onfocus

It has been so long since I've linked anything that I just need to clear the backlog with an old fashioned link dump. Enjoy!

• The Verge: Text messages delayed from February were mysteriously sent overnight - This is terrible—I hope more details come out about why this happened.
• Brand New: New Logo for Facebook, Inc. done In-house with Dalton Maag and Saffron - "...no amount of nice kerning can make up for reputation lost."
• Reuters: AT&T to pay $60 million in settlement for slowing cellphone data on unlimited plans - "None of these allegations were ever proved in court. We were fully prepared to defend ourselves, but decided settling was in the best interests of consumers," said Weasel McWeaselface, a spokesweasel for AT&Weasel.
• CJR: Twitter hates me. The Des Moines Register fired me. Here’s what really happened. - "They wanted the clicks. But they did not anticipate how powerful the narrative would be once wrested from their control and turned on them and their reporters."
• Fast Company: One simple trick to be happier - Chain small happy events together.
• Greater Good: Four Ways Technology Can Make You Happier - ...and fourteen-hundred ways it can make you meh.
• APA Style: Welcome, Singular “They” - Hopefully this will become standard in all style guides. AP Style allows it for limited cases but it should be used widely.
• Popular Mechanics: The Best Websites Ever - Nice history of websites. I worked on a couple of these.
• alexdanco.com: Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours - "Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies." AND "...Technology that's Actually Yours could be the next great counter-trend."
• The Baffler: All Right Already - Facebook is a conservative site. Someone had to say it.
• Mercury news: Kincade Fire: Why you can't make cell calls in this emergency - Maximizing profits on critical infrastructure has hidden costs that appear in emergencies.
• NYT: Read the Letter Facebook Employees Sent to Mark Zuckerberg About Political Ads - Finally seeing some dissent within Facebook. Good for the employees for speaking out about a horrible policy.
• watabou: One Page Dungeon by watabou - Nicely designed random dungeon generator.
• YES! Magazine: The Sustainable Future Town of Your Imagination by Rob Hopkins - Nice dreams.
• Vox: Elizabeth Warren has a lot of supporters on Wall Street over Trump - A counter to all the ‘wall street is panicking about warren’ stories I’m seeing.
• Continuations: Facebook and Speech: It’s All About Power - Agree that open APIs would help! That’s why these companies disabled them a long time ago.
• Timothy Burke on Twitter: "completely befuddled." - It sure looks like the fix is in.
• Buzzfeed: The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time - Add this article to your flow.
• CityLab: Why Asking for Bike Lanes Isn't Smart - scraps and twigs are not enough
• Ars Technica: Alexa and Google Home abused to eavesdrop and phish passwords - "Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google."
• Vox: The embarrassing epilogue to the media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails - This should put to rest the old lie that the NYT has a liberal bias.
• The Guardian: Zuckerberg has a bizarre take on history. More Facebook doesn't equal more democracy - Excellent summary of the Facebook trade-off: "Sometimes your phone call would be connected directly to the person you wanted to reach, sometimes it would reach no one and sometimes it would be blasted to hundreds or thousands or even millions of people at once. People with money would be able to pay extra to increase the likelihood that their calls would go through; those without would be stuck trying to game the system, without ever really knowing the rules."

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.

I'm trying to take some time to think about what it means to be a father today. Whatever your relationship is with that aspect of humanity—I hope you'll also take some time to think about it in the context of current events.

• New York Times: How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families
• @kasie: Don't you have any empathy?
• CNN: She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center
• Stephen Colbert: Jeff Sessions Cites The Bible In Separating Children From Parents
• @JuddLegum: There is a bill in the Senate that would stop Trump's policy of separating immigrant children from their parents...
• @littleesther: holocaust museum relevant as hell

I'm tired of the tone policing, edge casing, whataboutism, and just asking questions around this topic. The subject is basic human decency.

I'm going to be rereading this article about Mr. Rogers several times today: Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children.

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]

I save links in Safari's Reading List on my iPhone so I can reference them later. Sharing them here on my blog is their final resting place. Once posted here, I remove the links from my reading list and the cycle of cruft can begin again. It's a similar process to—and as exciting as—defragmenting your hard drive. How many hours did I spend watching the defrag visualization colors rearrange themselves in Windows Disk Defragmenter? That's rhetorical, but many. Many hours. Of watching. Now you too can watch the metaphorical defrag colors along with me:

First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!

While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.

Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.

Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.

@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.

ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!

I have about 30 articles related to the Facebook Trainwreck bookmarked but I'm going to skip them this week. (I don't have to tell you things are bad — everybody knows things are bad.) Instead, here are some other links:

• Wired: It's Time for an RSS Revival - You can't...
• Dan Cohen: Back to the Blog - ...go home again...
• Anil Dash: The Missing Building Blocks of the Web - ...but we should try!
• Transitioning Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links - What an incredible journey, etc.
• Perspective-aware Manipulation of Portrait Photos - This one made my brain hurt in a good way. They're making wide lenses look like long lenses with 3D awareness.
• The Last Conversation You’ll Need to Have About Eating Right - Because it's so long and you won't want to talk about eating anymore.
• Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web - A study of inter-community conflict at Reddit. 1% of communities initiate 74% of all conflicts.
• Jeff Simmermon: This Is A Boring Shark Attack: 8 Rules for Fascinating Storytelling

I have watched this video about aluminum cans a few times over the last week or so and I keep sharing it with people in person. It has five million views on YouTube so I'm not alone. I think it's so fascinating because we are alienated from many of the things around us and this video undoes a small piece of that:

So many links, friends. Don't read them all in one sitting. Check the videos at the bottom for a mental chaser or just skip ahead to that.

• Anil Dash: 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
• Data & Society: The Promises, Challenges, and Futures of Media Literacy
• danah boyd: You Think You Want Media Literacy… Do You? - "I’m not convinced that we know how to educate people who do not share our epistemological frame."
• John Maeda: Design in Tech Report
• Erika Hall: The 9 Rules of Design Research

• The Guardian: ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower
• New York Times: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions
• Facebook: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
• The Intercept: Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections

• New York Review of Books: Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction
• Democracy Journal: The Future of Leisure
• The Atlantic: Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter
• New York Times: YouTube, the Great Radicalizer
• Seth Radley: The Broccoli Tree: A Parable - I'm conflicted about this one. Sharing a tragedy together isn't necessary better than avoiding the tragedy in the first place?

• umair haque: Why America Should Have Had the World’s Best Social Contract (Instead of Settling For the Worst)
• Paul Ford: Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous - This had me empathizing with the blockchain folks?
• PetaPixel: How Two Photographers Unknowingly Shot the Same Millisecond in Time - Some nice photographic forensics here.
• Dictionary.com: Emoji Archives - Writing down how we use emoji takes some of the fun out of it.
• Panic: The Mystery of the Slow Downloads - So great to see Panic clean up a corner of the Internet that seems untouchable.
• Hurry boys it's waiting there for you: Toto- Africa (playing in an empty shopping centre) via New Yorker via Lia.

The best thing from last week was this Travel Oregon video in the style of Studio Ghibli:

After that, watch actual Studio Ghibli background artist Kazuo Oga paint: