New release: a family descendancy list generator. (The first version of one, anyway. It’s still pretty new.) It’s a web app that lets you enter a descendancy list in a text-based format like this:
And you then get something like this when you print:
Seven years ago I started making these types of charts in Google Docs, which worked out okay, but I got tired of fiddling with tab stops and here we are.
This marks a change from how I’ve been building genealogy chart apps, by the way. CLI scripts are all well and good, but doing it this way should hopefully be a lot easier for people to use.
The Wager, by David Grann, published 2023. Whew, what a story. Compelling throughout, and I learned lots of interesting things about seafaring to boot. I’m so glad I was not a sailor in the 1700s.
The Power Broker, by Robert A. Caro, published 1974. This was almost 1,200 pages long and took me over a year to read (though for much of that year I was admittedly only reading a couple pages per week; it’s actually quite readable and I sprinted through the last 200+ pages in a single day). Really good book, and what a fascinating (and detailed!) study in power. While it was very long, I feel that the length was fully warranted and worth it. (Stockholm syndrome? Maybe. But I do think I’m going to remember this book a lot more than some shorter books I’ve finished in a sitting.)
Fiction
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, volume 5, by Beth Brower, published 2021, fiction. Witty and delightful. Loved it. Looking forward to volumes six and seven, and I’m glad there are many more to come. I can see myself rereading these often over the years, which is saying something since I’m not a rereader at all.
The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera, published 2023, fantasy. Well crafted and inventive, with good prose and worldbuilding, and an interesting take on religion. Also, that twist near the end! Great and unexpected. There were some gross parts I didn’t care for, though, and even without taking those into consideration, I don’t think I would say that I loved the book. But I’m glad I read it.
TIL that ripgrep supports searching by Unicode ranges. For example:
rg "[\u0250-\u1FFF\u2027-\uFFFF]"
This greps for anything after the Latin Extended-B block, excluding some general punctuation like em/en dashes, curly quotes, and ellipses. (Useful to me for easily checking which characters I’m using on my website and thus what a new font would need to support.)
I’ve added a timeline page, listing the types of projects I’ve worked on each year. (A chronological view of my work to complement the topical view already on here. And mostly just because I’m a nerd and like making charts.)
I recently redesigned the reading log to be more compact.
Sean Voisen on moving beyond chat as interface. “One of the great failures of modern computing is how it has largely ignored the presence of the human body beyond the slightest acknowledgement that humans have a pair of eyeballs and a few fingertips…. Compared to the way we employ and use other tools and instruments—from spatulas to screwdrivers to accordions to violins—the way we use computers today is a gross underutilization of both the expressiveness and sensitivity of our bodies.” I think it’s great how some with disabilities are still able to use computers because of this very thing, but I’m also intrigued by the idea of multimodal interfaces.
Cory D on boring technology being good. Generally agreed. I’ve even entertained thoughts lately of building local CLI tools in C or C++, as a more boring (and thus hopefully more resilient) solution than using Node and JavaScript. (C/C++ compilers are omnipresent, and the binaries don’t require an interpreter.) (Yes, Rust or Go would probably make more sense. But I think I also kind of miss the old days when all my programming was in C/C++.)
Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, published 2021. Some good advice in here, but for the most part I feel like religion fills this need for me, so I wouldn’t say I loved it. I do enjoy Burkeman’s newsletter, though.
The Sisterhood, by Liza Mundy, published 2023. A history of women in the CIA. Interesting throughout. I’m glad things have improved somewhat over time.
Fiction
The Beast of Ten, by Beth Brower, fantasy, published 2018. A loose retelling of Beauty & the Beast. I liked it, but it was a bit slow going and the voice didn’t have the same spark and wit as the Unselected Journals.
The Big Score, by K. J. Parker, fantasy, published 2021. Quite enjoyed it. As I think I’ve said before, Parker’s writing really clicks with my brain, and this was no exception. Saloninus here is a fun amalgam, too.
John Durham Peters’ research techniques. “Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).” I especially like the dictionary reading recommendation and need to make time for that more often.
Alexander Obenauer on the interfaces with which we think. I like the idea of decomposing computing into smaller blocks that aren’t wrapped in monolithic apps. Seems like a great concept, allowing for more interesting composition.
Web lunch video with Maggie Appleton. Her comment about having no long-term overarching plan for her career resonated with me — with both my day job and my personal projects, it’s always been one step at a time. Once in a while I freak out about that and feel like I need to get things figured out, but as I look back, line upon line has been working out pretty well so far.
Sean Voisen on networked note-taking using tools like Obsidian and Roam. “I’ve found networked note-taking to be a practice that mostly overpromises and under-delivers.” I feel a little better about never actually linking my notes like I always intended to.
Who Can Use, “a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.” This is great.
