Zeynep Tufekci: Is It Safe to Hold a Holiday Party?
We cannot guarantee the future, but just as the dangers of this grim winter are real, so are the reasons for hope.
Fascinating how normal people use computers fact of the day: when they need to record their screen, they start a solo Google Meet, present their screen and press record.
Maureen Ryan: Bring Ted Lasso Energy Into Your Life!
Neudeggergasse, Vienna
The Correspondent will stop publishing on January 1. This makes me sad since it has been one of the most interesting news sources I’ve read in the past 1,5 years.
This shortcut from Federico Viticci to import screenshots from a Nintendo Switch to an iPhone is super handy: ShortSwitch
🎸 My album discovery of the week: Superstar by Caroline Rose
Ceija-Stojka-Platz, Vienna, last Wednesday a few hours before the first snow of the winter.
Amy Collier: How Dating During a Pandemic Is Like Being in a Jane Austen Novel
We’re celebrating our anniversary in a classic 2020 way: Covid19 mass screening in the morning, take away in the evening and watching TV in between.
Lu-Hai Liang: The psychology behind ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’
Dave Rupert: Technical debt as a lack of understanding
Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway
Unlocked Achievement #11 in Pedometer++. This was the hardest to achieve this year so far.
Finally.
Adult Alternative is a genre. Is Alternative just for kids?
Yesterday I made my one year 10k steps/streak with a boom.
Today is gonna be the day.
Night Mode is so good. (I know, I’m a year late to the party.)
New toy, my first three camera phone. November in Vienna is also the Perfect time to try out Night Mode.
I finally got Newton‘s Principia print from KroneckerWallis and it’s beautiful.
📝 Deploying a Static Website to S3 with Github Actions
I wrote four blog posts this month already. I think there have been years were I have published less.
📝 New blog: Firefox cannot render Source Code Pro in colour
Fixed a bug on my site where the colour of the code examples was not rendering in Firefox.
🚀 I have updated @fec/remark-images to avoid layout jumps and show a blurred version while an image is loading.
📝 New blog: Eleventy and Responsive Images
Frederick O’Brien for Smashing Magazine: Developing For The Semantic Web
📝 New blog: Testing a React file upload component with Jest
Great news: At mySugr we are currently looking for a Frontend Developer. If you want to work with me on products to make life easier for people with diabetes you can check out the job posting
🚀 I have released @fec/eleventy-plugin-remark v2.0.0 last night. You can now set options for Remark plugins.
Zeynep Tufekci for The Atlantic: This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic
Cate Huston of DuckDuckGo on building a high-aspiring career without burnout
Yanis Varoufakis for The Correspondent: How progressives could still win the 21st century
This is so cool: Pixelmator Pro gets AppleScript support
🚀 I have released @fec/remark-a11y-emoji v2.0.0. It adds support for skintones.
Alona Ferber interviews Judith Butler for New Statesman: Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”
I just found out you can change the color of your Memojis shirt by changing the color of the headgear.
Emily Willingham: The Condoms of the Face: Why Some Men Refuse to Wear Masks
The irony is that these men think they’re manifesting the ideal of the rugged, individualistic American, when their refusal really traces in part to a fear of what other people will think about them.
Alex Hope: When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number
Emily Ratajkowski for The Cut: Buying Myself Back - When does a model own her own image?
I know that Yubikey is about authentication, not encryption, but it would be so awesome if Yubikey could also securely unlock 1Password.
I bought one of the new Yubikey USB-C + NFC auth keys and it works great. Unlocking Mac OS with key and 6 digit PIN is so much easier than typing my long password when using my MacBook in clam shell mode.
The Winamp Skin Museum brings me back so many good memories of my early computer days. I wish we could still customize our software.
Mark Serrela for CNET: The secret Avengers video game the world never got to play
We went to Kirchberg am Wagram today and had some excellent Grüner Veltliner from Michael Bauer.
Ana Rodrigues for Smashing Magazine: Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb
Zeynep Tufekci for The Atlantic: Why Aren’t We Talking More About Ventilation?
