onfocus

Here are a couple summaries of the latest Mueller investigation indictments: @Baratunde reads through and Lawfare summarises.

These new developments make this article seem less like speculation and maybe it's time to speculate about How Life is Going to Change.

PSA: Remember Stylish the browser plugin that you might have installed that lets you change the look and feel of pages you visit? It's bad now. I exported my styles, uninstalled Stylish, and then imported them to Stylus. That should work until Stylus sells out.

No, YOU need this amazing retro keyboard based on a Hermes Rocket typewriter—not me. I don't have a keyboard problem.

I'm late on this one, but if you have any interest at all in Dungeons & Dragons you should hear Dinah explain it to Matt on his podcast Hobby Horse: Dinah Sanders rolls for initiative. She is the best ambassador I've heard yet for tabletop role playing and her joy is infectious. Go listen!

Also thought this was like something out of a D&D plot: How we discovered three poisonous books in our university library.

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!