Where the daily picks come from. 57 feeds, shops, and forums.
Updated
Devs surfacing what they built. High volume; scan the official Show HN RSS (news.ycombinator.com/showrss). The yield is small, single-purpose, non-AI tools with a legible virtue; the AI-agent and devops submissions that dominate by count yield nothing. Filter on 'does this do one thing you can describe in a sentence' rather than on score.
The definitive catalog of unusual places. Feed only (/feeds/latest, 27 items with full place descriptions): /places/ pages are Cloudflare-blocked to curl and WebFetch. Heroes: the feed's 300x200 img.atlasobscura.com proxy URL encodes the full-size S3 original. Join every path segment after the signature that has no colon, strip the trailing .jpg, pad and base64-decode, percent-encode the result (filenames carry spaces and U+202F), normalise uppercase extensions, and downscale to 2200px on the long edge.
Quirky finds across products, art and video; hits the 'delight' brief directly. Feed only (theawesomer.com/feed/, trailing slash): article pages are Cloudflare-challenged to curl and 403 to WebFetch, so items can't be fact-checked at the source. The <enclosure> is single-quoted and descriptions are CDATA-wrapped; parse both. The _t.jpg enclosure (600x500) is the largest size served; video posts carry a 1280x720 frame in the body; prefer the maker's own photo when a post links out. Post IDs in the 7xxxxx range are recycled old posts: drop them.
Curated dad-joke service with a clean JSON API (Accept: application/json). Quality is consistent; jokes do recycle, so dedupe by text. 2026-09-05: fetch path recorded. The endpoint is content-negotiated — the same URL returns an HTML page to a browser UA and JSON only with `-H "Accept: application/json"`, so the generic curl path needs that header added; `/search?limit=<n>&page=<n>` returns the whole corpus (74 jokes) for deduping against already-published finds.
Jason Kottke's link blog. The single best low-noise feed for cross-disciplinary delight. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (feeds.kottke.org/main).
Anu Garg's daily word arrives with a 'Thought for Today' quotation. The feed (wordsmith.org/awad/rss1.xml) carries only the current day's word, so recover skipped days: every AWAD page lists the week's words in a 'This week's words' block, each at wordsmith.org/words/<word>.html. Do it whenever the last capture run was more than a day ago.
Kevin Kelly's long-running catalog of physical and digital tools. The original source for this kind of taste. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (kk.org/cooltools/feed). 2026-08-30: both live columns produced. 'Gar's Tips & Tools' issues are item-dense (five or six distinct tools per issue, each with its own outbound link) and reward mining; 'Book Freak' issues are one book each with the core principles already summarised. Both were captured this run.
Garson O'Toole's research-driven investigation of quote provenance; the gold standard. Use the Atom feed (/feed/atom/): the RSS path /feed/ is served Brotli-compressed regardless of Accept-Encoding, which system curl cannot decode. The Atom feed carries every entry's full <content>, so write quote finds from it; when an article page is needed, use WebFetch, not curl.
Technical fabric clothing for daily use; the brand itself is a source. fetch:curl against the Shopify backend (outlier-nyc.myshopify.com/products.json; outlier.nyc's own products.json 404s; outlier.nyc/sitemap.xml is a fallback). Neither `available` flags nor a real price prove a product is buyable: skip anything tagged `draft` or `bis-paused`, and confirm the outlier.nyc/products/<handle> page resolves before writing. Drops are weeks apart, hence as-needed.
Internet-flotsam product aggregator; quality varies wildly, but the genuinely novel finds are hard to get elsewhere. Post pages are an Angular shell that returns the same template for every slug, so use the feed: description, price and a 400x333 thumbnail (the largest the CDN serves). /api/posts/<slug> (plural; fields under 'post') gives link, price and stock flags, but treat unavailable/stock as advisory and check the merchant's own site before dropping anything good. Resolve outbound links: a linksynergy wrapper's real target is its percent-decoded `murl` parameter; drop crowdfunding targets and Amazon search URLs; confirm an Amazon ASIN resolves to the named maker.
