Blog: #prints

An interesting Hacker News thread about how to prepare for blindness as a software engineer.

Ryan Holiday on swarming to learn things. I like this idea but haven’t managed to do it yet. My interest keeps flitting around.

Bryan Braun on Scratch. Cool.

Steven Johnson on walking as a way to think. Agreed.

Jordan Eldredge on bugs caught by the newish no-constant-binary-expression rule in eslint.

Jeremy Keith’s In and Out of Style talk from CSS Day. Liked this a lot.

Josh Dzieza on writing fiction with AI. Interesting to see how some people have used it. For me, writing the words myself is most of the fun.

Chromium issue 1130512, a bug that vexes my chartmaking. It’s not the end of the world, but I do look forward to when it’s fixed and I can get 0.25pt lines out of Chrome.

Wikipedia page on the etymology of London. Quite liked this.

Alex Chan on taking more screenshots. Something I need to do more often.

Google’s new Carbon language. I basically never write C++ anymore so I would never actually use this, but it’s interesting.

Robin Rendle’s essay in praise of shadows. Love the implementation here.

Robin Sloan on Miyazaki and plots animated by kindness.

Shepherd, a new thing for discovering books.

Axle that allows for 80-degree steering. The video was cool.

Daniel Kao on ArchieML. I’ve switched over to ArchieML for my genealogy charts and generally it’s been good.

Vaskange’s near-infinite zoom. It just keeps going!

The Cube Rule of food identification. Loved this.

David Stern on text rendering.

Olushuyi Olutimilehin on article vs. section in HTML.

British Summer Time, something I’d never heard of until now. I guess I’d just assumed that Daylight Saving Time was only an American thing and the rest of the world didn’t change times (sort of like imperial vs. metric).

Meta adds Rust to allowed server-side languages. I’m beginning to suspect I might like the idea of Rust more than Rust itself, but I also haven’t really written any Rust in almost two years. Need to change that.

Topi Tjukanov’s map of notable people. I’m in love with the way the labels fade in from behind the sphere.

My friend Matt Haggard on a cool wordprint visualization technique.

Vim undo trick. I’ve been using Vim for twenty-six years and never knew about this.

Vim ranges. This past week one of my goals has been to train myself to use Vim’s Ex commands for moving ranges (e.g., :15,20m41). This is something I do often enough (and clumsily enough right now, with row-wise visual select — a lot of js in a row — followed by yank and paste) that I want to learn how to do it super fast. This way is less likely to cause RSI as well.

Forrest Allison on Bun.

Giant leafcutter ant nest in Brazil. Whew, that thing is huge.

Cozy fantasy subreddit discussion on what cozy fantasy is. In my experience it’s a refreshing change of pace.

Thomas Bevan on kicking the news consumption habit. Once in a while I check the news but by and large I don’t (ditto social media) and it does feel better.

Scott Jenson on files. Also his followup. I like files.

Reddit thread on writing advice. Some helpful things.

Aaron Gustafson on equality vs. equity in the context of building software. Great points.

Jennifer Chu on MIT’s new ultrasound stickers. Looking forward to see what this enables.

Elisia Guerena on Angélique Schmeinck’s hot-air balloon restaurant. Great idea. I’m terrified of heights enough that I don’t think I’d ever want to eat at a place like this, though.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• A New Foreign Policy, by Jeffrey D. Sachs. A bit dry at times, but I learned a decent amount and agreed with the majority of what he says. I’m all for global cooperation as opposed to insidious American exceptionalism. Also, I hadn’t realized how much regime change we’ve forced on the world, how many wars we’ve started for no good reason. America is a troubled country in a lot of ways. (This is something I’ve been gradually realizing over the past few years as I’ve begun reading more history.)
• The Wizard of Lies, by Diana B. Henriques. I came into this not knowing really anything about Bernie Madoff or even about the 2008 financial crisis (I wasn’t paying any attention to either when they happened). Initially the financial stuff was near incomprehensible and I came quite close to shelving the book, but I stuck with it and it ended up being fine in the end. A sad story, though.

Recent fiction reads

• Prosper’s Demon, by K. J. Parker. Novella. Good. Didn’t see the end coming. Someday I’ll try Parker’s Tom Holt novels and see if they’re my style, because his Parker work really does suit me. Looking forward to reading A Practical Guide to Conquering the World to finish off the Siege trilogy.
• The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix. Enjoyed it a lot. I still haven’t read his Old Kingdom series yet, need to add it to my ever-long TBR list.