Jesse Frederik for The Correspondent: Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing
I love the SoundSource update. With video calls all day it’s super handy to have the new collapsed window in the corner of a screen all the time. Also love the menu bar icons to see input and output volume.
🎸 Thumbs up for the music video for I Know the End by Phoebe Bridgers.
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels – George Cave
🚀 I finally released cocur/chain v0.9.0
It adds strong typing, three new methods and some bugfixes.
Yesterday we had dinner at Hotel am Brillantengrund. Amazing Filipino food and a very cozy patio.
Super Expressive is a zero-dependency JavaScript library for building regular expressions in (almost) natural language
Caroline Randall Williams for The New York Times:
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
🎸 I’m enjoying the new album from Diet Cig: Do You Wonder About Me?
Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea by Ben Taub for The New Yorker
If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You’d net a clean $8 profit per pizza.
As I look out of my window in lockdown, my attention is fixed on these birds, rather than trees or distant rooftops, because I am desperate for novelty, to watch things that alter; for in seeing change, I can parse time.
How Animal Observation Can Free Us From Ourselves
The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet - WIRED
Fascinating story.
This is incredible cool. The Pudding investigated The Infinite Monkey Theorem Experiment and looked at how many actual monkeys you would need to produce some major works of music.
🔗 The Bumpy Road Code Smell: Measuring Code Complexity by its Shape and Distribution by Adam Tornhill
I needed to get out of the apartment today. There were barely any cars, but lots of people walking and riding bikes. I took this picture of Burgtheater because normally there is always some kind of event in the space before Rathaus and it was nice to see it empty.
🎸 Waxahatchee covers So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings by Caroline Polachek
A one hour lunch break at home is actually exactly the same amount of time as a half hour lunch break in the office.
Today I finished reading Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O‘Neil. Great book on how algorithms and machine learning are specifically used to target poor people and are used to undermine democracy and fairness.
We watched Detective Pikachu last night. Wow. What a weird ride. The story made no sense at all, but the Pokémon were cute. Top Corona Movie.
🎸 Another new release today: The Caretaker by Half Waif.
🎸 Saint Cloud, the new album from Waxahatchee is out today.
On a related note: I enjoy The Correspondent very much right now. They don’t have real-time coverage of current events, but rather well researched long-form articles on topics that are relevant.
🔗 The Correspondent: The coronavirus is reminding us that anxiety is good – as long as it doesn’t turn into panic
🔗 Good explainer of herd immunity from The Correspondent:
thecorrespondent.com/356/what-…
You can clearly see on which day we were not supposed to get out anymore.
On a related note: it takes exactly 32 steps to get from one end of my apartment to the other.
Yesterday the Austrian government announced that due to Corona all social life should be reduced to a minimum.
This is my Corona diary. Day 1.
Although my Saturday morning looks exactly like every other Saturday morning, cleaning up the apartment a bit and preparing food, I am bored.
🔗 I love this kind of posts: The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
I hope that the palace Bezos bought is comfortable, but I also hope it’s full of angry ghosts.
Has The Verge suddenly turned anti-capitalist?
🎸 Today TORRES released her forth album, Silver Tongue.
I just wanted to point out to you that the scientist interviewed in this article about the effect of planting 1 trillion trees is called Forrest.
There were two main reasons while I wanted to switch from Gatsby to Eleventy:
1) Gatsby loads React on page load, which makes the initial page load time super slow
2) I work with React all day at work and I wanted to work with something different in my free time.
Yesterday I switched my website from Gatsby to Eleventy and I am super with the results. Page load should be a lot faster now.
I just found a fix for the most annoying Apple Music bug so far. When I wanted to listen to an Intelligent Playlist in iTunes it would tell me to log into Apple Music, but I could listen to albums when I played them from “Recently Added”. In the “For You” section I am also logged in. Turns out I needed to log into iTunes Match (for whatever reason).
The first book I read in 2020 was Das Flüssige Land by Raphaela Edelbauer. An absurd take on the Heimatroman, it deals with how Austria suppresses its Nazi past.
📝 In 2019 I missed by 52 books goal, but I managed to read 36. Let’s see if I can do better in 2020.