Power-user Mac scripts, automation, and small utilities from the author of TextExpander/Marked. Feed: the site's own declared URL (brett.trpstra.net/brettterpstra), with full entry bodies. The 'Web Excursions' link roundups are the yield: each app gets one sentence and a link, so mine every outbound <a href> rather than the prose. Entities arrive double-escaped (<a href>): unescape before parsing.
Six recommendations a week from Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson. Almost always includes one delightful object or app. Use the Substack RSS feed — full issue content is in the feed, the public site is locked down. Re-validated 2026-07-03; migrated from fetch:curl to fetch:feed (same URL).
Long-running daily Mac/iOS tip site. Signal is mixed but it surfaces obscure things others miss — good for the occasional gem. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (osxdaily.com/feed/).
Matt Muir's enormous Friday roundup of internet curios; high volume, idiosyncratic taste, often the run's highest-yield source. Weekly: mine each issue once. The prose is unminable and section headers are link text, so take every outbound <a> in the entry body (~90 an issue) and dedupe against existing slugs. Toys, archives and single-object maker sites are the finds; politics and AI commentary is not.
Quiet, image-heavy notes on objects, architecture, and obscure design corners. Not dormant: dense link-dump posts land roughly monthly, so scan monthly and mine the whole post. The feed carries only the permalink, so fetch the article page (thingsmagazine.net/<slug>/, plain curl works) and take every outbound link in the entry body.
Design-forward stays and destinations — overlaps with architectural delight. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (wallpaper.com/feeds/tag/travel) — travel-tag-specific, fresher and more targeted than the site-wide feeds.xml.
Editorial gift guides and product features; the strongest product-launch feed on the list. Match <content:encoded> by name (it follows <description>): it carries the full article and inline images, so article pages are rarely needed (they 403 to curl; WebFetch works). Read for ship status: a shipping item names a price and a date, an announcement or pre-order names neither. URL shape (/<section>/<product-slug>/ vs /best-* and /deals/*) says whether a post is worth reading, not whether its product is: a new first-party product behind a deal post still counts, linked to the maker. A patagonia.com 404 is a bot block.
Free cultural & educational media — adjacent to the brief but a steady source of unusual-thing stories. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (openculture.com/feed).
Jason Snell + Dan Moren on Apple. Reviews mixed with industry coverage; scan for app posts. Feed: feedpress.me/sixcolors. The weekly 'App Report' column (Philip Michaels, Fridays/Mondays) is the highest-yield post: each app gets a named virtue and a price, so read it in full whenever it appears rather than treating it as one item.
Adam Engst's long-running Apple-platform publication. Tip-rich, technically careful, never reckless — a steady source of considered advice. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (tidbits.com/feed/) — sidesteps the earlier 403-to-WebFetch issue entirely.
Howard Oakley's deep dives into macOS internals, system maintenance, and forgotten corners of the OS — endlessly delightful for anyone who likes pulling threads. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (eclecticlight.co/feed/).
Maria Popova's literary essays, dense with sourced quotations from books worth tracking down. Formerly Brain Pickings. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (feeds.feedburner.com/brainpickings/rss).
Editorial travel magazine; 'experiential' coverage that surfaces more idiosyncratic destinations than typical glossies. Feed: afar.com/index.atom, declared in the page head (/feed, /rss, /rss.xml and /feed.xml all 404; the homepage is a JS shell to curl). Heavy on 'best X in Y' round-ups, hence weekly: read round-up titles for a proper noun, a single named place, rather than dismissing them.
Federico Viticci's site. Long-form, considered reviews of Apple-platform apps. Pair with their Club MacStories newsletter. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (macstories.net/feed/).
'13 Things I Found on the Internet' roundup of obscure travel and cultural curiosities. Volumes land irregularly, so scan as-needed and mine the whole volume when one lands. Each item's payload is an outbound <a href> mid-sentence: take every outbound link in the entry body, drop self-links and socials, and dedupe against existing slugs. Web projects, single-object shops, museum shows and object histories produce finds; property listings and Instagram-embed art posts don't.
Aggregator feed, Atom not RSS: entries are <entry> with <link href=...>, so an <item>-based parser reads it as silently empty. The feed carries one tagline line only, so WebFetch the /products/<slug> page (curl gets a Cloudflare challenge), follow the outbound maker link, and verify on the maker's own store. The feed is ~95% B2B AI and agent tooling; weekly scans catch the occasional consumer drop. Restore to daily if two consecutive weekly scans capture something.
