onfocus

And here are a bunch of links! (I really need to get rid of the title requirement for link posts.)

• Webstock: Emoji for fun and profit
• Is Trump At Mar-a-Lago - Useful single-serving site.
• Globe and Mail: Trump craves praise. We praise him for bombings. What possibly could go wrong?
• New York Times: As New Zealand Courts Tech Talent, Isolation Becomes a Draw - Let's go.
• BBC News: Saturn moon 'able to support life' - Let's go.
• Ars Technica: Why one Republican voted to kill privacy rules: “Nobody has to use the Internet”
• Jeff Bezos: State of Amazon Letter
• Buzzfeed: Over 550 Amazon Employees Are Pressuring Leadership To Cut Advertising Ties With Breitbart
• Waxy: Closing Communities: FFFFOUND! vs MLKSHK - I enjoyed both of these communities. Indie Web come back!
• Wired: Like Twitter But Hate the Trolls? Try Mastodon
• Bryan Boyer: America Loves an Underdog - A nice look at reusing civic spaces.
• Wikipedia: Chesterton's fence - Understand why a system exists before you set out to remove it.
• Samsung Internet Developers: Think you know the top web browsers?
• Hacker News: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support - Scraping just got more powerful, thanks Chrome!

I usually post links on the weekend. I guess these are supplemental links.

• Backchannel: How Google Book Search Got Lost
• Harvard Business Review: A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel
• Medical Xpress: Social media tools can reinforce stigma and stereotypes
• Quartz: Remote work: For programmers, the ultimate office perk is avoiding the office entirely
• The Concourse: The Corporation Does Not Always Have To Win - good rant about United and human dignity.
• Simple Icons - a rainbow of SVG brand icons.

Here are some links I've been meaning to share:

• The Washington Post: Mitch McConnell, the man who broke America
• The Intercept: Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues
• Fusion: The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face
• Ars Technica: Is the dark really making me sad?
• Wired: Tech Bigwigs Know How Addictive Their Products Are. Why Don’t the Rest of Us?
• The New York Times: How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons
• DDC Hardware typeface - I love this new (old) font. I'm using it on my site at this moment!
• Content Design Centre: Example content strategy
• Deep Photo Style Transfer - The examples here are amazing.
• Hackernoon: Mastodon - The creator of Mastadon on what the heck Mastodon is. (It's a distributed alternative to Twitter that people are using to be social rather than whatever people are doing on corporate social media.) See also:
• Motherboard: Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?
• weinre - A great tool I've been using to debug sites on an iPhone while developing on Windows.
• NetData - Nicely designed server monitoring tool.
• Mozilla Hacks: Do not let your CDN betray you: Use Subresource Integrity
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017

The soundtrack to these links is Avant Gardener by Courtney Barnett. Still love this song more than I should.

The news is still an avalanche of awful. Daylight Savings Time shifting is still terrible. On the plus side, here in Oregon we're finally starting to see some daylight in the sky.

Some links from the past while for your consideration:

• Pacific Standard: The Myth of Trump
• USA Today: Across the aisle, uproar over Preet Bharara's firing (amazing how a Twitter user often has more complete reporting)
• New York Times: Texas Congressional Maps Are Struck Down for Discrimination
• Wikipedia: Proposed GOP Health Care Plan Details
• Flickr Blog: Extracting beauty from the mundane: Wouter Rietberg
• @MikeSoron: ...a simple observation about public goods...
• Outside: The Small California City Responsible for America's First Bike Lane
• We Are the Mutants: Appraising the Brady Bunch's Art Collection
• Boston Globe: The biggest threat facing middle-age men: loneliness.
• David Pogue: The little-known iPhone feature that lets blind people see with their fingers
• Zell Liew: How to choose and pair typefaces
• Eric Meyer: Welcome to the Grid
• Skyliner: You Can’t Have a Rollback Button
• Ethan Marcotte: On container queries.
• English Flip-Flop Words

And here's a palate cleanser from Gillian Welch that's getting me through the end of winter: Acony Bell.

