Posts from November 2022

9AM — The world-class New York Times graphics department designed charts depicting the scenarios under which each team will advance to the knock-out stage of the Football World Cup.

8PM — Geopolitics, contested borders in south and south-east Asia, have found their way onto James Cheshire’s map-themed Christmas baubles.

8AM — Jamie Zawinski: “Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet.”

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.

5PM

Epicly Later’d pictures film-maker Harmony Korine, his films, influences, and art. Korine is best known for writing the script for the movie Kids, an unfiltered look at the life of a group of unsupervised adolescents in New York spending a day between shoplifting, assaulting strangers, consumption of a wide range of drugs and sex. This documentary shows that Kids isn’t even his most controversial work.

2PM — Wish I had Times Newer Roman when I was at university:

Introducing Times Newer Roman, a font that looks just like Times New Roman, except each character is 5-10% wider.

Fulfill lengthy page requirements with hacked margins, adjusted punctuation sizing, and now, Times Newer Roman!

11AM — How to Weave the Artisan Web by John Scalzi:

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?

Yes, indeed, that would be nice. How realistic is it, though, that the vast crowd that built a following on social media using its straightforward publication and amplification methods; that these people will start to develop and maintain their own websites?

9AM — Ever wondered why Japanese websites look so different? Me neither. Sabrina Cruz looked into it anyway and found some interesting insights into how it is different and why.

The post doesn’t seem to have a permalink, here’s a snapshot on the Web Archive for future reference.

12PM — Speaking of Matt Webb, his blogroll is an absolute treasure trove.

Back in the old days, many blogs had a blogroll listing links to other blogs the author followed. Blogrolls were the way to discover new blogs and rediscover old ones. With the arrival of Tumblr, Medium, and Substack, which mostly replaced publishing on self-hosted and self-built websites, blogrolls disappeared almost completely.

But there’s hope. Matt’s blogroll lists more than 200 blogs, most with RSS feeds, including many old gems I had forgotten and many I had not yet heard of before.

4PM — Matt Webb set himself 15 rules for blogging as a guide to post more often without overthinking the process. He has posted to his blog for 139 consecutive weeks. That’s getting close to three years. Looks like it works for him.

9AM — ooh.directory is a categorised directory of over 850 blogs, including a feed of the most recent posts.

8AM — Rands has a rare talent; he explains complex issues using simple words:

So, forever growth must be proven, advertising must fund forever growth, so advertising must continually increase. This means you, the person just looking for Interesting X, must be incentivized to see and click on more relevant advertisements. The services need more data to provide more relevant advertisements and fund forever growth. These services require you to engage more.

They’ve already helped you find your people, and you’ve already helped them out by providing your social graph and high-affinity content for this graph, but they need more because of forever growth. You already see ads, and perhaps you’ve clicked on some of them, but now you start seeing “content we think you’ll like.”

Of course, this is all in the context of him opening a Mastodon account.

4PM — Last.fm turns twenty. One of those services that have been around for what feels like ages and, apparently, still have a thriving community.

9AM — How to move an obelisk. Via @ftrain:

Here’s an article on how they move obelisks in case you are moving any obelisks today.

10AM — The leap second, which is occasionally added to synchronise atomic and astronomical time, will be abandoned in 2035.

We know this introduces a new problem now, but we’ll leave it for future generations to sort out:

Resolution D calls for U.T.C. to go uninterrupted by leap seconds from 2035 until at least 2135 and for metrologists to eventually figure out how to reconcile the atomic and astronomical time scales with fewer headaches. The international time standard would be severed from time as told by the heavens for generations to come.

Whether you work in timekeeping, make software, or pretend to tackle climate change—punting seems a universal approach to complex problems.

Also interesting is this nugget from a scientist sponsored by the Catholic Church:

[…] rejoining those two time scales was imperative, said Rev. Pavel Gabor, an astrophysicist and the vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Ariz. He said that atomic timekeeping was just one example of how the world was becoming incomprehensible to the average person, and that scientists had a responsibility to help people feel in control of their lives.