Affordable design gifts; small clever objects. Collection pages are a Shopify SPA, so fetch:curl against the bare /products.json?limit=250: the full catalogue. Newness signal is the Shopify product `id` (monotonic): compare against the highest id already captured, since the 2026-10-01 catalogue re-import re-stamped every product's created_at and published_at. (The /collections/new/products.json grid stopped turning over at 2026-03-24 and was abandoned 2026-09-09.)
Bags, EDC, and well-made carry gear — overlaps clothing and tools. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (carryology.com/feed/). 2026-09-06: **cadence demoted weekly → as-needed.** Feed healthy (HTTP 200, 10 entries) but newest entry is 2026-08-19 — nothing inside the window for three consecutive runs, and the publishing rhythm is now closer to monthly than weekly. Not dormant: the feed is live and the archive is recent enough that a post will land. Restore to weekly if two consecutive scans find in-window items.
Data artist's portfolio/index page — a catalog of unusual web projects spanning data viz, machine learning, and net-art (e.g. the EWS private-jet 'apocalypse' tracker that surfaced this source via Web Curios). Maker page, not a feed: no RSS (all common paths 404, probed 2026-07-14), so scan the static HTML index for newly-listed projects and capture standout ones as general-delight/tools finds. Low, irregular cadence — a single-pass harvest of the current catalog, then occasional re-checks. Fetchable via curl, validated 2026-07-14 (HTTP 200, server-rendered, 88KB).
Gruber's link blog often surfaces small Mac utilities and design-y oddities. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (daringfireball.net/feeds/main).
And now it's all this — engineer's perspective on macOS automation, command-line tricks, and Shortcuts. Quiet authority. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (leancrew.com/all-this/feed/). Dr. Drang posts in bursts rather than weekly; as-needed matches that and still catches a burst the run after it lands.
Simon Crompton on craft tailoring and permanent-wardrobe pieces. Deep, evidence-led reviews. Feed bypasses the Cloudflare challenge — validated 2026-07-03 (permanentstyle.com/feed); switched from fetch:skip to fetch:feed.
North-America-leaning road-trip routes and stops, often hitting roadside oddities. The feed is live but publishes round-up and listicle content rather than the single specific places this site captures, so it stays as-needed on signal quality, not liveness.
Interviews about the hardware and software people use. Good for triangulating what genuinely useful people pick. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (usesthis.com/feed.atom).
Wikipedia's sister project. Citation-disciplined and wide-ranging — the place to verify a half-remembered line before passing it on.
Michael Williams on Americana, heritage menswear, and the makers behind it. Seasonal rather than dead: posts land months apart, and the as-needed scan catches each one the run after it lands. Feed: acontinuouslean.com/feed/.
Museum-curated objects. New Arrivals reliably includes one beautifully-designed daily-use thing. WebFetch and the plain collection URL both return nav-only Shopify SPA shells — /collections/new/products.json returns the full product grid instead; fetchUrl updated 2026-07-03 (still 30 products, re-validated), kept on record so the quarterly re-probe has the working endpoint to test. 2026-08-01 was the first blocked run after a productive 07-29; skipped on the third strike per the daily-finds maintenance rule.
Five hand-picked articles per day. Paid; the picks are unusually consistent. Correction 2026-07-03: the /free/rss/ feed is public and unauthenticated, delivering all ~5 daily picks with full summaries — no login needed. The 'no public picks page' assumption was wrong; switched from fetch:skip to fetch:feed. 2026-07-14: the free RSS tier now exposes only 2 of the 5 daily picks (the rest are paywalled), so coverage from this source is inherently partial — its own daily word game (Nomido) is the reliably linkable artifact.
User-submitted outdoor adventures with photos — useful for trail/landscape destinations specifically. Would be usable again if a dated 'new adventures' endpoint is ever found; the places themselves (The Narrows, Diamond Fork Hot Springs, Sunset Cliffs cave) do clear the bar and several were captured in earlier runs.
Hand-picked architectural rentals worldwide — useful as a 'destination via the building' source. Its properties do clear the bar (Casa Siza, CasaCau, 34 Rue Louise-Emilie were all captured in earlier runs) — the blocker is purely that nothing on the site is dated. Re-probe if a 'new listings' endpoint appears.