Clearing my bookmarks:

• What The Fuck Just Happened Today? (Need to catch up? This works.)
• Jeff Jarvis: Trump & the Press: A Murder-Suicide Pact – Whither news?
• Dale Beran: 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump
• VOA News: Trump's Attack on Media as 'Enemy of the People' Has Historic Echoes
• Wired: The Cognitive Bias President Trump Understands Better Than You
• Susan J. Fowler: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
• Google Security: Announcing the first SHA1 collision (Linus Torvalds responds: the sky isn't falling for git.)
• Google Cloud: API Design Guide
• Stripe: Designing robust and predictable APIs with idempotency
• Tim Bray: Geek Career Paths
• itmeo: WebGradients (I set a few of these as my desktop background, they're neat!)
• zikes.me: How I Ruined Office Productivity With a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
• mlkshk blog: MLKSHK Shutting Down (It was a fun run, thanks andre and amber and all!)

Your friendly context-free link dump:

• On The Media: Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Protest Edition
• Wired: Congress' Phone System Is Broken But It's Still Your Best Shot
• 5 Calls on the App Store (iOS version of the website that helps you call your representatives)
• Houston Chronicle: Poor John Cornyn: His pesky constituents keep calling
• Vox: Hundreds chant "do your job!" at House Republican...
• Town Hall Project 2018 (find local Town Hall events in your area)
• Just Security: Full Text of Remarks by Top State Dept Official Discharged by White House
• New York Times: I Don’t Speak for Laura
• Salon: Don't think of a rampaging elephant (Linguist George Lakoff on political framing. again.)
• The Atlantic: How to Get Trump Voters to Support Refugees, Obamacare (More on political framing)
• @llaurappark: Stay freaked out and fired up.

So the folks who were predicting a cruel, authoritarian power grab were underestimating how quickly it would happen. We're on day nine and we have a consitutional crisis happening at airports.

I would love to see more leadership from either side of the aisle in Congress making sure our checks and balances are functioning. Without enforcement, the Constitution is just a piece of paper. Until we start to see some opposition leadership in the government it's heartening to see the ACLU and people in the streets across the country making sure American values are upheld. (When you're feeling hopeless take a look at pictures from Women's Marches around the world.)

I've been reading more from Lawfare Blog. There's a lot of informed commentary there. Be sure to read Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence and President Trump's Insecure Android.

I identified with the person who asked this question at Ask MetaFilter: How to stay informed without losing my mind or my day? There wasn't a concensus there and I think the answer is going to be different for everyone, but I'm fairly sure outrage fatigue is part of their strategy. I'm still looking for an answer to that.

Here are a few articles I've bookmarked:

• Corvallis reaffirms sanctuary policy
• Was It Over When The Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor?
• NYT: Trump’s Immigration Ban Is Illegal
• Scientific American: The War on Facts Is a War on Democracy
• California Could Cut Off Feds In Response To Trump Threats

Leaving things there for now in the interest of our shared capacity for outrage.

On a completely escapist note: MOUTH MOODS.

• The Coral Project: The Real Name Fallacy
• Extra Newsfeed: Tolerance is not a moral precept
• The Guardian: I've left Twitter. It is unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators
• Evan Williams: Renewing Medium's focus
• Obama: To my fellow Americans
• Washington Post: Why do Republicans want to repeal Obamacare? It's a tax cut for the rich.
• @pwnallthethings: Could have hacked? Sure. Did hack? No. Let me go through why not. (why dnc hack was not amateurs)
• Eileen Webb: Productivity in Terrible Times (via kottke)
• Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt. (focus and productivity ideas)
• Wired: 19 Ingenious Design Books to Inspire You in 2017
• GitHub: Reclaim Windows 10 (script for turning off bloat)

I've been enjoying some time away from the Web for the holidays. Hope your year is off to a good start. Here are some recent URLs I enjoyed:

• Quartz: Simone de Beauvoir's daring response to imposter syndrome (existentialism vs. stoicism)
• Wikipedia: Narcissism of small differences (one reason why groups with more similarities than differences fight. cut this out!)
• NiemanLab: Headlines Matter
• The Atlantic: How Marketers Get You to Buy New Stuff
• Hackernoon: 10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world (web performance techniques)
• GitHub: GoogleChrome/lighthouse: Auditing, performance metrics, and best practices for Progressive Web Apps
• Aeon: Sugar is a toxic agent that creates conditions for disease (happy new year! )
• Kevin Rose: Introducing "Zero", a new app to help you fast
• Micro.blog (distributed & aggregated tweet-style weblog system)
• Anil Dash: A billion dollar gift for Twitter
• The Guardian: Joseph Goebbels' 105-year-old secretary: 'No one believes me now, but I knew nothing'

More links from the link mill. We're past the solstice which means the days get lighter from here—literally at least if not metaphorically. If you only have time for one link, read the New Statesman article about mass false memories and the communites that have sprung up around them: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does.

