Link archive: November, 2018

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Friday, November 30th, 2018

Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

Tuesday, November 27th, 2018

Front-end development is not a problem to be solved | CSS-Tricks

The sentiment is that front-end development is a problem to be solved: “if we just have the right tools and frameworks, then we might never have to write another line of HTML or CSS ever again!” And oh boy what a dream that would be, right?

Well, no, actually. I certainly don’t think that front-end development is a problem at all.

What Robin said.

I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.

Monday, November 26th, 2018

Sunday, November 25th, 2018

Quick Note: Setting up a localhost on a Mac | scottohara.me

Okay, I knew about the Python shortcut—I mentioned it in Going Offline—but I had no idea it was so easy to do the same thing for PHP. This is a bit of a revelation for me!

Once in the desired directory, run:

php -S localhost:2222

Now you can go to “localhost:2222” in your browser, and if you have an index.html or .php file in your root directory, you’re in business.

Saturday, November 24th, 2018

Friday, November 23rd, 2018

When to use CSS vs. JavaScript | Go Make Things

Chris Ferdinandi has a good rule of thumb:

If something I want to do with JavaScript can be done with CSS instead, use CSS.

Makes sense, given their differing error-handling models:

A JavaScript error can bring all of the JS on a page to screeching halt. Mistype a CSS property or miss a semicolon? The browser just skips the property and moves on. Use an unsupported feature? Same thing.

But he also cautions against going too far with CSS. Anything to do with state should be done with JavaScript:

If the item requires interaction from the user, use JavaScript (things like hovering, focusing, clicking, etc.).

‘Sfunny; I remember when we got pseudo-classes, I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek post called :hover Considered Harmful:

Presentation and behaviour… the twain have met, the waters are muddied, the issues are confused.

Home - Memory of Mankind

A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.

You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.

Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.

Thursday, November 22nd, 2018

Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry

I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!

It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).

There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!

Essays « Object Lessons

Fax machines, pop-up books, radioactive televisions, writing boxes, microfilm readers, nuclear bomb cores, cupholders, bidets, jet engines, index cards, wiffle balls, oil barrels, lightning rods, playing cards, air conditioning, hair dryers, wheelchair ramps, handbags, diving bells, slippers, laundry chutes, sewing machines, pockets, skee-ball, safety pins, chalkboards, tote bags, holograms, hearing aids, dollhouses, billboards, airports, flash drives, cardigans, beer cans, stethoscopes, text editors, mugs, wallpaper, towel dispensers, bumber stickers, staplers, microscopes, fingerless gloves, wire hangers, toast, and more.

I’ll be in my bunk.

Wednesday, November 21st, 2018

Can You Still Send a Telegram? - The Atlantic

The tools that characterize a person’s time and place in technological history are the ones that a person actually uses, the technologies relied upon so heavily that they can feel like an extension of oneself. This is part of how technology can define a culture, and why sometimes you forget the thing you’re using is technology at all. Until, eventually, inevitably, the technology is all but forgotten.

Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine

The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).

Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:

I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

Tuesday, November 20th, 2018

Monday, November 19th, 2018

Saturday, November 17th, 2018

New kilogram standard: how the SI unit of mass is being redefined - Vox

A fascinating look at standards in the real world. In this case, it’s the kilogram, which is shedding its French Revolutionary roots in favour of the Planck constant.

Our messy human measurements have transcended their messy humanness; they have been melded with an eternal truth.

Mention of The Master Of The Kilogram reminded me of The Keeper Of Time.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2018

Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein

Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.

Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software — Brandur Leach

Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:

Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.

The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.

Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.

Monday, November 12th, 2018

Saturday, November 10th, 2018

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project? — Smashing Magazine

Rachel does some research to find out why people use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap—it can’t just be about grids, right?

It turns out there are plenty of reasons that people give for using frameworks—whether it’s CSS or JavaScript—but Rachel shares some of my misgivings on this:

In our race to get our site built quickly, our desire to make things as good as possible for ourselves as the designers and developers of the site, do we forget who we are doing this for? Do the decisions made by the framework developer match up with the needs of the users of the site you are building?

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Rachel’s excellent post from a few years ago: Stop solving problems you don’t yet have.

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.

Thursday, November 8th, 2018

The Commons: The Past Is 100% Part of Our Future | Flickr Blog

This is very, very good news. Following on from the recent announcement that a huge swathe of Flickr photos would soon be deleted, there’s now an update: any photos that are Creative Commons licensed won’t be deleted after all. Phew!

I wonder if I can get a refund for that pro account I just bought last week to keep my Creative Commons licensed Flickr pictures online.

Tuesday, November 6th, 2018

Sunday, November 4th, 2018

When your design system fails — HeyDesigner

You could create components that strike the perfect balance between reuse and context sensitivity. But defining the components of your design system is just the first step. It has to make its way into the product. If it doesn’t, a design system is like a language with no extant literature or seminal texts.

Marissa Christy outlines the reasons why your design system might struggle:

  1. The redesign isn’t prioritized
  2. The tech stack is changing
  3. Maintenance takes discipline

But she also offers advice for counteracting these forces:

  1. Get buy-in from the whole team
  2. Prioritize a lightweight re-skin on older parts of the product
  3. Treat a design system like any other product project: start small
  4. Don’t wait for others. Lead by example.
  5. Finally, don’t compare yourself to others on the internet

Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr Blog

I’ve got a lot of photos on Flickr (even though I don’t use it directly much these days) and I’ve paid up for a pro account to protect those photos, but I’m very worried about this:

Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos.

That in itself is fine, but any existing non-pro accounts with more than 1000 photos will have older photos deleted until the total comes down to 1000. This means that anyone linking to those photos (or embedding them in blog posts or articles) will have broken links and images.

Tears in the rain.

Saturday, November 3rd, 2018

Friday, November 2nd, 2018