Matthew Lang

A break from the regular profile photograph we include here. I'm including the rider in this one. Father Tu himself with his Affinity. I was immediately drawn to this during the week after seeing the addition of the NS Bikes Evidence riser bar on the front on a post on Instagram.

via FGGT

I think it's fair to say that I've finally settled on a browser that I enjoy using. For well over a year now, Firefox has been my browser of choice. Over the years I've used Internet Explorer (long story), Safari, Chrome and even Opera for a while. In between those I've used Firefox as well. Ditching all Google tools meant that I wanted something that had good development tools, an extensive library of add ons and a few other features that I just like as an individual. Firefox fitted the bill and I've been using it for two years straight now.

Firefox has added a number of great features of the years. Cross-platform support, continually improving security and even pinned tabs. They're all great features, but the single best feature I love about Firefox is this.

Opening tabs in the sidebar.

Expecting something else? Okay, it's not the ground breaking feature that everyone might rave about, but it's a feature that I like the most and here's why.

Ever since I seen split views in Vim, iTerm 2 and Tmux, I've seen the benefits of having multiple views open at once. Being able to switch at a glance from one file to another is a major productivity win. You can work on the part of the application that matters while having other parts of the application that you need to know in other views. You can even have your command line open in one view and your code in the other.

In Firefox a similar view can be achieved using Firefox's open in sidebar property in your bookmarks. What happens is that a second browser window will open to the left of your main window.

I spend most of my day on the web. Feedbin, Trello, Todoist and GitHub are where I spend most of my time. Siwtching between these tabs can be a pain if you require two of them open at once. Using the sidebar in Firefox though means that I can have one site open in the sidebar for taking notes or collecting information as well as allowing me to still focus on the immediate task at hand in my browser.

An understated feature of Firefox, but one that makes a productive difference to my day.

It's unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from someone who isn't trusted to create it.

— The fruitless search for extraordinary people willing to take ordinary jobs by Seth Godin

The Intercept summarises the recent passing of the USA Freedom Act. Good to see change happening as a result of the work of Jon Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.

The USA Freedom Act passed the House in an overwhelming, bipartisan vote three weeks ago. After hardliner Republicans lost a prolonged game of legislative chicken, the Senate gave its approval Tuesday afternoon as well, by a 67 to 32 margin. The bill officially ends 14 years of unprecedented bulk collection of domestic phone records by the NSA, replacing it with a program that requires the government to make specific requests to the phone companies.

— One Small Step for NSA Reform, One Giant Leap for Congress by The Intercept