Damian Cugley @pdc@octodon.social

Sometimes asking politely for people to be nice discourages nice people from but does not affect assholes, so the effect is that you end up only interacting with assholes. You have accidentally created an ‘asshole filter’.

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
via https://twitter.com/griffinkate/status/1394295856912900101

Tutorials about new features of CSS aimed at people already experienced with CSS

#CSS #resource #tips

https://moderncss.dev/
via https://twitter.com/terriblemia/status/1335310816283750401

Short documentary about the 1-tonne fount imported from Hong Kong to print the the New Zealand Chinese Growers’ Monthly Journal and its relevance to Chinese New Zealanders.

#Chinese #history #NewZealand #typography

https://thespinoff.co.nz/partner/objectspace/the-single-object/04-05-2021/the-single-object-the-typeface-that-told-the-stories-of-chinese-new-zealanders/
via https://twitter.com/klimtypefoundry/status/1389471918911213577

We are used to treating databases as a pluggable back-end for storing inert data for processing in our code, but the PostgreSQL database has many features for slicing and dicing the data and doing analysis than one might think.

#PostgreSQL #programming

https://hakibenita.com/sql-for-data-analysis

Short silent film of aerial footage from a dirigible piloted by Roy Knabenshue in 1914 over Chicago.

#Chicago #dirigible #retro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxCFCoI2pj
via https://kottke.org/21/05/aerial-footage-of-chicago-from-a-dirigible-1914

Wrote some geometry code for a side project and two lines aren’t matching because of a floating point rounding error and I am kicking myself for not using fixed point arithmetic from the start.

Recreating the logic board of the famous Macintosh SE/30

#electronics #Macintosh #retroComputing

https://68kmla.org/forums/topic/62451-se30-logicboard-recreation/
via https://sixcolors.com/link/2021/03/creating-a-new-se-30-logic-board/

People have been playing Tetris using the dinky little NES controller for almost 40 years, but even so a new button-mashing technique is sparking a minor revolution.

#gaming #NES #Tetris

https://kottke.org/21/05/new-nes-tetris-technique

Sculptural artworks made entirely of black LEGO bricks.

#Lego #sculpture

https://ekownimako.com/artwork
via https://kottke.org/21/04/building-black-ekow-nimakos-all-black-lego-sculptures

A simple, correct PEP517 package builder—in other words a replacement for disttools/setuputils/whatever.

#programming #Python

https://github.com/pypa/build

PEP 517: A build-system-independent format for source trees. This is an attempt to do for Python packaging what WSGI did for web frameworks: create a framework in to which appropriately simple or complex guild systems can be plugged.

#packaging #programming #Python

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0517/

Photos of the concrete façade of the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in Japan.

#architecture #concrete #Instagram #Japan

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN7MpevMxQM/

The eye has a system for detecting whether it is daylight or not that is separate from the light sensors that let us see. So faffing with the colour balance of your LCD display probably makes little difference.

#science #sleep

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/researchers-discover-second-light-sensing-system-in-human-eye/

Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!

#checklist #peopleNames #programming

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

English spelling dictionaries in the format used by the built-in spell-check on macOS, amongst other things. Unlike the built-in dictionaries it permits all the spellings supported by the OED, including ‘Oxford’ or ‘world english’ spellings like ‘organize’ and ‘realize’.

#OxfordSpelling #spelling

https://github.com/marcoagpinto/aoo-mozilla-en-dict
via https://alleged.org.uk/pdc/2019/01/09.html

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.

#metadata #peopleNames #programming

https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/name-representation/

Arial is a knock-off of designers’ favourite Helvetica which is ubiquitous because bundled with Microsoft Windows. Here’s a detailed history & critique by Mark Simonson

#Arial #typeDesign

https://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-arial