new.css
A minimal style sheet that applies some simple rules to HTML elements so you can take a regular web page and drop in this CSS to spruce it up a bit.
Link tags: mini
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Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will | Palladium Magazine
Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
world smallest office suite
I like this idea for a minimum viable note-taking app:
data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:20px;">I have added this to bookmarks and now my zero-weight text editor is one keypress away from me. You might also use it as a temporary clipboard to paste text or even pictures.
See also: a minimum viable code editor.
The Empty Box | CSS-Tricks
This is an excellent framing for minimal viable products—what would the black box theatre production be?
Forget about all the production and complexity you could build. What’s the purpose you want to convey at the core?
NASA Collection
Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.
The beauty of progressive enhancement - Manuel Matuzović
Progressive Enhancement allows us to use the latest and greatest features HTML, CSS and JavaScript offer us, by providing a basic, but robust foundation for all.
Some great practical examples of progressive enhancement on one website:
- using grid layout in CSS,
- using
type="module"to enhance a form with JavaScript, - using the
pictureelement to providewebpimages in HTML.
All of those enhancements work great in modern browsers, but the underlying functionality is still available to a browser like Opera Mini on a feature phone.
Et In Silicon Valley Ego – Dr Beth Singler
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
Breaking the physical limits of fonts
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
The timelessness of The Ballad of Halo Jones, the girl who got out | FactorDaily
The Ballad Of Halo Jones is 35 years old this year.
Where did she go? Out.
What did she do? Everything.
Minimal Google Analytics Snippet | Minimal Analytics
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
Disturbances #16: Digital Dust
From smart dust and spimes, through to online journaling and social media, to machine learning, big data and digital preservation…
Is the archive where information goes to live forever, or where data goes to die?
Solving Sol
Browser implementations of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual and minimal art, many of which only exist as instructions like this:
Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.
Three Missions | Field Notes
Okay, I think I’m going to have to get this pack of three notebooks: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
Who Does She Think She Is?
The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity. It’s developed into a form of relaxation after a hard day of being ground on the wheel of late-stage capitalism. Melvin Kranzberg’s statement that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” holds true here: The internet lets us be whoever we were before, more efficiently, with fewer consequences.
Mini Tetris
The spirit of 5K.org lives on. View source: this JavaScript version of Tetris is less than 1K. Details on Github.
Functional Minimalism for Web Design
According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.
Heydon/fukol-grids
The most minimal responsive, flexible grid library you can find. In fact, here’s the whole thing:
.fukol-grid {
display: flex; /* 1 */
flex-wrap: wrap; /* 2 */
margin: -0.5em; /* 5 (edit me!) */
}
.fukol-grid > * {
flex: 1 0 5em; /* 3 (edit me!) */
margin: 0.5em; /* 4 (edit me!) */
}
Bots | A Working Library
Absolutely brilliant stuff from Mandy (again). A long hard at today’s tech industry’s narrow approach to bots and artificial intelligence compared to some far more interesting and imaginative approaches in fiction:
- Ann Leckie’s superb Imperial Radch series,
- Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and
- Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : One weird trick to get online — designers hate it!
I don’t care about Opera Mini (I’m not its Product Manager). In the same way, I don’t care about walking sticks, wheelchairs, mobility scooters or guide dogs. But I care deeply about people who use enabling technologies — and Opera Mini is an enabling technology. It allows people on feature phones, low-powered smartphones, people in low-bandwidth areas, people with very small data plans, people who are roaming (you?) connect to the web.