onfocus

I am just never going to make my giant email newsletter list post and I have another one to recommend. If you're interested in the history of computing, keyboards, or the ways people interact with machines you should follow Marcin Wichary's progress on his book Shift Happens. Yesterday's update was a love letter to the KPH Radio Station in Marin County, CA which preserves decades of keyboards devoted to maritime communication: A time machine behind the cypress trees. And to catch up with Wichary's obsession you can't go wrong with Matt Haughey's interview with him on Hobby Horse: Marcin Wichary quit his job for his love of keyboards.

Here are a couple summaries of the latest Mueller investigation indictments: @Baratunde reads through and Lawfare summarises.

These new developments make this article seem less like speculation and maybe it's time to speculate about How Life is Going to Change.

PSA: Remember Stylish the browser plugin that you might have installed that lets you change the look and feel of pages you visit? It's bad now. I exported my styles, uninstalled Stylish, and then imported them to Stylus. That should work until Stylus sells out.

No, YOU need this amazing retro keyboard based on a Hermes Rocket typewriter—not me. I don't have a keyboard problem.

I'm late on this one, but if you have any interest at all in Dungeons & Dragons you should hear Dinah explain it to Matt on his podcast Hobby Horse: Dinah Sanders rolls for initiative. She is the best ambassador I've heard yet for tabletop role playing and her joy is infectious. Go listen!

Also thought this was like something out of a D&D plot: How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library.

Thanks for joining me as I clear out my saved links. It is time for week-old links to enter the carousel...

Recommend Me A Book is a fun site. It shows the text from the first page of a book and you can reveal the title and author after you read. I had fun trying to guess the book as I read.

I also had fun this week playing with random text engine Perchance. You give it some base text, a few simple rules, and you get a random text generator. I made one that predicts what's coming next in technology: next gen. (e.g. "hyperlocal ocelot conferencing" is the sort of thing this would generate.) Looking at the generators community page I see there are lot of people using it for D&D so I predict that I will be back in the future to make more.

I'm still on my mechanical keyboard bs. Massdrop is a site that organizes group buys of keyboards and keycaps. They have a good overview of why some people get into them: Mechanical Keyboards 101. I don't buy keyboards anymore though, I just read Massdrop for the articles.

The worst aspects of web culture were on display this week in Kathy Griffen's Standing up to Trump and Erin Biba's What It’s Like When Elon Musk’s Twitter Mob Comes After You. These are a good lesson in punching up/down and a reminder that this behavior isn't inevitable. The people who own and control the spaces where we interact online (hi, Twitter!) can stop this.

Zeldman on modern web development: The Cult of the Complex. I was nodding along with this, especially: "The question for web designers should never be how complex can we make it. But that’s what it has become." I don't think people consciously try to make development processes complex, but they end up that way through decisions by folks who aren't thinking about projects past their next deadline. Sean Kelly posted a thread on Twitter about what he looks for in a software engineer that seems related to me.

One of the reasons I went with a Logan's Run reference up top is because I just finished watching the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. I'm pretty sure the Logan's Run designers were inspired by 70s commune fashion. This documentary uses a lot of TV video footage from the time paired with beautiful modern cinematography. It gave me a lot to think about—I'm going to be processing this one for a while.

Also processing: this Twitter thread by Erynn Brook on mansplaining and different conversational styles. (Continuing wish: less Twitter as a platform for these kinds of conversations and more personal blogs.)

We don't deserve it, but there's a new Neko Case album!

Renew, renew!

The underbrush of my link ecosystem has become so wild and thorny with hrefs that it's time to break out the blogging driptorch and burn them all so the mighty oaks of thought can live free once more.

Last week Andy Baio broke the Twitter time continuum with a well-crafted Twitter search that shows activity from the people you follow from 10 years ago. Reading a 2008 feed made me think about text vs. media embeds and I enjoyed the discussions about tweeting in the modern world. Someone put together a handy page of Twitter time-traveling links if you'd like to try it out.

