Posts in "Notes"

I was sooooo close to getting a key to Puzzmo (the new place for thoughtful puzzles) today. 🕹️ Like, the last key disappeared ~10 seconds before I solved the puzzle. 😩 Yes, there are only 500 keys released each day, and yes, you have to solve a puzzle to get a key. I’ll get one tomorrow! 😅

🆕 My plug-ins, Conversation on Micro.blog and Reply by email, have just been updated to support HTML in link texts. So now you can be creative and add fancy icons to them. In the example below, I’m using icons from the Font Awesome project. Check out the README for instructions.

If you’re fan of the soundtrack in Super Mario Bros. Wonder you should tune in to Smooth McGroove. Here’s his rendition of DuckTales – The Moon. 🎵

I wasn’t the only one who thought that McGroove might’ve been part of the new Mario game, but he confirmed back in June that he wasn’t involved.

Huh! I always assumed Goombas bumped Mario to death, but now we know better. Thanks for clarifying, Miyamoto-san, and for passing on the information, Sato-san.

I heard that someone once asked Miyamoto-san why Mario takes damage when he bumps into a Goomba from the side in the original Super Mario Bros. game. Apparently, he answered, "It's because the Goombas bite him." … Yes, and when they bite you, they'll do it with a smile on their face! (Laughs)

Anh’s website is absolutely gorgeous and oozing with personality. And how cool is it that the homepage is a comic explaining why one should have their very own home on the web?! 😍 Take a moment and read it in full, and then explore the rest of Anh’s site.

Look at all those beautiful magazine covers. 🤤 The Whole Earth Catalog is probably something I would have been into had I been living in America in the 70s. Access to tools, ideas, and practices!

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

Matthias Ott is launching a newsletter, and I think it will be a winner. Subscribe over at matthiasott.com/newsletter.

Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web.

Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. 💚✊

There’s so much exciting stuff going on the web now. Away from the old silos. Back to blogs, newsletters, and web feeds. I love it!

How to follow people on X (previously Twitter) via RSS:

1. Find a Nitter instance supporting RSS. I use nitter.privacydev.net.
2. For a handle like @Astro_Jessica (NASA astronaut Jessica Meir)…
3. the Nitter URL is https://nitter.privacydev.net/Astro_Jessica
4. Paste that into your feed reader, and it will figure out the rest.

100 gecs dj session at Boiler Room: Los Angeles is absolutely wild! 🎵 They are having so much fun with it. Just look at Laura’s grin when everyone sings along to Jump in the Line at 43:37. 🥹

The energy in the crowd makes me wish I were there! And the set list evokes so much nostalgia for this old millennial. One of the commenters nails the vibe:

Basically my doctors office playlist 🔥

I love how Sanna’s and my internal clocks are so different. Like when she’s facetiming me from a dark hotel room, already in bed and half asleep, at 21.46, I answer from a lit kitchen, coffee in hand, headphones pumping music, while prepping French farmhouse soup for tomorrow. 😂

Here’s a brilliant Edgar Allan Poe rap from Elle. 🐦‍⬛

You know you’re on to something great when calculating the value of your “insurance fund” involves calling numpy.random.normal. 😅

The prosecution shows that the "insurance fund" that FTX bragged about was fake, and just calculated by multiplying daily trading volume by a random number around 7500

The first issue of Robin Rendle’s newsletter, The Cascade, arrives tomorrow. All about the past, present, and future of CSS. Subscribed! 

I really enjoyed State of the Browser the other weekend. All the talks were lovely, but/and @Amy_Hupe’s It all means nothing in the end was a delightful surprise. It wasn’t about states or browsers, but a fascinating perspective on burnout, purpose, and making meaning. See it!

I’ve lied and deceived you all! Or some of you. Maybe? Anyway, I spill the beans in my new blog post, The Truth About My September Photoblogging Challenge. 👀

I mentioned the 90s clear-craze back in June, and maybe it’s just me, but I sense a small renaissance is going on. Just in the last week or so, both Analogue and Flipper Devices released translucent editions of their gadgets. I don’t mind! 🤤

I’m enjoying a cozy little puzzle game called Automatoys. Simple controls, lo-fi jazzy tunes, lagom difficulty. The developer, Steffan Glynn, was inspired by the vintage arcade Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. 🕹️

You should watch Bottoms. Best friends PJ and Josie start a fight club in the name of female self-empowerment as a scheme to get other high schoolers to have sex with them. Hilarious and unhinged! 🍿

Look at this work of art. What a beauty. 😍 Nice work, @aparrish.

i made this custom game boy flash cart by "dead bug" soldering a DIP parallel flash chip to a cartridge edge breakout board that i designed. there's no memory bank controller in here, so you can only flash roms up to 32kb (i have tetris on there now haha) but i like how it turned out!

