onfocus

The underbrush of my link ecosystem has become so wild and thorny with hrefs that it's time to break out the blogging driptorch and burn them all so the mighty oaks of thought can live free once more.

Last week Andy Baio broke the Twitter time continuum with a well-crafted Twitter search that shows activity from the people you follow from 10 years ago. Reading a 2008 feed made me think about text vs. media embeds and I enjoyed the discussions about tweeting in the modern world. Someone put together a handy page of Twitter time-traveling links if you'd like to try it out.

Jessamyn West is fighting the good fight against Equifax by suing them in small claims court over their data breach. A week or so ago she went to court: Equifax Statement for Small Claims Court. Be sure to read the the follow-up tweets at the end of the article about how it went. Equifax probably won't pay a meaningful price for their recklessness with our data, but I'm glad Jessamyn is trying.

How is the smart speaker craze going? Vox epxlains How an Amazon Echo ended up recording and sharing a private conversation. I think it was @sudama who suggested calling them smart microphones instead so we remember data flows both ways.

I spent way too much time having fun at WASD Keyboards customizing keycap colors. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard. I don't really need another mechanical keyboard.

This is some digital spycraft wizardry: Glyph Perturbation, The Science of Font Steganography. By imperceptably changing how fonts are displayed, you can embed encrypted messages within innocuous carrier text.

This was a good reminder for me to make time for reading with my kids: What's Going On In Your Child's Brain When You Read Them A Story?.

I recently started playing electric guitar again for the first time in *cough*+ years and that opened a whole new world of YouTube tutorial videos I wasn't aware of before. I'm here to recommend Paul Davids and fun videos like his 10 Extremely Tasty Licks.

The link thicket is light on web developer help this time around, but this 2014 article about How to Write a Git Commit Message is still great. My favorite tip is Use imperitive statements as the subject line. I always try to do this and I think it gives commit messages a timeless quality—like you're explaining to someone mid-process how to recreate your steps.

With my weekly URLs now ablaze, the only thing left to do is fire up Portland Cello Project playing Paranoid Android (a good version finally online!) as background music while I watch my reading list disappear.

The big links tend to eat the smaller links, but new links are born every day to replace them. Here now are a few links gathered from their natural habitat and presented for exhibition.

Remember TV? They still make shows for it and some of them are enjoyable. If you're a fan of Ernest Shackleton or the Age of Discovery you should check out The Terror. It's not Shackleton's story unfortunately, but it is speculative fiction about Franklin's lost expedtion with some supernatural horror elements thrown in for—I don't know—fun? It's very well done and you could follow it up with a recent NOVA episode called Arctic Ghost Ship to ground the story in reality again.

I've also been enjoying Legion which is the least Marvel-y of all the Marvel shows and has some stellar acting. You really need start with the first season on this one to get up to speed and it helped me to watch along with the fine folks of MeFi.

Check out these early data visualizations from 1953 by Herbert Bayer: The World Geo-Graphical Atlas. I found this via a great profile of Field Notes: Why Field Notes Have Remained Curiously Addictive for a Decade. That also lead me to their collection of promotional memo books. There are still lessons to learn from this almost forgotten, functional design.

I use Stack Overflow just about every day and they recently launched a neat new way for teams to use their knowledge-gathering tools privately: Stack Overflow for Teams. And by 'they' I specifically mean my friend Geoff at SO who worked on this project, congrats on the launch!

The Tarot Cards of Tech will help you think about the future of something you're making. These cards have questions that don't come up when you're focused on the next to-do item and they seem like a fun way to step back and think about the big picture.

I haven't used The Greatest Keyboard of All Time (IBM Model M) and I'm skeptical of that title since we all agree that Realforce Topre keyboards are the GOAT.

I've been thinking about shift vs. support conversation since I read The Mistake I Made With My Grieving Friend.

If you haven't seen Childish Gambino's This is America you must have been offline for the past seven days. Welcome back and you have to see this!

Let us now fade into the background having examined links outside of their natural environment. Perhaps we will better understand them next time we ecounter: The Cycle of Link. [music swells, credits]

I save links in Safari's Reading List on my iPhone so I can reference them later. Sharing them here on my blog is their final resting place. Once posted here, I remove the links from my reading list and the cycle of cruft can begin again. It's a similar process to—and as exciting as—defragmenting your hard drive. How many hours did I spend watching the defrag visualization colors rearrange themselves in Windows Disk Defragmenter? That's rhetorical, but many. Many hours. Of watching. Now you too can watch the metaphorical defrag colors along with me:

First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!

While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.

Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.

Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.

@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.

ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!

Aaron Draplin at the OSU Brand Symposium showing the inspiration for his DDC Hardware typeface. The onfocus title up there is DDC Hardware.