Blog: #web

• Jason Kottke on what ten million stars look like — this is breathtaking and mind-boggling and beautiful
• Animation of a medieval bridge being built — mmm, more of this, please
• Jeremy Keith on dev perception of boring technologies — seems wise
• Owen Williams on SPAs — in a similar vein
• Kyle Gene Brown on Smalltalk and design patterns — I found this interesting (such astute commentary, I know)

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• Jim Nielsen on cheating entropy with native web tech — the simplicity here speaks to me
• Chris Coyier on simple and boring web work — same kind of thing, and the minimalist in me eats this stuff up (though I think certain types of apps do warrant using the more complicated frameworks)
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Umberto Eco’s antilibrary idea — yes, yes, this ten times over
• Robert Hodgin’s Meander project — lovely work
• Brian Eno on forward momentum in creativity — this seems wise to me and rings true to my own experience

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• Lea Verou on web components — seems reasonable
• Barton Gellman on what could happen if Trump refuses to concede — alert alert alert the end of America is nigh and this article is important (also, Barton wrote Angler, which is a great book)
• In Abeyance — fascinating newsletter about the built world
• Interpolating stop motion up to 60fps via AI — great that it can do this, but I think maybe it loses something essential about stop motion too?
• Jason Kottke on getting rid of euphemisms about slavery — amen

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• Bryan Braun on his Music Box Fun project — quite enjoyed this (and it makes me want to make something similar, which is always a good sign)
• Doug Belshaw on working in public — great thoughts
• Alex Hope on finding Tony Abbott’s passport number on Instagram — a long read but oh is it hilarious and delightful
• Justin E. H. Smith on the philosophy of the Internet — fascinating throughout
• Bryan Braun (again) on web components — the past few years I’ve avoided frontend dev (I’m allergic to unnecessary stack complexity), but this post gives me hope

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• Austin Klein’s reasons for blogging — I blog for the same reasons
• Farnam Street on being a learning machine — a worthy goal
• Ben Kuhn’s list of programming essays — good collection (and if you have favorites that aren’t in his list, let me know)
• Bartosz Ciechanowski on lights and shadows — this along with his Gears and Tesseract posts are fascinating, with great interactive visualizations
• Min — minimalist web browser (and I’ll mention here that I’m veering closer and closer to spinning up my own WebKit-based keyboard-controlled extremely minimalist browser, so that I can have full control over the UI, but that also seems a little crazy)

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• Ben Kuhn on your attention being your scarcest resource — thinking a lot about this lately since I tend to have too many plates spinning at a time (his blog in general is quite good, by the way)
• Matt Webb on a countdown zine site — this countdown clock idea is intriguing and now I’m thinking about using this idea on some things
• Jake Archibald on AVIF — a new image compression format I’d never heard of but which looks quite promising
• Apocalyptic West Coast fires — whoa (“hot coals the size of marbles falling from the sky”)
• Self-powered wireless keyboard made out of paper — though with electronics printed on it (still cool)

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• Jennifer Jacobs’ interview on the Future of Coding podcast — this is the area of HCI I’m most interested in
• Muse — an intriguing spatial canvas idea
• RFC8890, on the Internet being for end users — hear, hear
• Steven Johnson on the spark file — great idea
• The microCOVID Project — a layman’s method for quantifying Covid risk (probably not extremely accurate but interesting nonetheless)

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Made a new favicon for the site for the first time since July 2015. Old on left, new on right:

The new icon is a more abstract “BC” using three circles. The negative space also inadvertently looks a little like Woody Woodpecker facing left, but I’m okay with that.

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• Jose-Luis Jimenez on Covid-19 being transmitted through aerosols — important piece
• Kapow! — cool idea to easily turn shell commands into HTTP APIs (thanks, Richard)
• Tom MacWright on ideas for reinventing the web — interesting thoughts (not sure how feasible in practice, though)
• Robert O’Callahan on some of those ideas — also interesting thoughts
• Tom MacWright again on React and the modern web — somewhat in the same vein because why not and I am a minimalist at heart

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• The Weeklypedia — an interesting way to get one’s news
• FamilySearch’s cousin chart — nice, clear explanation
• VTM text-based environment — I’m intrigued by the large virtual space with lines to each window (see the video)
• Adam Frank on how to tell if there were pre-human civilizations on Earth — which is useful for seeing if there are civilizations on other planets
• Robin Rendle on the beauty of the web — agreed

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