Damian Cugley @pdc@octodon.social

Breakdown on life on Earth in terms of biomass (measured in millions of tonnes of carbon). Scroll down for a surprise!

#biodiversity #carbon #science #visualization

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/

Simon Willison’s approach to creating template repositories in GitHub, with a Cookiecutter step to set the name of the components in the source code automatically when someone uses the template.

#programming #template

https://simonwillison.net/2021/Aug/28/dynamic-github-repository-templates/

Information about how you might want to tweak your website design for Safari 15 in a video from WWDC 2021 with Jen Simmons. There are new CSS features for exposing the "safe" viewport (where you know browser chrome will not occlude your page's text).

#CSS #Safari

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10029/

For those who want a work of art to do their daily typing on: the Keymacs A620N-88 is a recreation of the famous Symbolics Lisp keyboard, with Matias switches (or any ALPS-style you prefer), a choice of ANSI or Lisp layout, and a custom spherical key-cap set.

#hardware #mechanicalKeyboard

https://keymacs.com/
via https://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=25131

Django SQL Dashboard provides an authenticated interface for executing read-only SQL queries directly against your PostgreSQL database, allowing exploration and visualization of your data with minimal friction. Queries can be bookmarked and turned in to publish dashboards.

#Django #PostgreSQL #programming #Python #visualization

https://github.com/simonw/django-sql-dashboard
via https://simonwillison.net/2021/May/10/django-sql-dashboard/

One of my bugbears is user databases that assume or impose first-name, surname fields, based on assumptions about how people's names are structured. This W3C note on personal names around the world outlines some of the ways names are understood around the world, and has suggestions for designing UIs accordingly.

#internationalization #peopleNames #programming

https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

Bloated CSS frameworks are a needless waste of bandwidth (possible exception for those still supporting IE11). Here are minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components, created by Stephanie Eckles of ModernCSS.dev

#CSS #lesscode #resource

https://smolcss.dev/

Observable Plot is a free, open-source JavaScript library from Mike Bostock, creator of D3. Simple incantations in its fluent API form a DSL for creating visualizations of tabular data with the minimum of friction.

#JavaScript #visualization

https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot
via https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1389615048880914437

I am building a rev. 3 Quefrency mechanical keyboard with red acrylic case!

#mechanicalKeyboad #Quefrency #tronics

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQYSt4DrOpT/

This was an eye-opener: a podcast episode on the vagus nerve, an anatomical feature of the body I was entirely ignorant of, that connects all sorts of parts of the body to the brain without diverting via the spinal column, and in which a lot of our consciousness of ourself is located.

#podcast #science #vagusNerve

https://overcast.fm/+GTscSb_CY

Here's nifty idea for a party, though difficult enough to set up you have to call performance art to actually do it: everyone wears platform shoes on their normal shoes so they see eye-to-eye with their variously heighted friends.

#happening #performanceArt

https://somethingcurated.com/2019/08/28/the-german-artist-who-threw-a-party-where-everyone-saw-eye-to-eye/

Entertaining twitter thread on a bug (that wasn't a bug really) caused by changing keyboard-layout conventions and the accommodations made to support old keyboards on new computers.

#programming #retro

https://twitter.com/figmadesign/status/1395446934899367938

Access-control lists are often set up to answer the obvious question "can X access Y to do Z?" but not other useful things like "What are all the Ys X can do Z to?" But this needs to be planned in from the start, or you will be sad later on.
(Twitter thread.)

#programming

https://twitter.com/leakissner/status/1410016715077865473

A 15-minute explanation of one of the signature masterpieces of the Renaissance, Michelangelo’s David, part of a series on YouTube.

#sculpture #YouTube

https://kottke.org/21/06/great-art-explained-michelangelos-david

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