "daily" category (the idea for which I stole from Slow Feeds[2] (now known as Web Subscriber[3])).

But a dedicated search engine for handcrafted content would be awesome.

EDIT: I saw https://wiby.me mentioned in a recent HN comment. The About page[4] states in part, "The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet."

[0] https://newsblur.com

[1] https://reederapp.com

[2] https://onethingwell.org/post/80985561981/slow-feeds

[3] https://zoziapps.ch/slowfeeds/

[4] https://wiby.me/about/

I have an Expresscard SSD (Filemate 48GB) on my 2007 Core2Duo MBP. I have installed Snow Leopard, moved all the frequently used apps on it but still point to the old home directory on the hard drive.

The SSD gets quite warm easily, but it actually makes my laptop feel snappier than my work laptop (2010 Core i7 non-SSD). A cold boot takes less than 12-15 seconds, most of it trying to read settings from my home folder in the old hard drive. I believe the ExpressCard uses PCI Express interface which is much faster than SATA on older macbooks.

Here are some resources from my bookmarks:

http://onethingwell.org/post/1610589228/ssd-two-electric-boogaloo

http://www.macworld.com/article/145185/2009/12/mbpssdcard.html

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091203220151255

> I came expecting examples of to-do lists, mail clients, clever messaging apps, etc. There are a handful of those.

There are hundreds of posts about those sorts of applications in the archives[0], but the focus of the site tends to drift about a lot depending on what I'm up to/interested in at a given time.

> Instead, the majority of apps are described by sentences where literally every word would be unfamiliar to a typical computer user.

That's definitely a problem, and after chatting with some readers on Twitter recently I'm making more of an effort to 'translate' jargon and buzzwords in software descriptions.

[0] See, e.g., http://onethingwell.org/tagged/todo