Web Excursions are select bookmarks from my travels around the interwebs, because I'm always thinking about you while discovering other people's cool stuff. You mean that much to me. You can see all of my (public) bookmarks on Pinboard, and visit the bookmarks archive for curated lists across the last few years.

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A special edition of “Web Excursions” with two more links than usual. That’s the kind of service you can expect from us here at BrettTerpstra.com.

Lightpack – ambient backlight for your displays
Lightpack creates ambient colors around your monitor or TV based on the color averages being displayed. I’ve seen some hacks of the IKEA light strips to do this, but they were beyond my USB programming capabilities. I’m very tempted to go for this ready-to-use-but-still-open-source version…
icefox/git-hooks
Dammit, this is something I’ve been trying to build, but better.

git-hooks lets hooks be installed inside git repositories, users home directory, and globally. When a hook is called by git, git-hooks will check each of these locations for the hooks to run.

DIY: Frozen Treats for Dogs
Our dog Emma loves these, so my wife published the recipe.
By the way, Emma has her own Facebook page and does not care how you feel about dogs having Facebook pages.
Jon Stewart: why I quit The Daily Show
Over the years, Jon Stewart become my most respected news source. I have no shame in admitting that. The Daily Show has been more “fair and balanced” than any other source. It’s sad to see this era of it ending, but you have to admire Stewart for knowing when to fold. The linked article is long, but fun and insightful for Jon Stewart fans.
LaunchDR
I was researching ways to handle scheduled publishing on Jekyll now that Apple’s broken my atrun system, and stumbled on this tool from my old friend Elliott Cable1 for programmatically creating launchd plist files in Ruby.
Apple Watch Vector UI Kit for Keynote and PowerPoint
I’ve personally moved away from Keynote as a prototyping tool, but Keynotopia keeps making me reconsider that.
Sketch Tricks
I’m really getting into Sketch, primarily because of the community surrounding it. This site compiles great tips and tutorials for the vector design app.

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  1. whom I met through his incessant and useful bug reports and feature requests for MoodBlast, way back when. He’s what forced me to start learning about proper UI design and intuitive interfaces.