onfocus

This is such a great mystery and investigation that I don't want to spoil it with too many details. We try to keep our phones out of water but we should also try to keep them away from "large concentrations of small-molecule gas".

Welcome to Newsletter Wednesday! (I just made that up so it's a thing now.) Sidebar shares five daily links about web design and it's a good one to subscribe to via email. I've recently been diving down a microcopy best practices rabbit hole and I'm blaming Sidebar for that.

This is a fun site to browse for visual inspiration. It has high-resolution scans of historic maps and map-adjacent documents that you can zoom around to see details. I've been going back to the data visualization category and the illustrated maps are pretty great too. Here's the origin story of this project.

Some amazing architecture and portrait photography of NYC in the 60's and 70's. [via Tecznts] There are a few more photographs by Hofer at Galerie m Bochum.

"In no other two-party system does the party that receives the most votes routinely find itself out of power." So that's not going according to plan. I really like the idea of ranked-choice voting but when the people who make those kinds of decisions benefit from the current system, any sort of voting change seems unlikely.

This is a nice, new iOS Mastodon app. I'm going back and forth between Mast and Amaroq and I can't decide which is the one Mastodon app to rule them all yet. If you're wondering what Mastodon is, you can't go wrong with Laura Kalbag's summary: What is Mastodon and why should I use it?

Jeff Atwood contemplates 10 years of the indespensible programming community Stack Overflow and where it might be heading. I'll also use this space to plug the excellent Stack Overflow newsletters. I don't visit the SO sites everyday but I like to see a weekly summary of what's popular in various communities—the RPG newsletter is especially fun if you're into that sort of thing.

The screen struggle is real. I'm trying to find this line with my kids and with myself and this article is more fuel for the less-is-more fire.

It's interesting to see which subjects are covered in this list of new online courses. I signed up for a free course about podcasting from an Australian university. [via mefi]