A kid created a browser app that shows you who is buying politicians

Greenhouse browser plug-in
Source: allourgreen.us
16 year old Nick Rubin created a browser plug-in called Greenhouse that lets you hover over politicians’ names on any web page to see which donors have given them money, and how much. Vice reports that it works in, “Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and is completely free.” Here’s more:

How does Greenhouse work?
It works by highlighting the name of any member of Congress on any website, and when you hover over these names a little box appears that shows detailed contribution information with amounts and where those amounts have come from. It’s basically a list of the top-ten industries from which they receive their money. My goal was to create something that promotes transparency. It would be great if people used it on sites where they’re reading about politics every day. For example, if you’re reading a piece on Congress votes for energy policy, you might see that a sponsor has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. I like to say that Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story. read more

Why I’m so pleased to have TextWrangler back

Textwrangler iconMy Mac note-keeping app of preference is BareBones’ TextWrangler, which I also use for coding. I love TextWrangler because although it’s a very powerful program, it’s also light on cpu usage even when I open a lot of windows and files with it. Navigating and managing open files through multiple windows is made easy with drag and drop functionality. And TextWrangler saves files on quit even if I don’t and will bring up unsaved files on relaunch.

So, how did I manage to create and access notes over the past couple weeks after TextWrangler suddenly stopped working for me? Since any text editing program will open the plain text files TextWrangler creates, I found a well-reputed free substitute in Sublime Text 2 and used that instead. I was able to open my old files and create new ones without needing to use Apple’s TextEdit – which corrupts text files by adding way too much bloat code to them – but oh boy, did I miss TextWrangler’s features and simplicity. read more