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.

Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Setapp. Get access to hundreds of Mac and iOS apps for one low monthly subscription fee.

Running a CPU benchmark on Apple Silicon M1
Peter Forret created a cool bash script that performs a cpu benchmark using ffmpeg and primitive. If you fork the repo and run it, you can commit the results and create a pull request to add them to the repo. Nobody seems to have done it yet (other than me), but I’d be curious to see a few more results from M1 machines, as well as comparisons to Intel machines. Pitch in if you feel the same!
Bookmarklet for Pins.app (1.6+)
A browser bookmarklet for the Pinboard app Pins, which added support for the necessary URL parameters in version 1.6.
Hey, I sped up Apple Mail Rules
AppleScripting the creation of Mail.app Rules is a great tip from Dr. Drang. (Yes, I use MailMate, and my SaneBox @SaneBlackHole covers this particular use case for me, but it’s still a great tip. Also, yes, the persistent emails of the type Dr. Drang describes are super annoying.)
Surge
A service that will host your static website with a CLI that makes publishing a one-step process. Support for SSL, custom CNAME, custom 404s, and more. It’s kind of insane that this is free.
Sync Safari Reading List bookmarks to Pinboard
Samuel Kordik built on work from Zach Fine and updated my old Reading List Catcher script to work in these modern times. It’s a Python script that syncs your Safari Reading List to Pinboard (and a Markdown file, to boot). You need to add a “secrets.py” file with your API key, and install the pinboard and pytz packages, but other than that it “works right out of the box.”

Check out Setapp today and get access to the best Mac and iOS apps out there.