I just published Save to nvALT, a Chrome extension for saving pages to nvALT, a note taking app for Mac OS X. Pages are saved as clean Markdown, without any fluff. Like Readability or Instapaper.

Download Save to nvALT from the Chrome Web Store.

How do I use Save to nvALT?

Click the Save to nvALT buttom in the Chrome toolbar to save the current page to nvALT.

Alternatively, you can select some text, right click and “Save note with selected text.”

What’s nvALT?

nvALT is a simple and fast note taking application. It’s an updated version of Notational Velocity.

Save to nvALT is non-intrusive

Save to nvALT is designed to be as non-intrusive as possible. Unlike most Chrome extensions, it requires no special permissions to run:

This is made possible by a new Chrome extension setting that keeps Save to nvALT disabled until you click its button.

Open Source

Save to nvALT is open source and license under the MIT license. You can view the source code on GitHub.

Credits

• Based on the original extension by David Halter
• Icon design by Chris Griffith
• Favicon design by nvALT authors
• Page content extraction logic by node-read
• HTML to Markdown conversion by to-markdown

“As pedestrians walked towards the crossing, they would step onto the green sponge and as they walked, the soles of their feet would make foot imprints onto the tree on the ground. Each green footprint added to the canvas like leaves growing on a bare tree, which made people literally feel that by walking they could create a greener environment.”

A screenshot from the summer when I really learned C, 2005. My current work setup has 8 browser tabs open to Hacker News and one terminal window with a compilation failed message. Progress!

Tim Burke writes regarding my alma mater’s first sorority in recent history:

This is the space where college communities like Swarthmore can fall pretty flat in their aspirations to diversity. We have students who will go all around the world to meet, live among and humbly try to understand a community of people whose history, culture and material conditions are very different from their own previous experience. Those same students can balk at understanding or negotiating the immediate presence of anyone whose unfamiliarity is not so customarily different, who is not an expected or presupposed sort of “diverse” person.

Written regarding Mark Suster’s rebuttal to Paul Graham’s essay about startups and growth.

I agree that the question is better asked “who should be raising VC funding?” vs. “what companies are startups?” What do you get by defining what a startup is? I don’t know.

But if you’re gonna be VC funded you need growth otherwise they’ll eat you alive. PG acknowledges this, so does Suster. That much is clear.

PG also admits that there are many companies that do not grow fast enough and take time to percolate that are worth pursuing. They just tend to be different kinds of companies, still worth pursuing, just different. In the second footnote of his essay, PG says:

One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as a model. What he meant, I believe, is that it’s fine to start software companies constrained in (a) in the same way a restaurant is constrained in (b). I agree. Most people should not try to start startups.

What PG is saying that YC will almost only fund companies that will grow fast, this is a reasonable investment model for them, shouldn’t keep you from building your company and building it without YC.

— http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1848

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch