#tech
Not now
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We're through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there's sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked. Ugly, stupid work. Pointless work. Now just as spring comes I'm sick. The other day I was in the office and I...
It's enough to make you crazy
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. I try to do less of that. Touch...
Links, November 2023
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. The book is full of social climbers,...
Links, October 2023
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. I always thought: there's so many that the earth must be practically a sponge. This write up of a single development near Victoria train station...
Building a computer
I was a real life, buck-toothed nerd when I was a child. I liked video games, didn't play outside enough. I spent a lot of time playing around on a computer. But I never built one. As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do...
Links, June 2023
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. Johnny Decimal, everybody. A fellow foe of the Grand Narratives that organise our collective consciousness is Roland Barthes, who as it turns...
Build a box
Despite being a dictionary-reading, computer geek, gap-tooth nerd as a child... and mostly into adulthood, I never did do any PC gaming or building. I think by the time I would have gotten into that I harboured illusions about myself as a creative, artistic person, who probably ought to use a Mac. Thus, I used a MacBook from a relatively early age and never messed around with building the things. Recently though, I finished building a PC for the first time in my life. I've been running a Plex server for a long time, and I've slowly been building up...
Links, September 2022
First I have a whole collection of maps. There's a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There's a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There's an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here's a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. There are a couple of websites about making websites to share. First is this fun tool to make scrappy, zine-like websites for party invitations and so on. On the more technical side is a...
Interview cycle
I'm interviewing for other jobs. It's a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour. I'll stop myself before I go to deep on the "jobs are like relationships" simile, which I don't really believe in. What I want to say is it's a tiring situation to both have a job and be applying for jobs. The interview process for tech jobs is particularly time consuming, although not as time consuming as other fields, I'm sure. Also, I have to remind...
The daily paper in e-ink
— An updated daily front page of The New York Times as artwork on your wall, Alexander Klöpping
Ann Syrdal, Who Helped Give Computers a Female Voice
— Ann Syrdal, Who Helped Give Computers a Female Voice, Dies at 74, Cade Metz in The New York Times
Pay discrimination at Pinterest
— Discrimination charges at Pinterest reveal a hidden Silicon Valley hiring problem, Katharine Schwab in Fast Company
Getting off of Netlify
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of "build minutes" on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the "Photo"...
How this site works
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple....
The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election
— The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election, Kevin Roose in The New York Times
Uses, January 2020
At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web. I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It's on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn't quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and the standard wireless Apple Keyboard. When it comes to notes I'm between places at the moment. I try to capture things in digital notes first time around, but...
Tech Sabbath
This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It's come along just at the right time for me, as I'm generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more. I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers. Slightly idealistically it argues that the day then becomes about the basics: seeing friends, hanging out and chatting, playing...
Tinkering
I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way. I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the house, across the back yard. He had his main desk in the corner, three computers lined up underneath with one of those boxy, ninetees monitors on top. His workspace was...
Confessions Of A News Addict
Hello. My name is Jack… [Group: Hello, Jack] …and I’m a news addict. In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news. Being a news junkie of the caliber that I have reached means that I’ve spent years trimming, optimising, and maximising the flow...
@fat - Internet Historian
Rives TED Talk If you take a listen to Rives’ great TED talk from 2006 today, it’s pretty easy to see it as a little time capsule. Here he is talking (eloquently and entertainingly) about Napster and Friendster. What was, at the time, a piece of pop culture criticism and entertainment, is just as easily viewed as artefact of an era in the internet history. The internet moves fast, look at how quickly we moved from the bullshit-ly labelled Internet 1.0, to Internet 2.0, to deciding that numbering eras of the internet like that is stupid. That’s how a talk...