2023-12-16
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety.Links
I collect interesting things from the web as I go. That collection takes a few forms. Firstly, there’s this fixed directory of links that I try to update and prune and organise into sections that feel right. Secondly, I sometimes make posts that round up interesting things I’ve found in the month or so prior. Finally I have “highlights”, where I cut out interesting snippets from longer articles and paste them here.
Scroll down a little for the directory. Scroll down a little further for a paginated list of highlights and link posts.
Directory
Outside
- Postcrossing - Postcard exchange
- Highland Walks - Personally vetted walks in the Highlands
- London Walks
- FATMAP - Curated and well-mapped walks in Britain
- Ian’s Shoelace Website
- Tree Talk - London Tree Explorer
- Diamond Geezer - Incredibly detailed London blog
- Dan’s Motorcycle Repair Page
- Jim Machalak’s Boat Designs
- The Mother of all Maritime Links
Indie Web
- omg.lol - $20/yr for a domain, Mastodon account, email forwarding and more indie stuff
- Tilde Town
- Low Tech Magazine
Link Directories
- Marijn Florence’s Linkroll
- Jacob Hall’s Linkroll
- Electric Trash
- Terra
- href.cool
- Gossip’s Web
- Garden of Blogs
Tools
- Barbra - Flash cards
- Old Fashioned - Cocktail recipes
- ZLibrary - Free e-books
- Witeboard - Online shared whiteboard
- ScreenplaySubs - Read screenplays alongside Netflix
- Percollate - Convert web pages to nice e-reader renders
- All the DIY Links You Never Knew You Needed - Links and pointers for DIY tabletop games
- Chest of Books - A collection of non-fiction books painstakingly converted to HTML
- Death Generator - Generate the death screens from classic games with whatever text you want
Coding
- Learn X in Y minutes - The fatest reference I’ve found for checking language syntaxes
window.locationCheatsheet- Responsive Image Syntax in HTML
- Scraping Recipe Websites
- Web History
- Redis Inventor on Code Comments
- Goodreads to SQLite
- Postgres Configuration for Humans
- Linux Command Library - Handy Linux one-liners
Personal Websites
- OMGLORD - A designer that has a good link directory
- Devin Argenta - I know him I like him
- Monokai - The creator of the Monokai font creates nice web experiments too
Language
History
- Pamphlets About Police Violence
- How Your History Gets Made
- Cookbooks and Home Economics - Internet Archive of historical cookbooks
Science
- Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction - Great AI demonstration showing human-like behaviour adaptation
- Proceedings of the IRCS Workshop on Prosody in Natural Speech - One summer in the 90s
- So you want to learn physics
Film
Highlights and roundups
2023-11-27
It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war. I didn’t start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it’s been instructive.2023-11-22
Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies.2023-11-05
First here’s Sequel, which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won’t switch to it because it’s iOS only. For you, maybe that’s perfect. I always wondered at how many tunnels snake their way through the soil in central London.2023-08-29
While I claim that the reason I haven’t emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don’t have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: “I am more interested in his insurance affairs.” A dragon guarded the literary estate of Borges and made anybody who wanted a part of it suffer.2023-07-30
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let’s be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you’ve figured that out, why don’t you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It’s time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world.2023-06-19
I think I’ve given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it’s nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised… easy. That’s why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees.2023-05-10
I’d like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they’ve finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did. I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company.2023-05-09
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay.2023-02-15
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I’ve been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that’s the only real giveaway that I’ve moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I’ve completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?