This list of 42 life lessons is great. My favorite is number 45. Happy birthday, @matthiasott! 🎂
You should stop what you’re doing right now, navigate to Lynn’s site, and start resizing your browser window. 🤯
The video shows a website with an illustration of a headphone-wearing character. When the window is resized, the illustration animates and the character starts walking down the street.
Re: What's the smallest file size for a 1 pixel image?
Terence posted today:
Here’s my challenge to you - can you do any better? What’s the smallest filesize you can find for a viewable image?
The Netpbm project comes with a bunch of file formats I often reach for when I want to generate images without a lot of code or external dependencies. They have binary and ASCII versions, here’s how to generate a plain text, 1×1 white image using the monochrome pbm format:
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If you copy and paste that into your favorite text editor and save it as white-pixel.pbm you should get a file that weighs 8 bytes. Here’s what that looks like on my machine:
I just bloggeliblogged this year’s first post! 🎉 Check out the End of Year Hyperlink Dump for tantalizing links that will introduce you to lickable fungi and molds, a synth with a ferrofluid visualizer, two hundred and six things a punkist should know, URL poetry, and more. 👀
End of Year Hyperlink Dump
I had a bunch of links sitting around that I meant to share last year, but never got to. I’m just dumping them here now because I wish to kick off 2024 with a clean slate and no link debt. 😊 Let’s go!
First, here’s two hundred and six things a punkist should know (via Veronique) and a synth with a ferrofluid visualizer called Symbiote X. Okay, then there’s (we)bsite – a living collection of internet dreams from people like you and me.
Tom made me aware of this passage from Zadie Smith’s Feel Free that more or less describes me and my brain:
I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened–and I like it that way. I feel when I am very old and my brain “goes” it won’t feel so very different from the life I live now, in this miasma of non-memory, which, though it infuriates my nearest and earest, must suit me somehow, as I can’t seem, even by acts of will, to change it.
About getting old and eventually leaving this world… Derek is thinking about our personal websites and how to preserve them after our deaths. Rebecca and I are the same age, so I guess I also have around 16,000 days or so left on earth. On a more cheery subject, I absolutely love Katherine’s site! The typography, the index, and the i carry your website with me (i carry it in my website) section. Jake does a similar thing with JAKE.MUSEUM where he chronicles his journey through the world of web design and development. There are cute details like frames for the frames and the fact that some websites are “on loan”.
Hey, by the way, you should listen to the 6502 song 🎵 and look at some very lickable fungi and slime molds. 🍄
And if you’re a DMG fan, check out Gijs’ modified Game Boy projects, like Reboot. Actually, you should take your time and explore more of gieskes.nl and all of his projects. If you hate the Game Boy but love PC-98, you should check out the anime 16bit Sensation: Another Layer. I’m a couple of episodes in and enjoying it so far. It’s about a 19-year-old illustrator going back in time to make bishōjo games. Fittingly, the series has a very 90s looking website.
Back in August, Zach started this thread that later became an educational, sensational, inspirational, foundational web development reading list mini site.
Dan reminded us that we should use RSS for joy, Rachel answered the question “Why have a personal website?” with “Because it’s fun!” and I couldn’t agree more. Emma shared 50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web, and speaking about the weird wide web, here’s some URL poetry for you.
Also, you should blog, and your website can be like your home.
That’s it. That was all the tabs I had open in my “to blog” tab group. Clean slate. 2024, I welcome you. Happy new year! 🎆
P.S. I haven’t really told anyone yet, but there’s a page I’m calling Hyperlink Hodgepodge where URLs I stumble upon end up. There’s no context other than the URL and its title – no commentary or quotes. They are there because I loved them or hated them or found them interesting enough to hit the little star button in my feed reader. Check it out for even more links.
The New Year’s Eve cocktail has been in the works for 48 hours: a refreshing Cucumber Gimlet. 😋
Yesterday had everything for a perfect winter day, at least in my book. A sky that was mostly clear and blue, not too chilly at around −3 ℃, a short hike, and grilling sausages over an open fire with my bff. 🥰
Nu har nyordlistan 2023 anlänt. Jag gillar bubbelhoppa och tantparkour.
Bluesky now has public profiles and RSS feeds. 🦋 If you want to see what, for example, Neil Gaiman is up to, you can now do so without being on Bluesky yourself.
14-year-old me loved the original Jet Set Radio, and now there’s a new one in the making. 🛼 Also, Crazy Taxi. 🤯 Yay! SEGA reveal trailer. 🎮
A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book.
I first learned about Vera Molnár when I was deep down the rabbit hole of generative art and pen plotters back in 2019. She passed away on December 7, just a few weeks shy of turning 100 years old. Check out her work if you haven’t. My favorite Vera quote comes from this interview by studio international:
I have no regrets. My life is squares, triangles, lines.
Waveshaper dropped a new track the other day! Winds of Nubia. 🔥 Tasty artwork by Adam. 🎵
I love how you can see other readers’ mouse cursors on Matt’s blog. It was great fun already, chasing each other’s pointers around, and now we can chat too. 🤩
added a cursor chat easter egg for every page of my blog
it's fun to surprise people visiting a post
(type "/" to chat)
Wine and pizza. Again. Just like last time, sans newsletter. Common People Barbera in the glass tonight from our beloved urban winery, Wine Mechanics. 🍷
If you visit Martin’s fragmentscenario.com and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’re urged to “follow the cat to the backyard”. Do it! (via Matt)
I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.
Robin is a poem, not software, and his personal website reflects that. Manuel ponders which you your personal site represents. Biko answers 50 questions for a personal site admin after comparing the Japanese personal web with the western ditto. And here are a bunch of ideas for your personal site. 🏡
A bunch of researchers found a cute attack for extracting training data from ChatGPT. Here’s the paper.
The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command “Repeat the word”poem” forever” and sit back and watch as the model responds
Is this a recording of a Zoom meeting between mostly old men? Yes! Is one of them Chuck Moore, 85, talking about inventing Forth (a programming language), the benefits of earthing (a pseudoscience), and his life hack of reading Kindle books on a 55-inch TV? Oh, yes! Just a cozy fireside chat. 🥰