A couple months back, a post titled “The $10 Echo” went viral. Now, Amazon has published their own guide on Github with exhaustingly loving detail of how to build your own DIY Amazon Echo with the Raspberry Pi. The required parts are your standard fare of USB wifi adapter, keyboard, and of course, a microphone which Amazon kindly links to amazon.com.
Important caveat: Because of a limitation in the Alexa Voice Services, the device won’t always be listening, rather require a button to click to trigger a Java applet to run the listening command. Of course, you can always buy the real Echo.
Disqus Condensed is now a Chrome extension! I shared an early sneak preview back in December. TL;DR Disqus Condensed provides a condensed view of Disqus.com to make it easier to find more discussions to join.
You’ll find on average double the number of discussions per page as you scroll through your home or channel feeds. This should greatly improve the likelihood of finding an interesting discussion to comment on in less time by making discussions easier to scan.
I love finding new discussions started from people I follow in my home feed. It’s now easier to spot in a stream of discussions with a yellow highlight that’s hard to miss. In addition, new discussions posted on channels you moderate are also highlighted in a similar fashion in your Notifications page.
There are numerous smaller tweaks scattered about so I’ll finish this off with a quick list:
Create discussion button on channels is highlighted in blue
Related discussions & Explore feed includes hover state
Follow notifications hidden
Don’t use Google Chrome?
If you’re on Firefox, Opera, or Safari, you can still try out Disqus Condensed by installing an extension called Stylish on your respective browsers:
I started with an extension for Chrome primarily since it’s my primary web browser and the most popular browser used by Disqus users. I’m currently exploring (read: Googling furiously) the requirements for porting the extension for other browsers so your feedback will greatly shape that.
Readability is something that’s been incredibly important to me and I’ve written several blog posts in the past dedicated to this subject alone. Today, I’m pleased to continue that tradition with a small tool that has greatly enhanced my experience when using Disqus. It’s my hope that it will for you as well.
If you like using Disqus Condensed, feel free to leave a review in the Chrome Web Store so others can more easily discover it.
Star Wars hype has reached a fever pitch with today’s long-awaited premiere and the Internet is suddenly dangerous grounds rife with spoilers at a moment’s scroll or click of a link. Fortunately, there’s a Chrome extension that solves that problem.
Today, I wanted to share a custom theme I’ve dubbed Disqus Condensed, a slimmed-down and condensed version of Disqus.com. Now, see more stories in your home feed or channel pages as you browse for discussions. Notable tweaks:
removed discussion excerpt
removed recent comment preview
removed discussion topic tags
reduced whitespace
reduced size of thumbnail images
hide user follow notifications
What was previously up to 5 rows of content for a single discussion has been distilled down to just 3 core components:
The theme’s CSS is fully customizable and editable so if there’s something that looks off or want to get your feet wet, feel free to update the theme file directly!
Here’s a quick before-after demo:
That’s it for now! I hope this theme can help you discover more discussions on Disqus. Share feedback and any questions below. Thanks!
I read a lot of different sites/links that I find from email newsletters, Twitter, Nuzzel, etc. and wanted to know which were my most frequented sites to read.
Exporting from Readability (I bookmark with Pocket and/or send articles straight to my Kindle with the Readability extension), here are the top 10 sites I read based on over 2500+ articles consumed:
I’m surprised that WSJ made the top 10 list. I’m not a subscriber and so the paywall-restricted articles are one’s I usually skip. That trend will likely continue.
Speaking of paywalls, there is one news site that I subscribe to and that is The New York Times. I’ve been a happy reader for nearly a year now and it shows in how much content I read there.
Numi is a calculator for OS X with support for all sorts of everyday maths tasks, from dates, currency conversion and quick percentage calculations to CSS units.