Bay Area shop's editorial — small-batch workwear and Japanese makers, with substantive notes per piece. The journal lives at /blogs/standard-strange-stories. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (standardandstrange.com/blogs/standard-strange-stories.atom). Demoted weekly→as-needed 2026-07-21: feed is live but its newest entry is 2026-06-29, i.e. nothing new across three-plus weekly windows.
Japanese outdoors brand whose apparel and titanium kit reliably qualify as 'delightful daily-use.' The product grid is JS-rendered and not scrapable; the Journal feed works but carries store and event news, not product drops, and has been quiet since 2026-05-16. The one-year fetch:"skip" threshold falls due 2027-05-16.
Men's-leaning lifestyle finds: gear, gifts, apparel. Feed only (coolmaterial.com/feed/, no www, trailing slash; the www host and article pages sit behind a Cloudflare challenge). Heavy on car reviews, style guides and monthly Black Book roundups; read the roundups for product picks.
Shawn Blanc's curated picks across software and physical objects. Strong taste, light volume. Confirmed defunct 2026-07-03 via feed (newest entry Sep 2024, feed itself is live but stale).
Tiny posts about software that does one thing well — heavy on indie utilities. Confirmed defunct 2026-07-03 via feed (newest entry Jan 2023, feed itself is live but stale).
Raw denim, workwear, and 'fades' culture. Strong on construction details.
Mastodon hashtag where indie devs surface their apps each Sunday — good for pre-launch / unknown finds.
Kelly's main site — the '68 Bits of Advice' / Excellent Advice posts often link out to delightful tools and books. Posts live at /thetechnium/; the homepage is a static about page. Feed validated 2026-07-03 (kk.org/thetechnium/feed); switched from fetch:curl to fetch:feed. Demoted weekly → as-needed 2026-07-14: the Technium is pure long-form essay — live and updating, but structurally it never names a buyable/usable thing (2 posts in the 07-05..07-14 window, 0 candidates). KK's product taste already reaches us through Cool Tools.
Glossy but often surfaces small makers and well-photographed individual pieces.
Andy Bell's curated directory of personal websites (~1,086 sites). Atom feed at /feed/all.xml lists every site with name, link, has-RSS flag, and tags. Source-of-sources first, find feed second: harvest standout personal sites worth ongoing tracking as source nominees, and capture a genuinely delightful individual site as a general-delight find in its own right. Caveat — every entry carries the same feed-regeneration timestamp (no per-site dates), so detect what's new by name-dedup against existing finds + nominees, not by date; sample a handful of the most delightful per scan rather than working all 1,086. Feed + HTML index both validated 2026-07-14 (HTTP 200).
Long-running menswear blog. The feed (putthison.com/feed/) is healthy and posts weekly, but the content is eBay 'Inside Track' affiliate roundups and sale round-ups, the ad-copy-listicle shape the bar drops, and it has produced no finds. Dormant by content, not by feed, so as-needed; restore to weekly if two consecutive scans capture something.
Listicle-format joke roundups. Curl reaches the page fine (server-rendered, no JS needed) — the problem is staleness, not access. icanhazdadjoke and r/dadjokes cover this topic with actually-fresh content.
Resident-written tips for ~80 cities — better signal than algorithmic 'top 10' lists.
Long threads (some 1000+ pages) where subject-matter obsessives compare specific brands; best for deep dives, not browsing. The forum-wide index.rss is sorted by last-post time and is coupon and referral spam plus bumped threads; sub-forum feeds 404 or 403 except buying-and-selling (classifieds). Following one specific sub-forum instead is an operator call.
App-of-the-week recommendations and workflow guides — opinionated picks rather than exhaustive roundups.
Catalog of architecturally unusual stays: treehouses, ice hotels, repurposed structures. Dead end: no feed and no server-rendered content, so fetch is skip. Earlier sources.json had the wrong domain (uhotw.com is now a gambling site).
Gear and clothing buying guides ('11 Best ...'); mostly evergreen listicles with a new batch every week or two. Feed only (werd.com/feed, 20 items, titles and short descriptions); read the listicle for named, shippable products.