Books purchased since last post

• To Ride Hell’s Chasm — Janny Wurts
• Good Omens — Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
• Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service — Carol Leonnig
• Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis — Guy Snodgrass
• Iron Truth — S. A. Tholin
• The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything — Matthew Ball
• Risen — Benedict Jacka
• Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy — Nathaniel Philbrick
• The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada — Don Hollway
• Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race — Tim Fernholz
• The Return of Fitzroy Angursell — Victoria Goddard
• The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul — Victoria Goddard
• Petty Treasons — Victoria Goddard
• Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander — Victoria Goddard
• Terec and the Wild — Victoria Goddard
• The Tower at the Edge of the World — Victoria Goddard
• Aurelius (to be called) Magnus — Victoria Goddard
• Anno Dracula — Kim Newman
• 1812: The Navy’s War — George C Daughan
• If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—from the Revolution to the War of 1812 — George C Daughan
• The Dawn’s Early Light: The War of 1812 — Walter Lord
• Belladonna Nights and Other Stories — Alastair Reynolds
• The Wizard’s Butler — Nathan Lowell
• The Bride of the Blue Wind — Victoria Goddard
• The Warrior of the Third Veil — Victoria Goddard
• Stargazy Pie — Victoria Goddard
• Bee Sting Cake — Victoria Goddard
• Whiskeyjack — Victoria Goddard
• Blackcurrant Fool — Victoria Goddard
• Love-in-a-Mist — Victoria Goddard
• Plum Duff — Victoria Goddard
• Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia — Anne Garrels
• The Aeneid — Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch
• Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages — Gaston Dorren
• A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis: Boston 1850–1900 — Stephen Puleo
• Dune Omnibus: Books 1–3 — Frank Herbert
• Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions — Michael Moss
• Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable — Jeffrey D. Sachs
• Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City — Samira Shackle
• Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance — Matthew Brennan
• 14 — Peter Clines
• Till Human Voices Wake Us — Victoria Goddard
• In the Company of Gentlemen — Victoria Goddard
• Stone Speaks to Stone — Victoria Goddard
• In the Realms of Gold — Victoria Goddard
• The Seven Brides-to-Be of Generalissimo Vlad — Victoria Goddard

Guess whose book I’ve been reading and loving.

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Baldur Bjarnason on better web apps. Agreed.

Anton Howes on why Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t invented until the 1970s. A fun question.

Bun, a new JavaScript runtime. Such speed! The built-in TypeScript and npm compatibility is nice, too. Planning on trying this out for some upcoming projects.

Rasmus Andersson on making fonts in Figma. Had no idea this kind of thing is possible in Figma.

Garrett Scott on Pipedream, a hyperlogistics startup. Kind of mind-blowing. I don’t know how I feel about the security aspects of having a chute into my house that other companies can access, though.

Laundry Jet, another interesting startup. Also something I probably wouldn’t want to use, this one because a) my house isn’t that big and b) if stuff gets stuck in there…

Matt Webb on tubes. The source of the above links.

Tree & Leaf, a lovely online genealogy site. I’m now itching to do something similar. (It’ll probably wait until after I’ve gotten this printed genealogy chart itch out of my system, though.)

ArchieML, the NYT’s markup language. A potential alternative to YAML that I’m looking at for some of my genealogy projects.

Darshana Narayanan on the dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari. I haven’t read Harari yet and now will go in with more skepticism than I would have otherwise.

Tess Joosse on recent research showing that quiet background noise can numb pain. Intriguing.

Matt Levine on Elon and Twitter. An entertaining read.

Gwendal Uguen and Luc Guillemot’s visual guide to the Aztec pantheon. A cool bit of educational material.

Yi Fuxian on China’s population peaking earlier than anticipated. I’m not actually tracking this closely or anything, but it did seem interesting.

The content-aware typography Tumblr. Ha.

Steven Johnson on not looking back while drafting. I tend to do this, though maybe with a little bit more rereading than he recommends (just the last page or so of what I’ve written).

Nolan Lawson on memory leaks on the web. Something I need to do better at checking for.

