Topics: Telecommuting tips, Heartbleed tools, the end of crapware?, Git tutorials, free education, ideas into products, humanize numbers, better Datetimes, a Git GUI.

• The Pluralsight blog has some good tips for those working from home.
• If you’ve been under a rock and haven’t heard, make sure you’ve updated OpenSSL on all your computers.
  • If you’re a LastPass user, they now have a report that will tell you which of the sites you have accounts on have patched the bug.
  • GRC (host of the Security Now podcast) has an online tool that will tell you if your browser is properly recognizing revoked SSL certificates.
• SweetLabs is working with PC vendors to replace OEM-installed crapware with a recommendation-based app store solution, letting developers sell their apps directly.
• The fledgeling OneGet community has apparently pushed to get the repository moved to Github. (via @fearthecowboy)
• Discovered that Atlassian has a nice set of Git tutorials and resources online.
• The Free Technology Academy offers free education in “Free Software, Standards and Hardware“.
• Local developer @EliThompson passed along an interesting new guide coming out soon: How to Transform Ideas into Software Products from Femgineer. Sign up to be notified when the guide is published and you can participate in a free e-mail course to get feedback on your idea.

Tools, etc.

• Wow. Humanizer is a .NET library that provides a mind-boggling array of ways to convert “strings, enums, dates, times, timespans, numbers and quantities” into more human-friendly text. (via Scott Hanselman)
• Scott also recommends Noda Time as a better library than what’s provided with the .NET Framework.
• Looking for a GUI for Git and/or Mercurial? Source Tree is a free download from Atlassian.

Projects, etc.

• Working on something, which I hope to announce the next day or two. Stay tuned….

Topics: Unit testing PHP, test images for color-blindness, hands-on learning, RSS on Github, myths of software development.

• The Open Data Protocol (OData) 4.0 has been approved, along with the OData JSON Format 4.0. If you’re not familiar with OData, it’s a standard for reading and writing to data sources with RESTful web services.
• Need to explain computing concepts to somebody? Computer Science Unplugged has some pretty nifty activities that do just that.
• I remember hearing about Flattr years ago – one of the early services for giving back to open source developers – but I had no idea they were still around. And doing reasonably well.
• Migrations in Entity Framework are a topic I could be stronger on. The ADO.NET Blog has some screencasts that just might do the trick.
• Friend Dan passed along another comic I need to add to my list of regulars: CommitStrip.
• Dan also shared some thoughts on a thought-provoking article from Model View Culture about the myth of the software developer. I hope to share my own thoughts on it later this week.
• OSS Perks is a listing of tools and services (including commercial ones) that are available for free to qualifying open source projects.

Tools, etc.

• Colblinder has a handy Color Blindness Simulator for your images. Upload an image then select different types of vision to see what it looks like. (via @DanielSolis)
• Portable.Text.Encoding is a portable (i.e. cross-platform) implementation of .NET’s Text.Encoding namespace. (via @migueldeicaza)
• Did you know Github repositories can have releases? You can find them using the following URL path:
  • https://github.com/<account>/<repository>/releases
  • To get an RSS feed, just add .atom to the end of the above URL.

Projects, coding, etc.

• Been studying up on WordPress plugins. There’s lots of documentation and tutorials out there, but I found that HardcoreWP has a very nice overview.
• Published a new KB article on Configuring PHPUnit for PhpStorm after introducing unit testing to a WordPress plugin project at work.