Links #160

For the next while (and for real this time), I will refrain from posting AI-related links. I’m heavily allergic to AI — sorry to blindside you with that hugely surprising fact — and the links I’ve been posting about it naturally skew negative, but I don’t want this blog to be weighed down with frequent negativity. Enter this respite.

Craig Mod on the MacBook Neo and the iPad. Yes, this. I rarely use my iPad these days but could see myself doing so if iPadOS were a better fit for the device.

David Aerne’s Charcuterie, a cool visual Unicode explorer.

ReadBeanIceCream on serving up text files instead of HTML for websites. While I kind of love this delightfully retro idea, the lack of clickable links does make the UX a bit onerous. If you used a browser that automatically linkified URLs, though, then it would work, I think. But at that point you may as well just use the Gemini protocol instead.

John Gruber on how to format ten-digit phone numbers. Hyphens all the way.

Pinery, a macOS app for making ebooks (EPUB and PDF). I haven’t used it, but it looks like it could be nice.

Benjamin Breen on the handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations, with some lovely work from William James’s books among others.

Screen Wake Lock API. Had no idea this existed. At the moment it doesn’t work on iOS, though, which is sad. (I want to use it in Scroll, my ebook reader.) Hopefully someday!

Attic, a command-line tool for backing your iCloud Photos up to S3. I don’t use iCloud Photos because I want to have my own copy of the files, but with this maybe it’s now worth looking into.

The making of iA Notebook (video). Enjoyed this. The notebook itself looks very nice, but oof, that price tag. $79 would get you around fifteen Field Notes notebooks (from the National Parks set, naturally), 720 pages altogether. Even though I know the comparison isn’t fair, still I find I’d rather have the Field Notes.