Link Collection: February 2025

Welcome to the February 2025 Link Collection! This month’s edition is packed with exciting open-source projects, essential reads on strategy and leadership, and practical guides on tech and productivity. Whether you’re an engineer, manager, or lifelong learner, there’s something here for you. Let’s dive in!

Projects #

dgtlmoon/changedetection.io #

The best and simplest free open source web page change detection, website watcher, restock monitor and notification service. Restock Monitor, change detection. Designed for simplicity.

Rayhunter #

Rayhunter is a new open source tool we’ve created that runs off an affordable mobile hotspot that we hope empowers everyone, regardless of technical skill, to help search out cell-site simulators.

siyuan-note/siyuan #

A privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software, written in typescript and golang.

glinford/dns-easy-switcher #

DNS Easy Switcher for MacOS.

Teaching a $14 ESP32 to Detect and Auto-Mute TV Ads #

A weekend project that uses computer vision to detect and automatically mute TV ads through Sonos speakers. Built with an ESP32, Home Assistant, and some 3D printing.

Books #

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder #

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

ISBN: 978-0812979688

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy #

When Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy was published in 2011, it immediately struck a chord, calling out as bad strategy the mish-mash of pop culture, motivational slogans and business buzz speak so often and misleadingly masquerading as the real thing. Since then, his original and pragmatic ideas have won fans around the world and continue to help readers to recognise and avoid the elements of bad strategy and adopt good, action-oriented strategies that honestly acknowledge the challenges being faced and offer straightforward approaches to overcoming them. Strategy should not be equated with ambition, leadership, vision or planning; rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. For Rumelt, the heart of good strategy is insight into the hidden power in any situation, and into an appropriate response - whether launching a new product, fighting a war or putting a man on the moon. Drawing on examples of the good and the bad from across all sectors and all ages, he shows how this insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools that lead to better thinking and better strategy, strategy that cuts through the hype and gets results.

ISBN: 978-1781256176

How to Be Perfect #

From the writer and executive producer of the award-winning Netflix series The Good Place that made moral philosophy fun: a foolproof guide to making the correct moral decision in every situation you ever encounter, anywhere on earth, forever *How can we live a more ethical life? This question has plagued people for thousands of years, but it’s never been tougher to answer than it is now, thanks to challenges great and small that flood our day-to-day lives and threaten to overwhelm us with impossible decisions and complicated results with unintended consequences. Plus, being anything close to an ’ethical person’ requires daily thought and introspection and hard work; we have to think about how we can be good not, you know, once a month, but literally all the time. To make it a little less overwhelming, this fascinating, accessible and funny book by one of our generation’s best writers and adept minds in television comedy, Michael Schur, boils down the whole confusing morass with real life dilemmas (from ‘should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?’ to ‘can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people?’), so that we know how to deal with ethical dilemmas.

ISBN: 978-1529421330

Get to the Point! #

In this indispensable guide for anyone who must communicate in speech or writing, Schwartzberg shows that most of us fail to convince because we don’t have a point-a concrete contention that we can argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. He lays out, step-by-step, how to develop one. In Joel’s Schwartzberg’s ten-plus years as a strategic communications trainer, the biggest obstacle he’s come across-one that connects directly to nervousness, stammering, rambling, and epic fail-is that most speakers and writers don’t have a point. They typically have just a title, a theme, a topic, an idea, an assertion, a catchphrase, or even something much less. A point is something more. It’s a contention you can propose, argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. A point offers a position of potential value. Global warming is real is not a point. Scientific evidence shows that global warming is a real, human-generated problem that will have a devastating environmental and financial impact is a point. When we have a point, our influence snaps into place. We communicate belief, conviction, and urgency. This book shows you how to identify your point, leverage it, stick to it, and sell it and how to train others to identify and successfully make their own points.

ISBN: 978-1523094110

Life Changing Magic Of Tidying #

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list).

ISBN: 978-1607747307

General #

Re-Volt I/O #

The popular racing game from ‘99! Download the game, tracks, cars and play online. Join the community to create and share with others!

Hours ∝ Story Points #

Are those Scrum poker cards I see?

Tech Hiring Bubble Bursts #

The tech job market is shifting - AI, automation, and competition are redefining careers. Learn how engineers can stay relevant in the evolving industry.

Your brain is full of microplastics: are they harming you? #

Plastics have infiltrated every recess of the planet, including your lungs, kidneys and other sensitive organs. Scientists are scrambling to understand their effects on health.

The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy #

Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

Management #

Improving Team Morale is not an Objective #

New managers often see making their team happy as their main objective. Here’s the problem with this approach.

How to develop capability in your team #

Developing capabilities starts with being clear in the distinction between capable and capability - and building the right training from there.

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers #

Most of us have encountered a few engineers who seem practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to non-obvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high quality code at unreal velocity.

Gen Z really are the hardest to work with—even managers of their own generation say they’re difficult #

Instead bosses plan to hire more of their millennial counterparts

A Field Guide to Team Dynamics and Conflict #

A practical guide for leaders to recognize and respond to organizational patterns, from harmonious flow to productive conflict, with tools for designing small, meaningful experiments.

Guides #

Introduction - Mintlify Guides #

Welcome to our compilation of best practices for writing technical documentation.

The Definitive T430 Modding Guide #

I’ve been getting requests to create a modification guide for the T430 for over a year now, so this guide is long overdue.

Filtering spam with GPT4o-mini for $0.00008 per email – Diary of a SysAdmin #

I self-host my mail, but I get flooded with spam. I run 4 mail exchangers, all with Postfix + RSpamD. Here’s a look at recently blocked junk on one of my inbound relays:

The Scrum Survival Guide: How to Make Scrum Work (Maybe) #

Every time I write an article about Scrum, there’s always a sizable group telling me I’m doing it wrong.

Using the Internet Without Leaving a Trace: a How-To Guide #

There may be a time, especially in the upcoming presidency, when you find yourself wanting to use online resources but not leaving any sort of digital “paper trail” behind.