Links from 2021

(In your best Albert Einstein voice) “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Garson conceived the album with Lynn and Joel Rapp, who ran Mother Earth Plant Boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Joel had been a writer for My Favorite Martian, but had burned out on the TV industry. So he switched from little green men to little green plants, and the Rapps’ store, as well as their series of best-selling books, helped popularize the houseplant trend that lasted throughout the 1970s and has become commonplace today.

The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, taken from recordings of London stations between 1984 & 1993.

Via Thom Yorke's Guest Mix.

Make a smooth shadow, friend.

Parties in the contractual chain will need to inform their clients if a worker has a ‘material interest’ in the intermediary they work via, under new off-payroll rule duties from April 6th.

Video chat conversations that recreate real-life social interactions

Clearly that could be a good thing or a bad thing.

Conversation doesn't paint Okta in a particularly great light, but lots of alternatives to be found in conversation.

If you are living in England and Wales or, have significant interests there, it would be sensible to sign an English power of attorney as well as a Scottish one. This will make matters administratively a lot easier in the event the document is needed at some point in the future.

is there a contractual penalty risk of accepting a permanent role with the end-client, or engaging with the client as a small consultancy delivering your services under a Statement of Work (SOW), if you are currently working as an agency contractor via a PSC?

Numi alternative. Can't assign subtotals to variables :(

Numi alternative. Looks abandoned.

you shouldn't start a new project with microservices, even if you're sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile.

Where it becomes very convenient for user interfaces, and we'll take the example of React here, is that instead of maintaining additional fields in your state to display or not an error (which will likely be desynchronized by mistake, since there's a human responsibility to maintain it), you can store a result value in your component state, and explode it directly in the render function to derive what you need to display.

An open-source colour picker app for macOS.

The Diátaxis framework aims to solve the problem of structure in technical documentation. It adopts a systematic approach to understanding the needs of documentation users in their cycle of interaction with a product.

This approach is not hacky at all.

self-paced online courses for children to learn coding at home, as well as specially designed curriculum for schools and camps.

An organized collection of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives compiled by Valery Marier

Conversations which cause controversy in public can be carried out in private with more nuance and no trolling. A distinction can be made between performance and communication. In “The presentation of Self in Everyday Life” Erving Goffman, a 20th-century sociologist, distinguished between “front-stage” behaviour, which is observed by all and sundry, and the “back-stage” life of rehearsal and preparation in the company of others who are part of the same project. “For healthy psychology we need back and front stage,” says Carissa Véliz of Oxford University. “[Online] we have been pushing back stage more and more into oblivion. Having more private messaging brings the back stage back.”

I really like this analogy.

This website is a single HTML file. It simply uses the #anchor suffix (from 1992) and the :target CSS selector to show and hide pages/content.

Remove blank space from around any most SVGs!

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of

a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is a collection of notes on paper slips with a special twist: It is a hypertext that he could navigate the drawer cabinet containing all the paper slips with a reasonable amount of time and energy. “Reasonable” means that it was reasonable for Luhmann, who, obsessed with his theory of society, was a workaholic and an enthusiastic bureaucrat.

The problem with [timeline] roadmaps is that they are linear and one-dimensional. They suggest that the product team knows exactly what needs to be done in the future, and that it’s only a matter of correct estimation and timely execution. But these are in fact release plans, not product roadmaps. They do not reflect the core concepts of modern product development, such as uncertainty, discovery and small pivots.

A creative storytelling app that empowers kids to draw, animate, narrate, and record their own cartoons on their tablet, phone or Chromebook.

A free lightweight GPU-based voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer.

Create animated videos using blocks, items and the lovable characters from Minecraft.

Always worth revisiting.

NTS and beyond...

a JavaScript library for creative coding, with a focus on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, beginners, and anyone else

Perhaps what we’re seeing is the disentangling of social media back into social and media: newsletters and podcasts are best understood as being part of the media spectrum, even if many of them are smaller and have community spaces attached. And Discord space, Slack spaces, etc, these virtual neighbourhoods are pure social.

How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.