This is one of these situations. I signed up for Pinboard.in, a bookmarking service, that’s hellishly fast, very flexible and most of all; simple.

I was looking for a service that allowes me to save and organise links on certain topics efficiently. I need to do a lot of web research for four different term papers and for my master’s thesis.
The recent del.icio.us kerfuffle brought Pinboard.in to my attention again — I remembered having read about it a while back, but I didn’t know when and why.

It took me 10 minutes to get through the feature list and the ‘getting started’ material to realise this is the service I’m looking for.
It then took me five more minutes to sign up, paying the $9.25 for the service.

The bookmark archiving feature requires a subscription, which costs $25 per year and I will upgrade to an archival account soon.

Now, why would I want to hit myself with a shovel?

Well, while I was sifting through my old bookmarks in Safari today, deleting unnecessary old stuff, I found a bookmark with this title:

Very interesting new bookmark service ‘pinboard.in’ for currently $1.50

Generously Pinboard.in reduces the price of the first year of the archival account by the the amount of the initial subscription fee, so I will not loose any money;

But OH MY GOD could that service have saved me time and work had I subscribed back then.

Jim Dalrymple of loopinsight.com visited RIM’s east coast offices, hoping to be able to compare the iPad 2 to the elusive RIM PlayBook.

Truly horrific.

Found on daringfireball.net

Joshua Schnell recently spoke to Jim Dalrymple and Stephen Hackett about dealing with rumours about Apple and technology in general, the process of deciding what to post on their blogs and journalistic quality in a business that often relies on pages views and ad revenue.

A very insightful discussion on the insanity that is the Apple/tech sphere that I can wholeheartedly recommend.

———

I’ve completely stopped reading sites like Gizmodo, Apple Insider, MacRumours and the likes, simply because they provide nothing of value anymore; they just spew unsubstantiated bits of information at their readers.

On the other hand I really enjoy reading both macgasm and The Loop, because they provide well filtered and well written content on topics that I’m interested in. Sites like the aforementioned are a refreshing change from the incessant chatter that surrounds Apple.

A few of the other sites that I enjoy for the same reasons are asymco.com, daringfireball.net, arstechnica.com, Macworld, and The Macalope.

Oh and no one should go out of the house without the current episode of Angry Mac Bastards on their iPhone/iPod, because they cut through the bullshit like a hot bat’leth through butter.

Neat little time saver:

If you don’t keep a browser open all the time and receive an download URL from someone, you don’t need to start your browser of choice. Simply follow the instructions in the linked Mac OS X Hints post and create a service in Automator that lets you quickly download a file from an URL.