Jessamyn West is fighting the good fight against Equifax by suing them in small claims court over their data breach. A week or so ago she went to court: Equifax Statement for Small Claims Court. Be sure to read the the follow-up tweets at the end of the article about how it went. Equifax probably won't pay a meaningful price for their recklessness with our data, but I'm glad Jessamyn is trying.

How is the smart speaker craze going? Vox epxlains How an Amazon Echo ended up recording and sharing a private conversation. I think it was @sudama who suggested calling them smart microphones instead so we remember data flows both ways.

I spent way too much time having fun at WASD Keyboards customizing keycap colors. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard.

This is some digital spycraft wizardry: Glyph Perturbation, The Science of Font Steganography. By imperceptably changing how fonts are displayed, you can embed encrypted messages within innocuous carrier text.

This was a good reminder for me to make time for reading with my kids: What's Going On In Your Child's Brain When You Read Them A Story?.

I recently started playing electric guitar again for the first time in *cough*+ years and that opened a whole new world of YouTube tutorial videos I wasn't aware of before. I'm here to recommend Paul Davids and fun videos like his 10 Extremely Tasty Licks.

The link thicket is light on web developer help this time around, but this 2014 article about How to Write a Git Commit Message is still great. My favorite tip is Use imperitive statements as the subject line. I always try to do this and I think it gives commit messages a timeless quality—like you're explaining to someone mid-process how to recreate your steps.

With my weekly URLs now ablaze, the only thing left to do is fire up Portland Cello Project playing Paranoid Android (a good version finally online!) as background music while I watch my reading list disappear.

The big links tend to eat the smaller links, but new links are born every day to replace them. Here now are a few links gathered from their natural habitat and presented for exhibition.

Remember TV? They still make shows for it and some of them are enjoyable. If you're a fan of Ernest Shackleton or the Age of Discovery you should check out The Terror. It's not Shackleton's story unfortunately, but it is speculative fiction about Franklin's lost expedtion with some supernatural horror elements thrown in for—I don't know—fun? It's very well done and you could follow it up with a recent NOVA episode called Arctic Ghost Ship to ground the story in reality again.

I've also been enjoying Legion which is the least Marvel-y of all the Marvel shows and has some stellar acting. You really need start with the first season on this one to get up to speed and it helped me to watch along with the fine folks of MeFi.

Check out these early data visualizations from 1953 by Herbert Bayer: The World Geo-Graphical Atlas. I found this via a great profile of Field Notes: Why Field Notes Have Remained Curiously Addictive for a Decade. That also lead me to their collection of promotional memo books. There are still lessons to learn from this almost forgotten, functional design.

I use Stack Overflow just about every day and they recently launched a neat new way for teams to use their knowledge-gathering tools privately: Stack Overflow for Teams. And by 'they' I specifically mean my friend Geoff at SO who worked on this project, congrats on the launch!

The Tarot Cards of Tech will help you think about the future of something you're making. These cards have questions that don't come up when you're focused on the next to-do item and they seem like a fun way to step back and think about the big picture.

I haven't used The Greatest Keyboard of All Time (IBM Model M) and I'm skeptical of that title since we all agree that Realforce Topre keyboards are the GOAT.

I've been thinking about shift vs. support conversation since I read The Mistake I Made With My Grieving Friend.

If you haven't seen Childish Gambino's This is America you must have been offline for the past seven days. Welcome back and you have to see this!

Let us now fade into the background having examined links outside of their natural environment. Perhaps we will better understand them next time we ecounter: The Cycle of Link. [music swells, credits]

Apple is removing the Escape key from their new MacBook Pro. This is worse than removing floppy drives, CD drives, and headphone jacks combined. If you're like me you still use vi every day. Having to toggle virtual buttons constantly would force me to move to some sort of (gasp!) GUI editor.

I guess there's no stopping progress. I'd probably attach an external mechanical keyboard to one of those laptops anyway. (If they still have USB ports.) Don't get me started on laptop keyboard key switches.