Links
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LifeSplat.com
UK retirement calculator that looks different from the usual. Would be nice if some of the assumptions could be tweaked.
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Ian Penman · Vorsprung durch Techno · LRB 10 September 2020
I’m always pleased to see an Ian Penman article in the LRB and I liked this ambivalent one about Kraftwerk.
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Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma” – LibrarianShipwreck
I haven’t watched the programme but I enjoyed this very critical review of it. (via Dan Hon)
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For Sale: Candleriggs, Lower Ufford, Suffolk | The Modern House
No house is *perfect* but for me I think this comes as close as any I’ve seen. Dreamy.
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Clockmaking: 2
Venkatesh Rao’s lengthy description of making a pendulum clock from a laser-cut wood kit is interesting.
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A Django project blueprint to help you learn by doing
A really nice walkthrough of thinking about, planning and making a Django website, for those who have done initial tutorials and now want to make their own things.
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I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. | by Indi Samarajiva | Sep, 2020 | GEN
“If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like ‘this is it’, I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says ‘things are officially bad’.” (via Kottke)
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Welcome to Your Bland New World of Consumer Capitalism - Bloomberg
Lots of great examples of similar copywriting, brand statements, company visions, etc that all want to be unique.
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The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen – Texas Monthly
This was a good read. (via Things Magazine)
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‘Les Temps Modernes’: End of an Epoch | by Mitchell Abidor | The New York Review of Books
Article from 2019 on the magazine’s 2018 closure.
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FI Calc
Not only an extremely nicely done retirement calculator but it also has a clearly-written guide.
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When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number
This is very entertaining. (via @yoz)
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How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations | Chartable
I’m not very good at colours and this is nicely explained.
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Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian
I’ve very much enjoyed his columns over the past decade or so.
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Tom Crewe · A Girl Called Retina: You’ll like it when you get there · LRB 13 August 2020
The first half of this especially good, full of jolly entertaining anecdotes about mid 20th century girls’ boarding schools.
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Hundred Rabbits — home
Making interesting offline digital tools from a boat. Lots of written-up experiences and thoughts. (via Craig Mod’s Roden)
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Amia Srinivasan · He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita: How Should I Refer to You? · LRB 2 July 2020
I had no idea there had been quite so many attempts to come up with gender-neutral pronouns for quite so long.
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Conventions Minutes, August 16, 2020: Uncle Joe. Tumbleweeds in Milwaukee. The Kamala Boost.
A new swipey daily news format. Weirdly little amount of content and the navigation feels oddly fussy. (via @tomcritchlow)
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Andrew O’Hagan · Seventy Years in a Colourful Trade: The Soho Alphabet · LRB 16 July 2020
I enjoyed this portrait of a Soho despite, or because of, being unfamiliar with that world.
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About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS
Matt Webb’s new single page site explaining it.
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CamJam
Flips rapidly through 900 Transport for London traffic cameras showing almost-live footage. Quite hypnotic.
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Horses and Ale – the end of two eras – Symbols & Secrets
I knew there used to be stables up Whitecross Street but hadn’t realised it was in the (apparently recently closed) Travis Perkins .
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What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon – mssv
By Adrian Hon. Not sure why I hadn’t thought much about these parallels before. (via Pluralistic)
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Squeezing every drop of performance out of a Django app on Heroku | by Ben Firshman | Medium
About serving many requests for Arxiv Vanity, from 2017. (via /r/django)
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How London’s Silicon Roundabout dream turned into a nightmare | WIRED UK
One of the suggested tags for this article as I add it to Pinboard is “corruption”.
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Identifying Generational Gaps in Music
This is interesting, although it’s odd they never explicitly say it’s US-focused. (via Waxy)
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SVGOMG - SVGO’s Missing GUI
Really nicely done web-based tool for optimising SVG files by Jake Archibald.
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256088 - Status icon calls all newsfeeds RSS (even Atom)
Introduction of the original orange square RSS icon by Kevin Gerich in 2005 (and, inevitably, lots of arguing about RSS standards etc).
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Time Streams
“Time-aware feeds at any url. A simple protocol and file format for our digital lives.” (via FaveJet)
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A Land of Monopolists: From Portable Toilets to Mixed Martial Arts - BIG by Matt Stoller
Interesting to consider the private-equity-fuelled monopolies in so many (relatively) small industries. Business for business’ sake. More in the following issue.