Matthias Ott on just putting stuff out there on the web. This makes me want to write more often. Still trying to decide if this two-week cadence is right for me or not.

Google Docs URL shortcuts for creating new documents. Had no idea these existed. Wow.

John Christensen’s Webb vs. Hubble comparison site. Double wow.

Ahmad Shadeed deep diving into some Figma CSS.

Nolan Lawson on style scoping vs. the shadow DOM.

C. J. Chilvers’ personal publishing principles. An interesting idea for a page. I like it.

Frontend Mastery on the new wave of React state management libraries.

Klim Type Foundry on The Future, a new Futura typeface. Mmm, I love type design writeups like this.

Robin Shreeves on scruffy hospitality. I.e., not worrying so much about cleaning your house before guests come over. We haven’t had guests since Covid began, but when we start up again (which will be soon, now that our youngest are almost fully vaccinated), this is good to keep in mind.

Kurt Schlosser on “parallel reality”. It’s a new type of screen with multidirectional pixels that can supposedly privately show up to 100 customers their flight information, all at the same time from the same screen.

Matt Webb on carbon dioxide detection. Makes me wonder if I should get a monitor for this.

Miriam Suzanne on why browser stylesheets have a default margin of 8px. CSS history!

Keith Peters on randomness in generative art. Cool.

Matthew Guay on documenting first before building (software). Love this. Every time I’ve done this, I’ve been glad that I did — implementation goes so much more smoothly.

Sheon Han on the hidden history of screen readers (JAWS and NVDA, mainly).

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Recent nonfiction reads

• Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. A variety of essays, with varying levels of interest. Overall, it was a quick read that I learned a lot from. The idea of disability being time travel (making your body act much older or much younger) resonated with me; I’ve certainly felt like my spondylolisthesis has aged me thirty years. While it’s invisible to anyone looking at me, it affects my life every day, all day long. (It’s very rare for an hour to go by without the pain drawing my attention.) Anyway, this was the first book I’ve read about disability since my injury, and some of the essays definitely felt like they were speaking to me.

Recent fiction reads

• The Sudden Appearance of Hope, by Claire North. I think this was maybe my second favorite of hers so far, after Harry August. An interesting science fiction idea (a girl who everyone forgets) with intriguing exploration of the potential ramifications, which is what I like out of science fiction. (Or at least one thing I like out of science fiction.)
• Devolution, by Max Brooks. Sasquatch horror. Quite violent in some respects, but overall a captivating story. I liked it more than World War Z, which felt more exhausting to me. Even so, I’m very, very glad this book was fictional.
• Upgrade, by Blake Crouch. Another interesting science fiction idea (which comes enough into the book that I won’t spoil it, even though it’s somewhat self-evident and probably all over the back cover copy). During the middle I wasn’t sure how I felt about the book, but the ending turned it around for me in a good way. Also one that I’m glad was fictional.

Books purchased since last post

• Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World — Adam Tooze
• Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story — Christina Thompson
• The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy — Paige Williams
• The Last Lie Told — Debra Webb
• Churchill & Son — Josh Ireland
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body — Neil Shubin
• Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory — Ben Macintyre
• The Law — Jim Butcher
• Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence — Joseph J. Ellis
• The Immortal King Rao — Vauhini Vara
• The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday — Saad Z. Hossain
• Knives at Dawn: America’s Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d’Or Competition — Andrew Friedman
• Stet: An Editor’s Life — Diana Athill
• The Story of Greece and Rome — Tony Spawforth
• Trust: America’s Best Chance — Pete Buttigieg
• Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer — Steven Johnson
• The Hand of the Sun King — J. T. Greathouse
• Upgrade — Blake Crouch
• Drunk on All Your Strange New Words — Eddie Robson
• Inda — Sherwood Smith
• The Immortal Game: A History of Chess — David Shenk
• Stray Souls — Kate Griffin
• The Glass God — Kate Griffin
• Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir — Marie Yovanovitch
• Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life — David Treuer
• Harbinger of the Storm — Aliette de Bodard
• Master of the House of Darts — Aliette de Bodard

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Stephen Cranney on using scriptural phrases with DALL•E. I played around with Midjourney a bit and wish I’d thought to try this when I still had free credits.

Bjørn Karmann’s Occlusion Grotesque, a typeface carved into the trunk of a tree and digitized over time. Intriguing.

Markwhen, Markdown for timelines. Cool.

