Posts from January 2023

6PM — An extensive piece by Digby Warde-Aldam looks at the history of the British chain Pizza Express and how the design of their shops helped to build a national franchise. I never ate at a Pizza Express—why would I? I’m too pretentious. Still, I’ve always been intrigued by their old-fashioned art-nouveau identity and how outdated their shops looked.

6PM — Paul Graham wrote an answer to the question How to get new ideas as a counter piece to a response someone got from GPT after training it using Graham’s writing. While the GPT’s reply makes sense and is sufficiently complete, the writing couldn’t be more robotic and bland. Compare that to how Paul Graham actually writes.

5PM

Installation by street artist RONE. Flinders Street Station, Melbourne.

7PM — A Stroll Down Flatbush Avenue

This set of photos taken approximately every 50 feet along a stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn show the bustling street, storefonts, elevated trains, and trolleys.

Like Street View, but the pictures are from 1914.

6PM — The timeline era, a notion from Luke Harris, resonates a lot:

I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion.

What Twitter always lacked, what Mastodon already lacks, is deep thought. The technology behind Mastodon is exciting, but the way it works, the timeline, the reposts, and how people use it are no different from Twitter. Mastodon is too close to Twitter to present a viable alternative.

1PM

Future Utopia ft. Kae Tempest – We Were We Still Are

5PM

Ellen Lupton talks us through the history of the Bauhaus and various typographic works from the collections of the Letterform Archive and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

1PM — For Mozilla’s 25th anniversary, Jamie Zawinski reconstructed some early version of the mozilla.org website from 1998.

9AM — A man chilling in an armchair on the back of a lorry, a marriage proposal, or a bear feasting on fish—Wonders of Street View is a collection of curious scenes that can be found on Street View.

8AM — A very dry recount of events and numbers, A Brief History of Blogging is an interesting document of 2011’s zeitgeist. Its predictions are both wrong and spot on at the same time.

Blogs are unlikely to go anywhere in the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot of room for growth and innovation in method in which their content is found, delivered, and accessed.

Blogs mostly disappeared from the public eye because the methods for distributing and accessing content changed dramatically in the years after.

1PM — Unsolicited blogging advice by Manuel Moreale:

[T]he vast majority of the people out there won’t give a shit about you and your content. And that’s OK. It’s even comforting. Don’t waste time figuring out the perfect way to say something or the perfect topic for your blog. Don’t go insane curating your online persona. Be yourself. Be authentic. […] Post a picture every now and then, talk about a book you read or a movie you watched or a place you visited. Talk about an interesting conversation.

It may be unsolicited advice, but it’s sound advice nevertheless.

6PM

The New York Times created a Spotify playlist to commemorate David Crosby, who died this week—and it’s ace.

5PM — The Country Fire Authority offers an RSS feed for fire restrictions in Victoria. It’s a great use of the technology, but it doesn’t fulfil its potential. There’s only an RSS feed per region, and an entry lists regional municipalities with fire restrictions. But it doesn’t tell what the restrictions are, and there’s no feed for just my municipality.

5PM — The Computer History Museum recounts the story of Apple’s Lisa, the first personal computer to feature a graphical user interface. Lisa was a commercial flop but paved the way for the GUI-based personal computing we know today.

10AM

7PM — Wikipedia is getting a design update. The changes focus on the reading experience and navigating around articles and the site. It’s no fundamental overhaul—Wikipedia will still look like Wikipedia.

6PM — A new book by Will Hagle celebrates Madvillainy, the legendary album by MF Doom and Madlib. It will be available from 9 March. The book part of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 ⅓, a series of books about classic albums, each with a specific place in the history of popular culture.

9AM — Benjamin Dumke-von der Ehe made a paper diorama of the “This is fine” dog. Very fitting for the meme’s 10th anniversary.

2PM — Joel Coen on why they don’t make television series:

As writers… long-form was never something we could get our heads around,” Coen said. “It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a hard thing to get your head around.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a recent example. It should have ended after three, maybe four seasons. But the writers always find a reason for June to stay or return to Gilead. Few television series get this right, mostly shows limited to one series or those that tell a different story with every season, like Fargo or True Detective. I wouldn’t be able to name more than a handful of multi-season shows that were captivating all the way through. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, maybe.

