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Links

  1. Clockmaking: 2

    Venkatesh Rao’s lengthy description of making a pendulum clock from a laser-cut wood kit is interesting.

  2. 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.

  3. 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)

  4. 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.

  5. The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen – Texas Monthly

    This was a good read. (via Things Magazine)

  6. ‘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.

  7. FI Calc

    Not only an extremely nicely done retirement calculator but it also has a clearly-written guide.

  8. When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number

    This is very entertaining. (via @yoz)

  9. How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations | Chartable

    I’m not very good at colours and this is nicely explained.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. Hundred Rabbits — home

    Making interesting offline digital tools from a boat. Lots of written-up experiences and thoughts. (via Craig Mod’s Roden)

  13. 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.

  14. 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)

  15. 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.

  16. About Feeds | Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS

    Matt Webb’s new single page site explaining it.

  17. CamJam

    Flips rapidly through 900 Transport for London traffic cameras showing almost-live footage. Quite hypnotic.

  18. 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 .

  19. 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)

  20. 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)

  21. 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”.

  22. Identifying Generational Gaps in Music

    This is interesting, although it’s odd they never explicitly say it’s US-focused. (via Waxy)

  23. SVGOMG - SVGO’s Missing GUI

    Really nicely done web-based tool for optimising SVG files by Jake Archibald.

  24. 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).

  25. Time Streams

    “Time-aware feeds at any url. A simple protocol and file format for our digital lives.” (via FaveJet)

  26. 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.

  27. Photo Essay: 100 Years That Changed Houston | Houstonia Magazine

    I enjoyed these photos of people in Houston. (via Things Magazine)

  28. Abbeydore & Bacton Group Parish Council

    More up-to-date than it first appears.

  29. Ewyas Lacy Study Group

    Quite deep local history site, very near us.

  30. Places | Eleanor Crow Illustration

    I love the watercolour shop fronts. (via @undermanager)