2020-11-05 👨‍💻 Recent computer programs of mine: • https://GitHub.com/PaulCapron/TraSSH Fake SSH server. • https://gist.GitHub.com/PaulCapron/98864c20f74cf982fd70f5715210f091 Enhance Wikipedia links with fetched summary. 2020-09-03 👶 Congrats on the birth of your kid, @tjalve! 2020-08-26 💭, 📬 > sent out a newsletter and have been feeling anxious about it being not enjoyable for people to read > i thinkkkk the path forwards is some kinda zen shit of […] "nonattachment to outcomes of sharing things" — @auria, yesterday Yes. Do it (write it, share it) primarily for yourself! That’s an audience you know kinda well. Write what you’d love to come upon. « L’esprit achève ses propres pensées en les mettant au dehors » said Louis the Great (“The mind achieves its own thoughts by expressing them”). You get clearer ideas by forcing yourself to state them. (N.B.: « achever » also means “to kill”; stating [ideas] indeed makes them concrete, solid… dead. Death is the bedrock of life.) Writing/sharing primarily for hypothetical “others” is a recipe for meager content; some, maybe even many, people will like it, but noone will love it. And great is the risk of patronizing underestimation or “impostor syndrome” overestimation of the audience. Blur the dichotomy of “you” / “others”. Your past self is a different ego. So is your future self. What “Person A” is in your head is a mental picture, not the reality of “Person A”. Both the picture and the true person change, anyway. The value of a given thing depends more on the receipient than on the giver. So congratulate yourself when you stumble upon some good content, for it’s good in your opinion, and that’s because you were able to extract value from it. And be humble when someone finds your content good, by reciprocal reasoning. (The value found by that someone may be completely different that what you, the author, had in mind!) ⁂ Subscribed to your TinyLetter btw, @auria. You share good ideas ;-) 2020-08-24 📚, 🔡 @internaut (and others!), here is a design-related reading list: • Exclusive Design by Vasilis van Gemert: https://exclusive-design.Vasilis.nl/ A thesis on webdesigning for commoners with disabilities. Mr. van Gemert questions the status quo, and offers original outlooks. Quote: “But I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘Do the current web design conventions work for people with disabilities?’ Simply said, the current conventions are designed by, and thus for, designers. Not all these conventions work for non-designers.” [Let it be noted here that “accessibility” is about making something accessible to as many people as possible. Translating a website, or ensuring it work on older browsers, has a much bigger impact on that regard than making it 100% WAI-ARIA compliant. Most “web a11y people” miss the elephant(s) in the room…] • B612 - The PolarSys font; Design and production of a digital font: https://GitHub.com/polarsys/b612/blob/master/docs/B612-Leaflet.pdf B612 was designed for use on Airbus aircraft cockpit screens. Real, serious, hard-constrained usage. The design document reflects that. Quote: “The principle of ‘ink traps’ has existed as long as typography has: it is a small indentation at the junction of letter strokes which ‘traps’ the ink on small characters, so that it doesn't block the junction and affect the legibility. In the case of B612, the ‘light traps’ accentuate the counterforms, particularly for the sharp angles. The indentations are always well distinguished, even at a small size, and the contrast between the different strokes of the character is reinforced.” [page 8] Now for two books, unfortunately not freely available online (but lmk if you want them): • The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building Mr. Alexander’s insights are quite abstract, some to the point of being (pseudo)mystical. To his defense, let’s cite E. A. Poe: “It is the nature of truth […] to be richest when most superficial.” (Poe’s poems are good btw, @internaut ;-)) Quote: “Each sidewalk is a unitary system, which includes both the field of geometrical relationships which define its concrete geometry, and the field of human actions & events, which are associated with it. So when we see a sidewalk in Bombay is used by people sleeping, or for parking cars … and that in New York it is used only for walking—we cannot interpret this correctly as a single sidewalk pattern, with two different uses. […] They are two entirely different patterns.” [page 73] • Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought?: The Traditional View of Art by A. K. Coomaraswamy: https://www.amazon.com/Figures-Speech-Thought-Traditional-Unpublished/dp/1933316349 Now that is next-level deep! Quote: “What we have in view, under these circumstances, is to support by the analysis of certain familiar terms and categories the proposition that our modern preoccupation with the ‘decorative’ and ‘aesthetic’ aspects of art represents an aberration that has little or nothing to do with the original purposes of ‘ornament’” [chapter 3] Quote: “It is by no means the case that symbols and likenesses arise in the course of a higher development of spirituality in men. On the contrary they draw nigh as means of rescue when there is a decline in our divinity and spirituality. […] It is only when one has acquired the habit of this way of looking at things that symbols and images can be understood” [chapter 18] Waiting on your own recommendations on the subject, @internaut! ⁂ @internaut, your Reconna font (http://MikkiJanower.work/reconnatypeface.html) is gorgeous! Looks similar to the web-famous, good but overused, https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Playfair+Display Somehow (due to its thick/thin lines alternation on some glyphs, maybe) it also reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodoni which is top-notch. Is Reconna (freely) available somewhere?? 2020-08-23 🍲, 🎂 “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty. […] I would say that Charlemagne’s mother and the Archbishop were put into the Pot, in fact got into the Soup. They were just new bits added to the stock. A considerable honour, for in that soup were many things older, more potent, more beautiful, comic, or terrible than they were in themselves (considered simply as figures of history).” — J. R. R. Tolkien in https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf Yummy metaphor! See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew ⁂ Happy birthday @dnll ^o^ 2020-08-21 🎶, 📰 @emipri has good music taste. Toi et Moi by Paradis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H4ekRWiW6U) is especially good! ⁂ Having “logs” on this site be free-form textareas is cool, but that also has drawbacks. If they were structured as lists of timestamped entries, we could maybe get RSS (or, even better, Atom) feeds for our logs, making subscribing/consuming/linking much easier. cc @elliott :-) 2020-08-17 🍞 30% of Russians died in the famine of 1601–1603. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1601%E2%80%9303 42% of Yankee adults are obese as of 2017–2018. https://www.CDC.gov/obesity/data/adult.html “In his searing and provocative book Hunger, the Argentinian journalist Martín Caparrós states that ‘obesity is the hunger of the wealthy … [In rich countries] malnourishment went from being a deficit to an excess, from a lack of food to an oversupply of junk food’.” — https://www.the-TLS.co.uk/articles/cheap-food-consequences-bee-wilson-book-review/ “There is nothing new under the sun” — Ec 1:9. “The poor will never cease from the land” — Dt 15:11. 2020-08-16 ⛪ “The Old Believers reject the idea of contents a priori prevailing over form. To illustrate this issue, the renowned Russian historian Василий Ключевский referred to poetry. He argued, that if one converts a poem into prose, the contents of the poem may remain intact, but the poem will lose its charm and emotional impact; moreover, the poem will essentially no longer exist. In the case of religious rituals, form and contents do not just form two separable, autonomous entities, but connect with each other through complex relationships, including theological, psychological, phenomenal, aesthetic and historic dimensions.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#Background 2020-08-11 🃏 https://FreeSolitaire.win/ Patience game.