Note archive: September, 2021

Twenty years ago I wrote the first entry in my online journal.

Today I wrote the two thousandth eight hundredth and eighteenth entry.

https://adactio.com/journal

Too late to stop now.

Going to London. brb

Using an RSS reader is like getting a glimpse of what the web would be like it weren’t smothered in JavaScript.

It’s glorious.

@WeAreNew_Public I’m loving the magazine!

Any chance of providing an RSS feed for the articles published there? 🙏

Going to London. brb

The latest episode of the @Clearleft podcast is all about design research, with excerpts from a talk by @GreggCorp and many words of wisdom from @Sniffles:

https://podcast.clearleft.com/season03/episode03/

Welcome to Brighton!

You picked a nice day for it!

Reading The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Pondering the cognitive dissonance of being in favour of vaccines but against GMO crops.

The science-sceptical arguments against both are remarkably similar.

And both are in reality safe and effective.

Learning to write BASIC on my ZX81 was so formative.

Thank you, Clive Sinclair.

Someone needs to update howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

There are fourteen people in space right now (on three different spacecraft).

Ooh, yeah, that was fun!

https://adactio.com/journal/1546

👋

Good times!

I love it when people share on their websites what books they’re reading/have read.

But I remember seeing one web designer’s online bookshelf where out of 96 books, just two were written by women.

And one of those women was Ayn Rand.

Yes, but the selection is very limited:

• https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/resilient-web-design/id1183700985
• https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/web-history/id1535003098

As a member of The Long Now Foundation, I am absolutely disgusted by this. The environmental disaster of this “NFT-based crowdfunding model” is the antithesis of long-term thinking.

That makes sense—svg isn’t a replaced element.

My gut feeling is that the download attribute would be handy on the img element (and other replaced elements too?) but I don’t have a use case to hand.

I shall ponder further.

I know this isn’t the use case you’re asking about, but if download were available on the img element, would it makes sense to also make it available on inline SVGs? (I do have a use case I can share for that.)

An alt-history space kick, you say? Are you reading @MaryRobinette’s Lady Astronaut series?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/adactio/262962547/

Thanks so much, Jared!

Maybe I could cajole you into being interviewed for the podcast sometime? 😉

Thinking about my recent trip to Zürich, I must admit that there are many advantages to living in Switzerland.

The flag is a big plus, for one thing.

Reading The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again by M. John Harrison.