Link archive: December, 2016

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Friday, December 30th, 2016

Wednesday, December 28th, 2016

Monday, December 26th, 2016

Megatelescope releases its first image: Physics Today: Vol 69, No 12

A lovely piece of design fiction imagining a project where asteroids are shaped and polished into just the right configuration to form part of an enormous solar-system wide optical telescope.

Once they are deployed in space, a celestial spiderweb of crisscrossed laser beams can push around clouds of those microscopic optical sensors to desired locations.

Saturday, December 24th, 2016

Friday, December 23rd, 2016

Wednesday, December 21st, 2016

Visualizing the Alien: A Hollywood Conundrum

Compare and contrast Alien, Starship Troopers, and The Thing with 2001 and Roadside Picnic (and I would throw Solaris into the mix).

Plugging in a monster moves a plot right along, of course, but if that’s all it’s doing, the plot is neglecting to examine how a real biosphere would work. That would be a sensationally complex task, but given the amount of research now going on in astrobiology and exoplanetary science, the suspicion here is that experts could be summoned who could produce such a film. Even so, there is something to be said for not seeing aliens.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

Your Voice - TimKadlec.com

The most important rule to follow when giving a talk or writing is to be yourself. I can learn just about any topic out there from a million different posts or talks. The reason I’m listening to you is because I want to hear your take. I want to know what you think about it, what you’ve experienced. More than anything, I want your authenticity. I want you to be you.

Monday, December 19th, 2016

Saturday, December 17th, 2016

Datafication and ideological blindness — Cennydd Bowles

Run from data-driven companies. In thrall to semi-science and blinded by their dogma, they’ve lost the ability to see intelligent alternative perspectives on their business, their products, and the world. Embrace instead data-informed companies. This isn’t mere grammatical pedantry – a company genuinely informed by data understands the risks of datafication and adopts sophisticated, balanced approaches to strategy that blend quant, qual, and even some of that unfashionable prediction and intuition.

Friday, December 16th, 2016

Wednesday, December 14th, 2016

Tuesday, December 13th, 2016

Radio Garden

This is absolutely fascinating—listen live to radio stations all over the world by rotating our planet in your browser.

There’s something really addictive about eavesdropping on the world’s airwaves like this.

Monday, December 12th, 2016

Saturday, December 10th, 2016

Friday, December 9th, 2016

Thursday, December 8th, 2016

Server Side React

Remy wants to be able to apply progressive enhancement to React: server-side and client-side rendering, sharing the same codebase. He succeeded, but…

In my opinion, an individual or a team starting out, or without the will, aren’t going to use progressive enhancement in their approach to applying server side rendering to a React app. I don’t believe this is by choice, I think it’s simply because React lends itself so strongly to client-side, that I can see how it’s easy to oversee how you could start on the server and progressive enhance upwards to a rich client side experience.

I’m hopeful that future iterations of React will make this a smoother option.

What the Heck Is Inclusive Design? ◆ 24 ways

I really, really like Heydon’s framing of inclusive design: yes, it covers accessibility, but it’s more than that, and it’s subtly different to universal design.

He also includes some tips which read like design principles to me:

  • Involve code early
  • Respect conventions
  • Don’t be exact
  • Enforce simplicity

Come to think of it, they’re really good design principles in that they are all reversible i.e. you could imagine the polar opposites being design principles elsewhere.

Wednesday, December 7th, 2016

Is JavaScript more fragile? – Baldur Bjarnason

Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.

This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.

DiceWARE

This is a wonderful service! Handcrafted artisanal passwords made with a tried and trusted technique:

You roll a die 5 times and write down each number. Then you look up the resulting five-digit number in the Diceware dictionary, which contains a numbered list of short words.

That’s the description from the site’s creator, Mira:

Please keep in mind when ordering that I am a full-time sixth grade student with a lot of homework.

She’s the daughter of Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation.

Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile - Inside Intercom

I wrote a while back:

There’s a whole category of native apps that could just as easily be described as “artisanal web browsers” (and if someone wants to write a browser extension that replaces every mention of “native app” with “artisanal web browser” that would be just peachy).

Here’s some more thoughts along the same lines:

We’re spending increasing amounts of time inside messaging apps and social networks, themselves wrappers for the mobile web. They’re actually browsers.

There’s an important take-away to this:

The web is and will always be the most popular mobile operating system in the world – not iOS or Android. It’s important that the next generation of software companies don’t focus exclusively on building native iOS or Android versions of existing web apps.

Just make sure those web apps render and work well in the new wave of mobile browsers – messengers. Don’t build for iOS or Android just for an imaginary distribution opportunity. Distribution exists where people spend most of their time today – social and messaging apps, the new mobile browser for a bot-enabled world.

Monday, December 5th, 2016

We’ve updated the radios and checkboxes on GOV.UK | GDS design notes

I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.

Sunday, December 4th, 2016

Installing web apps on phones (for real)

Henrik points to some crucial information that slipped under the radar at the Chrome Dev Summit—the Android OS is going to treat progressive web apps much more like regular native apps. This is kind of a big deal.

It’s a good time to go all in on the web. I can’t wait to see what the next few years bring. Personally, I feel like the web is well poised to replace the majority of apps we now get from app stores.

Service Worker, what are you? - Mariko Kosaka

This is a fun—and accurate—explanation of service workers.

There’s definitely something “alien” about a service worker—it’s kind of like a virus that gets installed on the user’s device. I’ve taken to describing it as “a man-in-the-middle attack on your own website” which makes sound a bit scarier than is necessary.