“I think sensitivity to this mistrust of elites, mistrust of experts, mistrust of science and institutions, that’s something that’s a very real problem in today’s world,” he said. “And let’s not contribute to it.”

The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t know the leap second exists, let alone how it complicates the world’s affairs. The leap second, of all possible reasons, isn’t the reason the “average person” distrusts elites and science. It may have something to do with how our political, economic, and spiritual leaders conduct themselves.

6PM

Matt Green is walking every block of NYC. (via swissmiss)

4PM — Cennydd Bowles argues that it’s ok, ethically speaking, to watch the Football World Cup.

I have watched fewer and fewer games of big football tournaments in recent years. I no longer have time to sit around and watch football for four weeks. But the fact that recent tournaments were hosted in countries with questionable track records on human rights and FIFA’s shenanigans didn’t help either. This time it’s likely I won’t watch any of the games, if only because the kick-off times don’t favour audiences in Australia.

11AM — Fred Brooks, Turing-Award winner and author of The Mythical Man-Month, has passed away. Brooks was responsible for Brooks’ law, one the most renowned, and at the same time, consistently violated laws in software project management.

11AM — No beer will be served at the football World Cup in Qatar. Obviously, the ban won’t apply to you if you have enough money or licked the right boots:

Beer and other drinks, including an official FIFA Champagne and an array of sommelier-selected wines, will still be available in stadium luxury suites reserved for FIFA officials and other wealthy guests.

Thoughts and prayers to all the English fans who now must endure the scorching heat drinking water.

10AM — no-ht.ml is a website written entirely without HTML.

5PM — Volume 6 of the NACIS Atlas of Design has been published in October. You can preview some of the maps included in the edition, and they look delicious.

5PM — Per freedom-of-information request, the most popular journeys on the London tube.

11AM

Brett Novak’s films are pieces of art; not to mention Isamu’s immense skill in this one.

8AM — A short history of technology hubs in the US. Surprisingly, the article, published only a year ago, is only available from the Internet Archive. The Reboot is now a crypto site.

6PM — brands.town is a Mastodon instance that houses fake accounts of well-known brands, including a surprising amount from Australia like CentreLink, Metro Trains and the Australia Australia Australia Party. Full of valuable information.

5PM — Anna Mancini tells the story of how the Apple archives ended up at Stanford. It’s strange how much major news outlets either recite wrong accounts or rewrite history to fit the narrative of the larger-than-life leader who was just as visionary as he was rooted in history. And how you rarely hear about the people who get done seemingly mundane things such as preserving an archive; because they work in the background and don’t spend much time giving interviews.

7PM — How big tech could hijack and crush Mastodon:

I think the real danger for the Mastodon/greater Fediverse community is that, should Mastodon really become the “next Twitter”, it will catch the attention of the other FAANGs. And the way the Fediverse is structured currently, it appears highly vulnerable to the old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish playbook

Quite ironic that the author decided to post this on Hacker News of all places.

8AM — NetNewsWire, my feed reader of choice, allows subscribing to Twitter accounts. You can follow people on Twitter without the Twitter cruft, although you still need a Twitter account. Let’s hope all this work wasn’t for nothing.

6PM — LOW←TECH MAGAZINE runs a solar-powered website that sometimes goes offline when the battery powering their server runs dry during spells of bad weather. The background showing the current battery status is a nice touch.

9AM — “Moving everything to RSS.” Excellent summary of where to find RSS feeds of popular sites and privacy-friendly ways to read them.

2PM — “Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.”

6PM — “The Map” is a short documentary by Gary Hustwit about the redesign of New York’s subway map and the accompanying online app.

8AM — Bear Blog is another unobtrusive new blogging platform. It supports the basics: No trackers or JavaScript, custom domains, themes, and feeds. There’s also a version for self-hosting.

