Oatmeal

This number is mind blowing to me because I listened to Podcasts for a good 5 or so years before discovering Overcast 😬

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

Today we were not kept off the mountain by thunderstorms.

A thunderstorm kept us off the mountain this afternoon, so we found a mostly empty go kart place and had the time of our lives instead. 🏎

I know there are some HAM Radio folks on the indieweb and adjacent, so I’m passing along this question from my dad:

My Yaesu VX-8DR will receive APRS beacons but won’t send my beacon or send or receive APRS messages, settings seem correct.

Anyone have suggestions?

m.b.wiki.eli.li will be down for a bit while I migrate it from tiddlywiki to dokuwiki. I’m hoping to have it back up and running within 24 hours of this post or less.

The landscape of my kid’s imagination is terrifying. A short, presumably oft-made trip to school includes

• navigating lava fields
• traversing quick sand
• at least one sea monster (named Pam?)
• being pursued by a silent and unseen, but very large beast (potentially a wolf)
• running late

Tweet. It’s a lorikeet.

Google is seeking feedback on a solution, not on how to solve the problem. Is a new HTML element the best solution for whatever problem <std-toast> is trying to solve? I have no idea, and Google is already so invested in this solution that they are telling the world they will be writing code.

Green energy?

Buds

Lobstah.

Seeing that iTunes’ days are numbered, I thought I’d re-share this post from a while back about iTunes being a really good social network.

iTunes Nostalgia

Excerpts:

Apple tried to turn iTunes into a social network, but they never realized that the social power of iTunes wasn’t in the “network,” per se, but rather in the media. It was a media platform with in-built sharing features. Passive connection, with communal feelings.

iTunes was for librarians while Spotify was for the hungry. An iTunes library took cultivation and care to maintain. Spotify just required an appetite.

How to land on the Moon

Diagrams. Many great diagrams. Even more switches. The quality of older NASA imagery is gorgeous. I’m always surprised by how non-clinical and how artful the compositions are.

BeepBox

For any lovers of nanoloop out there, this will be a nice little toy to play with.

For other fun game dev tools: Game Dev Tools for Raspberry Pi

(🎶 Here is a very tiny loop I made 👩‍🎤)

Tokyo became a megacity by reinventing itself

If you agree with Harvard economist Edward Glaeser that cities are humanity’s greatest invention, then Tokyo is perhaps our greatest example: a stunning metropolis, home to more than 37 million people and one of the world’s wealthiest, safest, most creative urban centers.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in how megacities shape human behavior, Tokyo is unavoidable—it has already changed your life. The city is the ultimate social influencer, the node through which the world connects to Japanese culture.

Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

…this is included for a single terrifying phone wallpaper. Scroll until you find it. It cannot be missed.

A play in a few acts:

1. Colonialism is alive in the exploited tech work force
2. The economics of package management
3. ASDF, the version manager for all your languages
4. Terry Pratchett Warns Of Online Fake News In 1995 Interview, Bill Gates Shoots Him Down
5. Open gardens
6. A highly opinionated guide to learning about ActivityPub
7. Pleroma Hosting on Raspberry Pi
8. Electric Zine Maker (early beta, be gentle, hug it often)

The cutting-edge of cutting: How Japanese scissors have evolved

I know of plenty of folks who like fancy stationary, pens, and pencils, but scissors seems much more up my alley, tbh.

The Invisible City Beneath Paris

I am a sucker for any sort of urban exploration stuff.

The Convivial Society, No. 17: Arduous Interfaces

And @kicks’ response, Reply: Arduous Interfaces. From the response:

We’ve long had some equivalent of Robert’s Rules of Order—now we see codes of conduct or forum guidelines. When we think of running an online group, we think of ‘moderating’ it. Policing the conversations, cleaning up spam and so on. And this is fine: probably necessary and I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of how to do it.

But I think we also need a librarian ethic somewhere among these groups. Maybe there are moderators out there who have this kind of commission. You are dealing with a community of writers, who are all filling the community up with their verbose output—this is all data that needs to be grappled with.

So, think of a librarian at work: putting books back under the proper heading, referring readers to specific titles, borrowing books from the outside—in fact, I wish communities were better about knowing what other communities are in the topical vicinity—to help everyone find themselves a home. (I do see this, though, in the Indieweb community—a person might be told to check out micro.blog or maybe TiddlyWiki. However, I think we’re lucky to be a meta-community.)

Toward the next generation of programming tools

I’ve long thought that the real next-generation programming language won’t be a rehash of LISP, C, or Smalltalk syntax. It won’t be character based at all: it will be visual. Rather than typing, we’ll draw what we want.

The Pizza Lab: Foolproof Pan Pizza

Make thee a pizza.

Black and white and RSS; Photos you can only see in a feed

Fans of RSS, unite!

Laziest.