onfocus

I didn't want an iPhone 7. I mean, I don't want one. The improvements are incremental at best. And that fake depth of field!? That's gimmicky, right? You can't simulate beautiful bokeh. You need heavy glass. Then I read this take: iPhone 7 Plus Depth Effect is Legit. Hmph.

Ah, front end JavaScript frameworks. Let your heart soar as you read how they've been rated in The State of JavaScript 2016. Then cry tears of knowing sorrow as you read How it feels to learn Javascript in 2016.

Speaking of surrealism, Salvador Dalí keeps appearing in my news. Taschen is republishing Dalí's 1973 cookbook. A cookbook? What's next? Finding out he had a long lost collaboration with Walt Disney at some point in 1945? And that it has been reconstructed for viewing on our personal screens? Yes:

And and?! He illustrated a version of Alice in Wonderland? Yes. Or is it all Mirage?

The latest episode of Reply All is all about online scams: #78 Very Quickly to the Drill. As a balance to all of the scamminess mentioned, they talked about a service called The Ring Finders. It's an organization that lists people with metal detectors across the country who will help find lost wedding rings. It was a great way to end the episode, and a good reminder that lots of people have the impulse to help—and people can get problems solved with that help.

That train of thought led me to the idea that there should be a website called The Link Finders. There's nothing more frustrating than knowing you've read a certain article or seen a certain piece of information that you can't find again. I wrote about some strategies for finding lost sites in 2006: Finding Lost URLs. It's a recurring theme in MetaFilter's backchannel, MetaTalk. There are two of those types of post on the front page as I type this: someone read something on MetaFilter somewhere, they've tried their personal searching bag of tricks, they come up empty, and they need assistance finding it.

Seeing that process in public is satisfying. Someone has a specific problem, others chime in with suggestions, and most of the time the person finds their bit of info. If the information is also of interest to you it's even better. You get randomly referred to a link you might not have seen otherwise and you get a sense that there is justice in the universe.

Lazyweb, go!

Infrastructure updates to this blog continue apaceish:

• HTTPS¹ on at all times
• Emoji everywhere
• Friendlier URLs for posts with slugs
• CSS now SASS-y
• Super modern git and CDN deploy process with a bash script
• Cutting edge access reports with analog
• Most recent CodeMirror for textarea while composing posts
• Deferred loading of video embeds
• Bug fixes and performance improvements

And for fun here are the services I use for this site:

• Hover for domain registry ²
• DigitalOcean for the virtual server
• AWS CloudFront for hosting images, scripts, and stylesheets
• ZoneEdit for DNS

I still feel more couch than blogK at this point, but ticking off items that have been on my to-do list since the early part of this century feels good.

¹ Proper pronunciation?
² The hovering businessman emoji's ska roots.

Someday this election's going to end...

And when it does, the Election Profit Makers podcast will end. But today is not that day. When life hands you election absurdity, one response is to transform it into better absurdity. That's EPM: better absurdity. If you're not already gathering intel and riding those waves, it's time to invest while you still can.