Mary Gaitskill on the hidden life of stories.

Matthew Butterick on the legal implications of Github Copilot.

Kit Wilson on reading ourselves to death and an overabundance of text.

3D maps of every London Underground station. Mmm.

A look at the Onyx Boox 25″ e-ink monitor. I’m really excited to see how e-ink develops over the next couple decades. (In writing this, I realized that I would love, love, love to have a thin, lightweight, small pocket-sized 400+ dpi e-ink reader. Something like an iPhone 13 Mini but just for reading.)

Patrick Clancey on rethinking mobile-first CSS. Some good points, though it’s not as much about ditching mobile-first as I thought it would be.

Una Kravetz on style queries, coming soon to CSS.

Mitch Benn on the pronunciation of /r/ in various English accents. Loved this.

Brenan Keller on testing. Ha.

Rich Harris on Prettier making tabs the default in 3.0. Tabs do seem more accessible and better than spaces, honestly.

Slack on remote development (not that kind).

NASA’s new Hubble e-book on exoplanets.

Epanorthosis, a thing I didn’t know about till the other day.

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I’ve been reading more on my Kobo lately, after barely touching it for months. The contrast and typography are great. The physical buttons end up hurting my fingers a little, though, so I’ve just been using the touchscreen. (Honestly, I’d prefer it without the buttons, for my fingers and for the sake of symmetry. If/when Kobo releases a new Clara with the Carta 1200 screen, I’m absolutely planning to switch.)

Recent nonfiction reads

• The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf. About the life of Alexander von Humboldt, who I had somehow never heard of before reading this. Glad to have corrected that. The book also ended up being about a number of other men (Bolívar, Darwin, Thoreau, Marsh, Haeckel, Muir, etc.), which I hadn’t expected but which turned out to be fascinating. Loved it.
• Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World, by Philip Matyszak. A nice overview of dozens of ancient groups like the Akkadians, the Hyksos, the Phrygians, the Bactrians, the Epirots, the Celtiberians, the Catuvellauni, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the Hephthalites. About five or six pages per group. It was slower reading because of all the ancient names (Magetobriga, Vercingetorix, Sarmizegetusa, etc.), but it was good. So much human history, and I still know so very little of it.

Recent fiction reads

• Sourdough, by Robin Sloan. Really liked it. A bit zany at times, but lots of heart. And yes, it did get me itching to make sourdough bread.

Books purchased since last post

• The Past Is Red — Catherynne M. Valente
• Troubleshooting Your Novel: Essential Techniques for Identifying and Solving Manuscript Problems — Steven James
• Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy — Jamie Raskin
• In Theory, It Works — Raymond St. Elmo
• The Crook Factory — Dan Simmons
• The Secret Lives of Color — Kassia St. Clair
• Cuba: An American History — Ada Ferrer
• Hench — Natalie Zina Walschots
• The Secrets of Alchemy — Lawrence M. Principe
• Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution — Nathaniel Philbrick
• Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History — Ian Morris
• Desdemona and the Deep — C. S. E. Cooney
• Dark Breakers — C. S. E. Cooney
• Legend — David Gemmell
• The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger — Stephen King
• Sweet Harmony — Claire North
• A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• The Wandering Earth — Cixin Liu
• A Ghost in the Throat — Doireann Ní Ghríofa
• Thunderstruck — Erik Larson
• A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism — Jeffrey D. Sachs
• The Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
• The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible — Simon Winchester
• Battle for the Big Top: P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, John Ringling, and the Death-Defying Saga of the American Circus — Les Standiford
• It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels — Robert Penn
• Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag — Orlando Figes
• The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust — Diana B. Henriques
• Five Days in London, May 1940 — John Lukacs
• To Say Nothing of the Dog — Connie Willis
• Blackout — Connie Willis
• All Clear — Connie Willis
• How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
• Battle of the Linguist Mages — Scotto Moore
• The Ninth Rain — Jen Williams
• Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Oh how I wish I could read them as fast as I buy them.

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Still Eating Oranges on the significance of plot without conflict. I ended up using kishōtenketsu with the story I’m about to release.

Erlend Hamberg’s short overview of GTD. Helpful refresher.

Swarthmore’s explanation of the rope-around-the-earth puzzle. Hadn’t heard of this before but I love it.