(Via The Homebound Symphony)

1PM

While we all spent the lockdown baking bread, Jon Tordoff built a 100sqft LEGO model of the Lake District. (Via The Map Room)

7PM — Caleb Mason, a law scholar, dissects the lyrics of verse 2 of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, explicitly considering the Fourth Amendment. The paper is surprisingly well-written. Even I, not trained in law jargon, can follow the argument. (Via kottke.org)

4PM — A dog sitting on a table, surrounded by fire, enjoying a cuppa—the “This is fine” meme, you likely use it yourself at least once, is ten years old now. KC Green, creator of the comic strip, reflects on its legacy and how it affects the perception of their own work. Support the artist and buy some merchandise. (Via Pixel Envy, Waxy)

5PM — Dave Karpf went through the WIRED archives and dug up the best and most interesting stories published in the magazine since 1993, covering the dot-com boom and its bust, the Web 2.0 era, and everything that happened after. (Via Phil Gyford)

5PM — “What’s better than maps or stamps? Maps on stamps! When maps meet stamps, you get a love child called ‘cartophilately.’” Frank Jacobs, of Strange Maps fame, highlights artefacts from Gilad’s Maps on Stamps, a vast database of over 17,000 stamps with maps on them.

5PM

I’m loving Vibin’s Boom Bap instrumental mixes. They remind of the olden days, driving to the Baltic Sea in my friend’s VW Golf III. Now they are great background music for work.

11AM — The New York Times published a piece about engineering blogs at tech companies. Major news outlets writing about blogs again—is the current resurgence of blogging real?

10AM — Jeremy Keith writes about five websites that were redesigned recently. I’m seeing more background colours, creative layouts, and serif fonts. It looks like the times of clean, almost sterile, often boring web design are behind us. For now.

6PM — When exposed to music by A Tribe Called Quest whilst it ages, cheese develops a “funky” flavour, “remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste, and significantly different from the other samples.” This applies to humans, too; the more Tribe you listen, the funkier you become. (via)

1PM — A 900-page tome specifies the look and positioning of road signs, markings, and traffic control devices in the US: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control.

10AM — Remy Tumin, New York Times:

A software engineer siphoned more than $300,000 from his employer by introducing what prosecutors called a “series of malicious software edits” that wired money into his personal account.

Is Zulily one of these companies that don’t do code reviews because the practice discourages trust and slows down team productivity?

1PM — The Instagram generation has discovered the aesthetic of point-and-shot-cameras. Every trend comes around in twenty-year cycles. I should have held on to my Canon Powershot A60 from 2003; I could be the cool old bloke now, who was there when it all happened.

3PM — An interactive map by the Violence Research Centre at the University of Cambridge shows murder locations in medieval London. Some of the descriptions are hilarious:

• “Innkeeper Stephen of Lynn murdered after winning at backgammon,”
• “Death among drunk wrestlers,” and
• “Vicious attack for dropping eel skins outside a shop.”

Others could be modern-day headlines:

• “Man lies dead in street from fatal stab wound,” or
• “Luton man stabbed in Sunday evening dispute.”

8AM — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy:

By all means, please start your own blog and encourage others to do so. But let us not pretend this is what most people actually want to be doing. We are all busy and maintaining a website when the house needs to be cleaned and people need to be fed is a terrible waste of time. Silos suck over the long term, but at least they are easy.

This and technology is hard and most people really just want a free text field to scream complaints into the void.

5PM — On Google Maps, you can see where on the moon the Apollo astronauts landed and the area they explored.

4PM

Lupe Fiasco, currently an MLK Visiting Professor at MIT, giving a lecture “Rap Theory & Practice: an Introduction,” the introduction to his undergraduate course.

6PM — 23 things to do in SE23, my old stomping ground. I’m happy to see Ferfect Fried Chicken included in the list:

You can’t call yourself Perfect Fried Chicken and not expect to be sued, as this takeaway on London Road discovered to its cost, so they changed their first letter to create something totally meaningless and have carried on trading as FFC ever since.

One of South London’s many chicken shops that somehow survive despite an apparent lack of customers. This one developed a cult following in the area. Some Zomato reviews suggest Ferfect Fried Chicken serves the best pigeon in town, and someone sells limited-edition prints of drawings of their shopfront.

9AM — After years of label disputes, De La Soul’s entire catalogue will be published on streaming services this March. Of course, real rap-music connoisseurs already have all of De La Soul’s work on vinyl; i.e. not me. (via kottke.org)

5PM — Browse the Web like it’s 1991 and you’re Tim Berners-Lee.

3PM — This is fun: A website that points to the position of your mouse pointer. Apparently, a lot of finger pointing happens at parties.

6PM — If your new-year resolution is to host content on your own site, which you definitely should, then follow Tantek, who is posting IndieWeb tips for the next 100 days.

2PM — Samuel Pepys, a civil servant who lived in London in the 1600s, wrote a diary for ten years, which is now considered one of London’s main records of life at the time. Pepys’s diary covers monumental events like the Great Plague or the Great Fire of 1666.

In 2002, Phil Gyford started publishing the diary in blog format, one post every day, and repeated the reading from 2012. The third reading starts later today. Each post is extensively annotated with contextual information and is well worth a read.