Corruption

• Center for Public Integrity: Donald Trump's sons behind nonprofit selling access to president-elect
• Politico: Gingrich: Congress should change ethics laws for Trump
• Teen Vogue: Donald Trump's National Security Advisor Met with 'Alt-Right' Freedom Party Leader
• USA Today: Lawyer: 'Appalled' by FBI warrant that shook Clinton

Action

• Resigning from Oracle
• EFF: Your threat model just changed.
• Schneier on Security: My Priorities for the Next Four Years

Online Community

• Fast Company: Internet Comments Are Awful. Could They Be Awesome?
• The Conversation: How news sites' online comments helped build our hateful electorate
• Jeff Jarvis: Facebook Steps Up

Neat Tech

• Google Web Designer
• GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer
• Oxford Dictionaries API

Misc.

• Audio Engineering Society: The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments
• Bloomberg: The Pessimist's Guide to 2017 (it me!)
• Against The Wicked City: On romantic fantasy and OSR D&D (D&D play style alternative via mefi)
• The Conversation: A sacred light in the darkness: Winter solstice illuminations at Spanish missions (architecture aligned with nature via @somebitsLinks)
• New Statesman: The movie that doesn't exist and the Redditors who think it does (see also: berenstein retcon. fascinating that more than one or two of these mass false memories exist.)

Corruption

• Buzzfeed: Trump Must Give Up Hotel Before Inauguration
• New York Times: The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
• Politico: Source: Twitter cut out of Trump tech meeting over failed emoji deal (facepalm emoji)
• Let Me Point out to you How Ridiculous the Trump Tech Meeting Was (nepotism)

Action

• neveragain.tech (tech employees refuse to build religious database)
• Atlantic: The Cure for Post-Election Malaise Is Civic Participation
• Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda (learning from tea party tactics)
• Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic (questions programmers should ask themselves)

Tech Criticism

• We say we don't hate our audiences. Our mobile strategies suggest otherwise. (100x this!)
• ZDNet: Evernote's new not-so-privacy policy will let employees read your notes (I did this uninstall)
• Wired: 150 Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras

Media

• Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News
• Freedom to Tinker: Disrupting The Business Model of the Fake News Industry
• Kevin Barrett @ Postlight: Building Kind Social Networks
• Secure the News (grading the security of news sites)
• Wired: Meet the Ad Companies Ditching Breitbart and Fake News (see also: @slpng_giants)

Extra

• Flickr: Christmas Ephemera Group (tis the season)
• D&D Equipment Cards (neat DIY game accessory)
• The Awl: Maybe Stop Using Your Cuisinart (laceration hazard!)
• Gatebox - Virtual Home Robot (isolation hazard!)

Anxiety-Producing

• Teen Vogue: Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America
• Politico: Electors demand intelligence briefing before Electoral College vote
• Pew Research Center: Low Approval of Trump’s Transition but Outlook for His Presidency Improves
• Washington Post: A big change to U.S. broadcasting is coming
• @ericgarland: It's time for some game theory.
• The Independent: China flies nuclear bomber over South China Sea as a 'message' to Donald Trump
• Forward: Why Time's Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art
• Recode: Tim Cook, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg — and maybe even Jeff Bezos — are going to Trump's tech summit next week

Not as Anxiety-Producing

• Programmer Competency Matrix (via HN discussion of What Makes A Senior Software Developer?)
• Talks that changed the way I think about programming
• Closure Compiler in JavaScript (easier minification automation)
• Five Leadership Hacks (I love "continually fix small broken things")
• Fixing Font Awesome's fonts (performance tweaks for hosted icon fonts)
• Pull to Refresh.js
• Developers' side projects (who owns what?)
• Fun hacks for faster content (iframe streaming)
• The Mysterious Talking Board (SFO exhibit about ouija boards)