8AM — Hand-drawn map of Melbourne’s inner city, for visitors. Includes directions where to buy lemongrass for dinner.

5PM — Simon Willison uses an interesting analogy to explain how Mastodon works. It’s like blogs. You can host your own or use a shared instance, and it also acts as a feed reader.

I sure hope that the rekindled interest in blogging won’t be stifled by everyone just moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Despite what everybody says, how different Mastodon feels, the parts I always hated about Twitter, the condensed hot takes optimised for likability and shareability and devoid of nuanced thinking — we would see that too on Mastodon once it takes off.

8AM — What to blog:

A blog post is not the same as an essay or article. It’s simply an update to the log of information you’re writing on your website. That stream of posts, together, makes up your blog. So a post can be as short or as long as you like. It’s your voice, so they can also be as formal or informal as you like.

9AM — Manchester City, the football club, is developing a scarf that tracks fans’ physiological reactions during games. Imagine this: After a heart-breaking loss in injury time, your smart watch sends you a notification offering anti-depressants at a local pharmacy, discounted for ticket holders.

9AM — Assorted quotes by Paul Ford, writing about boring technology:

Disruption is an ethos for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don’t have tanks in the street.

And:

You can’t just say “software is eating the world” and chill. Software already ate the world, and digested it, and pooped out a new world, and that’s where we’re living.

And:

Stability is my new best friend. Not the big stuff, the UN-level stuff. Leave that to the smart macro-thinkers with European accents and interesting all-weather clothing, or the sad Americans with Substacks.

Paul Ford is always a joy to read.

4PM — Some appropriate descriptions of West-London stations on the new Elizabeth Line:

• “sparse futuristic box”
• “bland commuter funnel”
• “gorgeous listed throwback”
• “original brick building leading to unshowy box”

8AM — Douglas Bowman remembers Wired’s redesign 20 years ago, the first major project to ship a standards-conformant website. This was a big deal then; it’s how I first learned that you don’t need tables to lay out a website.

8AM — Antarctica has bars. Several of them.

8AM — In the UK, true north, grid north, and magnetic north will be aligned in the coming years at different places around the country. If you’re around Poole in the coming weeks, you can trust your compass for once.

9AM — What do you do when you’re bored, and you have too much money on your hands? You invest in a sport you don’t understand, in a country you don’t understand.

C.R.E.A.M.

6PM — Steven Levy, Wired:

While the variety of devices launched or updated are as disparate as a home-roaming robot and a television set, Amazon’s hardware chief, Dave Limp, is emphatic that they all serve the company’s grand mission—constructing a silent infrastructure of ambient intelligence to do just about anything for us.

Think of it as the opposite of the metaverse: Instead of asking people to venture into an artificial virtual world, Amazon wants to weave its computing products, whether it builds them itself or licenses the technology to others, into our homes and cars, to the point where the technology seems invisible, even as it switches on gadgets, alerts us to home intruders, and figures out what we want to watch or read next.

As predicted in 2006 by Adam Greenfield in his visionary book Everyware.

8AM — Hoodmaps classifies neighbourhoods in cities worldwide according to their vibe. In London, the map shows people in Sydenham are rich, and hip in Selhurst. Whoever provided the data has clearly never been to South London.

11AM — Nicheless is a micro-blogging service that limits posts to 300 words, and doesn’t publicly display replies, likes, and follower count.

9AM — The Browser Company have hired Darin Fisher to build Arc, a new browser:

Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites.

Arc is very different from other browsers. The breadth of new functionality in Arc is overwhelming at first. I initially toyed around with Arc for an hour and then didn’t open it for a couple of weeks. But I came back, and it’s growing on me.

Most of our work happens in browsers today, meetings, emails, calendars, or writing. And Arc does an excellent job of grouping all those aspects into spaces, split panels, keeping important tabs open, closing others automatically. Overall it’s a more organised browsing experience.