City of Women London
City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.
I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.
Link tags: round
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Plus Equals #3, September 2021
Want to take a deep dive into tiling images? Like, a really deep dive. Rob has you covered.
Basic Pattern Repository
A nice little collection of very simple—and very lightweight—SVGs to use as background patterns.
Ancestors and Descendants – Eric’s Archived Thoughts
Eric looks back on 25 years of CSS and remarks on how our hacks and workarounds have fallen away over time, thank goodness.
But this isn’t just a message of nostalgia about how much harder things were back in my day. Eric also shows how CSS very nearly didn’t make it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Todd Fahrner and Tantek Çelik saved the day. If Tantek hadn’t implemented doctype switching, there’s no way that CSS would’ve been viable.
Gaming the Iron Curtain
The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:
Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.
2019 Firefox Flashback
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
The Hiding Place: Inside the World’s First Long-Term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste - Pacific Standard
Robert McFarlane’s new book is an exploration of deep time. In this extract, he visits the Onkalo nuclear waste storage facility in Finland.
Sometimes we bury materials in order that they may be preserved for the future. Sometimes we bury materials in order to preserve the future from them.
Mornington Crescent - Esolang
A (possibly) Turing complete language:
As the validity and the semantics of a program depend on the structure of the London underground system, which is administered by London Underground Ltd, a subsidiary of Transport for London, who are likely unaware of the existence of this programming language, its future compatibility is uncertain. Programs may become invalid or subtly wrong as the transport company expands or retires some of the network, reroutes lines or renames stations. Features may be removed with no prior consultation with the programming community. For all we know, Mornington Crescent itself may at some point be closed, at which point this programming language will cease to exist.
CSS-only chat
A truly monstrous async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.
This is …I mean …yes, but …it …I …
Remove Background from Image – remove.bg
Well, this looks like it could come in handy—no more tedious time in Photoshop trying to select turn a person into a separate layer by hand; this does it for you.
Introducing Background Fetch | Web | Google Developers
I’m going to have to read through this article by Jake a few times before I begin to wrap my head around this background fetch thing, but it looks like it would be perfect for something like the dConstruct Audio Archive, where fairly large files can be saved for offline listening.
Font Playground — Play with variable fonts!
A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.
Finding Dead CSS – CSS Wizardry
Here’s a clever idea from Harry if you’re willing to play the long game in tracking down redundant CSS—add a transparent background image to the rule block and then sit back and watch your server logs for any sign of that sleeper agent ever getting activated.
If you do find entries for that particular image, you know that, somehow, the legacy feature is potentially still accessible—the number of entries should give you a clue as to how severe the problem might be.
My favourite books (and games) about the apocalypse
Plague; zombie; nuclear …Anna’s got them all covered in her roundup of apocalyptic literature and games.
Lisbon Azulejos
When I was in Porto a few weeks back, I took lots of pictures of the beautiful tiles. They reminded me of the ubiquitous repeating background images that were so popular on the early web. I was thinking about abstracting them into a collection of reusable patterns but now it looks like I’ve been beaten to it!
Send messages when you’re back online with Service Workers and Background Sync – Twilio Cloud Communications Blog
This example of using background sync looks like it’s specific to Twilio, but the breakdown of steps is broad enough to apply to many situations:
On the page we need to:
- Register a Service Worker
- Intercept the “submit” event for our message form
- Place the message details into IndexedDB, an in browser database
- Register the Service Worker to receive a “sync” event
Then, in the Service Worker we need to:
- Listen for sync events
- When a sync event is received, retrieve the messages from IndexedDB
- For each message, send a request to our server to send the message
- If the message is sent successfully, then remove the message from IndexedDB
And that’s it.
Enhancing a comment form: From basic to custom error message to BackgroundSync | justmarkup
This is a truly fantastic example of progressive enhancement applied to a form.
What I love about this is that it shows how progressive enhancement isn’t a binary on/off choice: there are layers and layers of enhancements here, from simple inline validation all the way to service workers and background sync, with many options in between.
Superb!
the new code – Even Stevens: Using Round and Space in Repeated Background Images
See, when I first heard about background-repeat: round; I thought it was something to do with making things circular. But no, it’s about tiling a background image so that nothing gets cut off. The amount of tiling required is rounded to the nearest whole number.
Now I get it.
Psiu Puxa Wallpapers
Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.
ServiceWorker: A Basic Guide to BackgroundSync
A nice introduction to using Service Workers to enable syncing in the background: when the user is offline, tasks get queued up and then when the user is back online, those tasks execute.