Alex Trost on generative SVG grids. Fun.

Victor Shepelev reverse engineering {Shan, Shui}*. Love this.

George Francis on generative textures. I haven’t been doing art lately but this makes me want to get back into it.

The Verge on being able to edit and unsend iMessages in iOS 16. Finally. Finally.

Joris Peters et al. on where chickens were originally domesticated. (Appears to be central Thailand.)

Artvee, free high-resolution public domain art. So much to see here!

Huge straw sculptures at Japan’s Wara Art Festival. These are amazing.

The Browser Company on optimizing for feelings. Intrigued to see where this leaads.

Blender 3.2 is out.

Paul Katsen using GPT-3 in a spreadsheet. Weird new worlds!

“Farm vehicles approaching weights of sauropods exceed safe mechanical limits for soil functioning.” Obviously a bad thing, but the title delights me for inexplicable reasons.

Robin Sloan on his new Spring ’83 protocol. I love new internet protocols. I’m thinking about borrowing the idea and implementing it as a “whiteboard” page on my site. Kind of like my now page, in that it would be updated periodically. But this would have its own style (rather than inheriting the overall site style). No idea yet if it would actually be useful or usable, but the idea intrigues me.

Len Falken on posting plain text. Interesting idea. The lightweightness of it, in particular.

Nicholas Rougeux’s 17th-century watercolor swatches. Love this. Also see the making of.

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Of note: I discovered a few days ago that Marvin (the ebook reader I use on iOS) lets you import custom fonts. Works great, love it. Marvin continues to be by far the best ebook reader I’ve found. It’s been four years since it was last updated, though, and I worry that it’s eventually going to stop working. Probably going to bite the bullet at some point and build my own web-based reader so I’m not dependent on outside apps that may disappear.

Recent nonfiction reads

• I got partway through the first volume of Boswell’s Johnson, but then bailed. The letters were a little too much detail for me, given that I don’t actually know much about Johnson the writer (my interest is more in his lexicography). Might still come back to it.
• This was more of a fictiony couple of weeks.

Recent fiction reads

• Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse. I almost gave up around fifty pages in, but then things got interesting. (Which is why I usually try to give books at least a hundred pages.) Loved the setting and the magic.
• Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds. Novella. A tower progression story like Sufficiently Advanced Magic, but much darker. Brutal and violent. More math, too, which was the most disturbing thing of all. (I jest.) The story was interesting in a detached, cold sort of way, but it didn’t really speak to me.
• Wakers, by Orson Scott Card. While I still prefer OSC’s early style more than his recent barebones style, and while I could certainly do without the juvenile humor, and while every character being sarcastic in the exact same way is now maybe a bit much for me, the story was compelling and the world was intriguing.
• The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker. Novella. Oof, that ending. I would not say this is a happy story. Liked it a lot, though. Parker’s style fits my brain really well.

Books acquired since last post

• SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome — Mary Beard
• The First Human — Ann Gibbons
• Valor — John Gwynne
• A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa — Alexis Okeowo
• Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century — Alice Wong
• Lightblade — Zamil Akhtar
• The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America — Ethan Michaeli
• Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing — Randall Stross
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James C. Scott
• Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down — J. E. Gordon
• Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages — Richard E. Rubenstein
• The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution — Peter Hessler
• Saint Death’s Daughter — C. S. E. Cooney
• Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books — Joseph Geisner
• Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy — Adam Jentleson
• Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture — Neil Dahlstrom
• James Patterson: The Stories of My Life — James Patterson
• Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall — Andrew Meier
• The President’s Man: The Memoirs of Nixon’s Trusted Aide — Dwight Chapin
• What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy — Jo Walton
• Academ’s Fury — Jim Butcher
• Cursor’s Fury — Jim Butcher
• The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World — Patrick Wyman
• The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years — Sonia Shah
• Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves — John Kroger
• The Tragedy of Great Power Politics — John J. Mearsheimer

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Global histories of the Church. Mini-Saints, basically. Looking forward to reading through these once I finish volume 3.

Nicholas Rougeux’s digital edition of J. G. Heck’s Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art. So cool.

Nicholas Rougeux’s making-of for his digital edition of A Dictionary of Typography. Also very cool.

Nicholas Rougeux’s digital edition of Byrne’s Euclid. Mmm. I really love those diagrams.

