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Links

  1. Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read - The Atlantic

    I read this a few days ago and it was good and explained a lot but I can’t remember much of it now.

  2. Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous: Paul Ford - Bloomberg

    On Bitcoin and the dot-com book and bust.

  3. Building a combined stream of recent additions using the Django ORM

    Very handy. I’ve tried a couple of laborious ways of doing the same in the past, probably before `.union()` appeared.

  4. Offscreen Magazine Interview — by Craig Mod

    Really nice piece. Thoughtful, pragmatic, calm. On books, working out what scale of effect gives you satisfaction, pace, depth, connectivity. (via Warren Ellis)

  5. How do you set limits on client feedback? - Work clients design | Ask MetaFilter

    I don’t think I’m ever in this situation but there’s useful stuff in these answers.

  6. In The Eternal Inferno, Fiends Torment Ronald Coase With The Fate Of His Ideas – The Yorkshire Ranter

    I imagine this as a chapter in a book called “How the Modern World Works”, which would make you go, “Ohhh, yes, that explains that mess.”

  7. Louis Rossetto on Vimeo

    Louis has uploaded a bunch of old Wired videos. (via @guydeboredom)

  8. GitHub - kennethreitz/requests-html: HTML Parsing for Humans™

    Python web requests and page scraping. Looks like it might be a bit easier than BeautifulSoup. (via @simonwillison)

  9. Bee Wilson reviews ‘The Littlehampton Libels’ by Christopher Hilliard · LRB 8 February 2018

    A lovely article about a woman writing very sweary anonymous letters to her neighbours in Littlehampton in the 1920s.

  10. Don’t Be Evil

    Interview with Fred Turner. 1960s New Left vs New Communalism, techno-utopianism, the politics of infrastructure, “Burning Man is to the tech world what the 19th century Protestant church was to the factory”, the electronic frontier. (via @michalmigurski)

  11. Onym

    Nice long list of dictionaries and tools and things to help with coming up with names for things. (via Tom Taylor)

  12. John Perry Barlow gave internet activists only half the mission they need.

    Because it hasn’t quite occurred to me that all that “keep your hands out of our internet, you stupid governments” stuff meant that we left a space in which corporations could do whatever they liked. (via @michalmigurski)

  13. Look for the Lungfish

    Some great paragraphs from a good post by Charlie Stross about questioning all assumptions when imagining what our future is like.

  14. The Online Photographer: How To Buy Lenses

    A nice summary of a series of posts about camera lenses, for future reference when/if I’m feeling flush.

  15. How I coined the term ‘open source’ | Opensource.com

    it had never occurred to me to wonder how and when the term arrived. (via Oblomovka)

  16. Asking the Right Questions About AI – Yonatan Zunger – Medium

    A good summary of the basic things to know about AI when thinking about it. (via FaveJet)

  17. geek old semi-formal (Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka)

    For trying to write somewhere in “the hellish triangle of being readable, entertaining, and truthful”.

  18. The Playboy of West 29th Street (London Review of Books)

    Colm Tóibín on John Butler Yeats. For the unrequited, long-distance love in old age and the perpetually almost-but-never finished artwork. (Subscribers only)

  19. The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence - IEEE Spectrum

    From last year, on the amount of money and effort it takes to maintain archives of movies and TV shows.

  20. DataFire - Build APIs and Integrations to process, serve, and sync your data

    Interesting way to integrate *lots* of things. The Node-based code is open source so you can run it for free on your own server, or use the pay-for hosted version. (via @richardjpope)

  21. Cinema Treasures

    Such a nice site that keeps turning up in my searches for cinemas I went to years ago, many of them closed, split, renovated or simply renamed.

  22. The Pool - Health - I Had No Idea What Depression Felt Like, Until Suddenly, I Did

    A good description. (via @mildlydiverting)

  23. reverie and anarchy

    Danny on Essex New Towns and leaving places behind.

  24. Softwear: How Outlier, the Underground Fashion Label for Nerds, Got Cool | WIRED

    A bit of their history and how they do things.

  25. The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed - The Atlantic

    On the stores that are a bunch of small pieces loosely joined in front of a Chinese dropshipper.

  26. ftfy - fix unicode that’s broken in various ways

    Shows you how to fix “broken” encoded text using python.

  27. Loop | Holly Herndon on process - YouTube

    A conference talk from 2016. Liked especially for describing the laptop as an intimate, personal instrument, and for trying to make music like the sound of the internet.

  28. Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting – Tony Zhou – Medium

    Particularly for the bit that stresses the importance of independence, because that’s what helps you control the balance of the “fast, cheap, good: pick two” triangle.

  29. Van der Home – Bryan Boyer – Medium

    Lovely post about looking closely at the origins and details of a Mies van der Rohe apartment in order to renovate it.

  30. Is 1024×768 showing more or less than 800×600? | One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

    “800×600 is like a beauty filter for web pages of all ages. Looking at the web through it you get sentimental. … On a bigger screenshot you see how the amateur web was shrinking and shriveling…”