I just found out about this site called Wordnik, and it is now the place that I will go to find my words, to define my words, and to learn new words.

Stick your word in the search field and Wordnik will go to work for you.

It'll give you the definision of a word from several different online dictionaries and encyclopedias and other collections of lexcical¹ information.

Hyponyms? Hypernyms? Wha??

Some of these things I did't know what they were, but now that I know about them, hell yes I want them in my fricking dictionary! Why weren't they there before?

Synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, rhymes. Words that are found in similar contexts. Examples of the word in use. All very useful to have available when doing some serious word work.

And a great resource, the Reverse Dictionary which I used to look up what the study of insects in order to distiguish between Entymology and Etymology, the study of the history of words. Two words I confuse often.

This is now the place that I go to find my words. Incredible free resource.

Wordnik via some link blog that I can't remember now.

1. A word that I had to look up to make sure it actually existed and meant what I thought it meant. ↩

I do a lot of thinking in outlines, and I’ve used quite a few outliner apps in my time as a computer user and thinker of things.

My favorite for ease of use is OmniOutliner. I can just fill up line after line in that app. But the problem occurs when it’s time to get those lines out of the app. There’s no smooth way to get them out. Not that I’ve found.

There’s the OPML export, there’s the copy and paste, there’s dragging them from the app into the window of another app, but time and time again, I run into the same problem that I can’t get the stuff out of that outline without having to go back and be on the hook for a lot of fiddly clean up of odd carriage returns and spacing, extra characters that show up in export because I forgot to turn off the checkbox feature. Things like that.

It’s possible to get the stuff out, but the cost of cleaning it up outweighs the savings in using the app over using a text file or doing it right in a word processor.

Oak Outliner is weird in that it is a web-based application1 that stores your outline in the browser’s cache. That means it stays where it is, no syncing, no saving. Lots of neat features like intuitive keyboard shorties and folding of lines.

I think it’s pretty slick, just like I think another project made by these guys, Folding Text is chock full of interesting potential. And maybe for a quick one-off brainstorming session Oak Outliner might be really handy. But I’m struggling to think of a reason why I’d use this over a text editor, or Scrivener, or a native app.

I will be keeping an eye on this though.

Oak Outliner

Folding Text

OmniOutliner

My wife just decided to buy a document scanner for her business

Very excited, because I’ve been wanting to go paperless in my office, but my flatbed scanner broke long ago, and since then, I’ve been using an app called Scanner Pro that uses the camera to make scans of documents. It’s surprisingly usable, and great for one-off scans, but anything more than one or three pages, and you’re going crazy. So tackling the scanning of all the paper in my filing cabinet was simply not an option.

It will likely be a while before I’m able to make good on my vow to go paperless, but I’m sure excited.

I’m preparing myself, too. David Sparks’ book Paperless has been a pretty thorough guide for how to get started.

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Sheet-Fed Mobile Document Scanner

Paperless – David Sparks

When I was actively producing The Winchcombe, I made a little bit of money from the Amazon Affiliate Program link that I stuck on there.

It’s a nice, easy way for readers to give a little bit of money to a content producer that they like without it actually costing anything, other than an extra click or two.

And I’ve stuck a few in this blog from time to time as well. But the actual generation of the link back to a produce had always been just difficult enough to keep me from doing it as often as I’d like to.

But recently I discovered that TextExpander can do it for you, if you create a snippet featuring a nifty little script that a guy named Brett Kelly made. Then, just plug in your affiliate code and an abbreviation and you’re ready to roll.

And, as a bonus, you can learn a little bit about how it works in Brett’s post about it.

TextExpander

How To Use A Textexpander Snippet To Quickly Generate Amazon Affiliate Links

Really nice iOS tip from fellow Minnesotan Sid O’Neill for quickly adding a list of items to OmniFocus quickly using Drafts and Apple Reminders.

Add multiple Omnifocus actions at once using Drafts