GitHub now has a setting to underline links. 👏 Thanks @eric et al.

A lot of accessibility work is a progress over perfection mindset, with a mind to the long game. Which is to say onwards and upwards!

If Listen to Page in Safari on iOS is grayed out, check Siri’s language setting—it must match the webpage’s language. I struggled with this when Siri was set to Swedish while I tried to listen to English posts. Weirdly, the old Spoken Content feature doesn’t have this language restriction.

When you take a screenshot of a webpage in iOS 17, you get to choose between Screen and Full Page. Neat!

Oh, wow, what a badass move! Bill Willingham gets fed up with DC Comics and sends Fables into the public domain. 👏👏👏

I misremembered and thought today’s prompt was sculpture, not statue. What a fail. So no guessing this time. This is John Bauermonumentet. Sculpted by Karl Hultström in 1931 and photographed by this fellow human today, during a stroll through the city park. 👸

I’m taking Apple’s Self Service Repair for a spin. (I’ve sourced parts and service manuals in… less official ways in the past.) The experience is okay so far, except that they reserved 16,543.32 kr (roughly $1,482) on my debit card should I take the rented tools and run. 🫠 So, it’s not for everyone.

Keep in mind that for some, it’s still hump day! 😊 Here’s my entry for day 13 and the prompt glow. Is it produced by wetware 🧔‍♀️ or software 🤖?

Karin af Klintberg’s latest film, Kungen, features an extraordinary synthy and organic soundtrack by Katharina Nuttall. Kinda reminds me of the score from The White Lotus. Well worth a listen on YouTube. 🎵

For day 12, the prompt is panic. Would you bolt if you saw this shadow? And was it captured by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

We made apple pie for today’s commercial special event! 😋

Tonight, I enjoyed a cold beer in the evening sun on our balcony. So in retrospect, getting those cans of Okinawa-style lager from teenage engineering was a good call. But, is this a photo I took 🧔‍♀️ or the creation of a text-to-image model 🤖?

Let’s break the cycle for day ten. Here’s a throwback of me riding a bike in the summer of ‘93. Captured by good ol’ dad. Definitely human.

I know my way around a few languages – programming ones, that is. Like assembly language for the classic Sharp LR35902 (the CPU of the original Game Boy). But here’s a question for you: did I 🧔‍♀️ take this pic of the handheld, or was it cooked up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

The prompt for day eight is yonder. Are those tourists actually real, captured by a human photographer 🧔‍♀️, or are they just the creation of a neural network 🤖?

I love this initiative from Kagi (the ad-free, paid search engine)! They now bump up relevant results from the small web, like blogs and personal websites. And there’s a fun way to stumble upon new sites. A great companion to Marginalia Search. Yay for all efforts to humanize the web!

Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways[.]

One week of the photoblogging challenge already! Is this panorama captured by a human 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

Here’s the website with a teaser for Hayao Miyazaki’s next film, The Boy and the Heron.

All is well in this realm, but dream 🤖 or reality 🧔‍♀️, can you tell?

Fellow microbloggers, I’m sorry I lied. Two out of my five challenge entries so far were generated by a diffusion model.  A couple identified the dreamed-up sunset. No one (!) suspected the fake clouds.

The rest was shot by me. Thanks, everyone, for participating so far. Keep the guesses coming! 😊

Well, it’s no secret that I love me a lush forest. But is this one documented by your fellow human 🧔‍♀️ or just a latent diffusion model’s 🤖 dream?

It’s day four already, the prompt is orange, and you know the drill by now: was this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

This potholder might look ordinary, but it is very precious to me. Or maybe it doesn’t even exist. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

The prompt for day two of the September Photoblogging Challenge is buildup. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

The prompt for day one of the September Photoblogging Challenge is abstract. What do you think – is this pic snapped by me 🧔‍♀️ or dreamed up by a text-to-image model 🤖?

Here’s more than 500 CSS loading animations from Temani Afif. 🤯

Our Flag Means Death is incredible and as close as we will get to a Monkey Island TV show, according to Ron Gilbert. That’s all I need; I’m in! 🏴‍☠️

Oh, man, now I want to find an old knitting machine and start hacking on it. This is just marvelous! 🧶

Retreat is an independent electronic machine knitting practice based in Berlin. All items are crafted by a real human with the help of a hacked domestic knitting machine from the 90s.

This reminded me of the don’t write it down advice in REWORK. (via @grumpygamer)

But people will say, "Do you keep a notebook?" and the answer is, I think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around.

These 40 hats by Anders are stunning! I think I know LeChuck’s hat, Ash’s cap, Samus' helmet, and about two dozen more. How many can you place? 🤠

The history of video game hats - One "hat" per year from the past 40 years.. see if you can guess them all #pixelart