Mark Simonson on the thinking that led to his new Proxima Sera typeface.

Josh Comeau on pixels vs. rems in CSS.

Rest of World’s 2022 international book list. Looking forward to reading several of these.

Ryan Donovan on reading academic computer science papers. Reading papers was one of the highlights of my master’s degree, actually.

Papers We Love, “a community built around reading, discussing and learning more about academic computer science papers.” Lots here.

Katherine Cowley on how many hours it takes her to write a book. This inspired me to start tallying how much time I’m spending on my writing.

3D rendering of the earth without its water. I don’t know how accurate it is, but as art, it looks cool.

Nikhil Vemu on iOS’s built-in flight tracker. Didn’t know about this either.

Tom Critchlow on subterranean blogging. I prefer the subsurface discussions.

Seth Godin on the smallest viable audience. An intriguing idea.

BYU’s detailed 3D model of campus. Fun to explore.

Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy, from computer scientists, technologists, and developers. Signed it.

Eric Barker on peer pressure. I finished reading this and immediately bought his new book.

Bert Hubert on reverse engineering the source code for the Pfizer Covid vaccine. So, so, so cool.

Matt Webb on DALL-E 2 and prompt engineering. I got access to the Midjourney beta a week or two ago and tried it out. It’s a weird, uncanny new world. Some of the outputs are incredible. (Hard to know how much is actually new vs. pulled straight from existing images, though.)

Phillip Isola with an interesting DALL-E 2 result.

Craig Hockenberry on IconFactory’s new WorldWideWeb app. Serve a folder up on iOS, accessible on your local network. Worked like a charm — I added a simple index.html to an iCloud Drive folder and started the server on my phone, and my wife was able to access it right away. This is great.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein. An unexpectedly pivotal book for me. I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change before this, other than noticing more frequent extreme weather events. I wish things weren’t the way they are. I wish we had a healthier relationship with the earth. I now have even less patience for unregulated capitalism. (Selfishness is supposed to save the world? Sheesh.) Anyway, the book was occasionally slow reading but overall it was good and important.
• Building Ligatures, by TypeTogether. A pleasant history of TypeTogether and some basics of type design and typography. Nice overviews of some different scripts, too. The overall theme was working together to make things better, which was a nice followup to the suggestions in This Changes Everything.
• The Last Nomad, by Shugri Said Salh. What a wildly different life she’s had. (She was a Somali nomad, though that’s only the first third or so of the book.) It definitely expanded my horizons and was worth reading. The FGM part was infuriating and so, so sad.

Recent fiction reads

• All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. Loved it. Some parts I think could have been glossed over or removed, but as a whole, I thought it did several interesting things with the time travel conceit. Especially near the end. Whew.
• The Imaginary Corpse, by Tyler Hayes. The POV character is a stuffed yellow triceratops. At first the setting wasn’t really working for me and I almost gave up, but once it got into the mystery, I was fine. A little weird. (Which is what fantasy is good at.)
• Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Novella. Sad to come to the current end of the Murderbot series, but she’s under contract for a couple more novellas and another novel, I believe (according to a recent AMA on Reddit), so that’s nice.

Books acquired since last post

• Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
• Dispatches — Michael Herr
• Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind — Alan Jacobs
• Verdigris Deep — Frances Hardinge
• The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House — John F. Harris
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together — Heather McGhee
• Spirits of Vengeance — Rob J. Hayes
• Smoke and Stone — Michael R. Fletcher
• Queenslayer — Sebastien de Castell
• Crownbreaker — Sebastien de Castell
• Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System — John E. Morris
• More Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo
• Dark Sea’s End — Richard Nell
• James Baldwin: A Biography — David Adams Leeming
• The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir — Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson
• The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization — Paul Strathern
• Bone Swans: Stories — C. S. E. Cooney
• The God Is Not Willing — Steven Erikson
• Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — Stephen E. Ambrose
• A History of Food in 100 Recipes — William Sitwell
• The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out — William Sitwell
• The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History — Robert Mazur
• The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity — Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy
• How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir — Hans Rosling
• The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
• Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong — Eric Barker
• Hild — Nicola Griffith
• Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature — Zibby Owens
• The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire — Francesca Cartier Brickell
• Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England — Amanda Vickery
• The Field of Cloth of Gold — Glenn Richardson
• The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table — Anja Røyne

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