PSA

¹If my math is correct, this past Saturday morning, we passed the tipping point between “days since last (2015) Christmas” and “days until this coming (2016) Christmas.”

Please don’t kill the messenger.

I’m not actually bringing this up to be cruel and annoying. I make this announcement because many of you are crafty people who give hand-made gifts for the holidays. For me, the mid-point of the year is my semi-official starting line. It’s when I really become aware of the holiday, and start putting serious thought into when I’ll need to start (and complete!) which projects in order to have everything ready in time for the appropriate gift-giving events. (As much as I strive to emulate Jordan in all things, I cannot actually knit a sweater in one night.²)

TL;DR:

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I couldn’t really be bothered to make an actual Venn Diagram, so set notation will have to suffice.

Anyway, I know that I have friends who knit. I know that I have friends who garden. I do not currently know how much overlap actually exists between these two sets of friends, but I figure there’s gotta be some, right?

For those (currently theoretical) friends who both knit and garden¹, KnitPicks has a pattern that might be of interest to you. Go! Go get cozies for your plants!

Really, the subject just about says it all, but in case you require more detail: Interweave Knits / Knitting Daily is having a “5-Star¹ Products² for $5″ sale. At the time of this writing, there are 32 items on sale for $5.

Free Tip #1

Be sure to check what format you’re actually getting things in! The sale includes eBooks; printed books (paperback and hardcover); magazines; VHS (!) and DVD content, downloadable video content, and I’m sure I’ve missed some other way things are being distributed. I adore the digital editions, but some people hate them. Some features I find alluring for the digital editions include, “not having to find a place to store another physical thing,” “not tripping on another physical thing for which I did not find a storage space,” “I can carry ALL THE BOOKS on my laptop,” and “not having to pay for shipping.” But, whatever floats your boat.

Free Tip #2

Before buying something about which you’re not certain, I recommend double-checking the item’s reviews elsewhere online (I used Amazon, but see above, re: your boat). In addition to some more reviews, you might be able to find additional (or even any, depending on the item) images of what’s inside the covers.

Footnotes

Via https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2015-0235.

A heap-based buffer overflow was found in glibc’s __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function, which is used by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() glibc function calls. A remote attacker able to make an application call either of these functions could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application.

Update ALL THE THINGS! Again. Once, you know, a patch is available.

I assume that most of the people who would be interested in this are already aware of it, but just in case someone’s missed it, I thought I’d point out that there’s currently a Doctor Who Audiobook Humble Bundle going on. As of this writing, there’s about 5 and a half days left on the offer. It’s a pay-what-you-want bundle, though there are price points to unlock some content. (Currently $15 or more to get everything in the bundle.) (more…)

If you use an iPhone, you probably found that you had an unusually large number of app updates available to you yesterday. This is because a new version of Apple’s iOS was released, and developers released new iOS 8-compatible versions of their apps.

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This will probably be of interest to many of you:

As the cute little critter below says, there’s a sale going on in O’Reilly land, so if there’s an eBook that you’ve been putting off getting (like maybe that organization book that I posted about a few days ago), now might be the time. Be sure to use discount code B2S4 at checkout, though clicking on the image should do that automatically. (Note: This discount does not apply to printed materials or print + eBook bundles.)

So tell me, what are you going to buy? (No. Really. I wanna know.)