Alex got inspired by chat bubbles and considered adding them to Oddμ. Mentions something called Gibberish, which I will bookmark next

Chat bubbles are cool.

I told him he would need a special syntax for that and he got scared. He also liked a quote of mine: “it’s impossible to keep a publishing system pure Markdown”.

Back in the day, centering an element was one of the trickiest things in CSS. As the language has evolved, we’ve been given lots of new tools we can use… But how do we pick the best option? When do we use Flexbox, or CSS Grid, or something else? Let's dig into it.

A guide to domain-specific types that make sense.

TL;DR: You can request a Linux manual page version of a blog post with the following HTTP request:

curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ > post.page && man ./post.page

On the need for a simpler, smaller internet to stand out from the crowd, meet interesting people, and build a calmer business.

Janet is a functional and imperative programming language. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and *nix.

Designed to be embedded. A Lisp!

An old and interesting blog.

ZUI, executable text, alternative history vibe. Lovable!

Also talks about DolDoc, which I'm long interested in.

A PalmOS emulator for the web

OpenWorm is an open source project dedicated to creating a virtual C. elegans nematode in a computer.

Червя оцифровали 😳

Via Merlin

Есть игуана с глазом на затылке! А это, оказывается, тема распространённая так-то. Называется теменной глаз.

Discover Middle Earth during Third Age with this interactive map.

Pagefind is a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your users’ bandwidth as possible, and without hosting any infrastructure.

Yume Nikki and related games wiki

Puzzle together in this free-to-win modern yet familiar online stacker in the same genre as Tetris. Play multiplayer games against friends and foes all over the world, or claim a spot on the leaderboards - the stacker future is yours!

My tetris pal filled me in on the newest Tetris tech. This one seems to be all the rage now, instead of Jstris. I can see why! It's awesome.

Trying to make the case for permanent irrevocable digital identities, which unfortunately today, by de-facto, are email addresses.

I’ve spent the last 6 years teaching Free Software and Open Source at École Polytechnique de Louvain, being forced to investigate the subject and the history more than I anticipated in order to answer students’ questions. I’ve read many historical books on the subject, including RMS’s biography and many older writings.

And something struck me.

RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.

C++ has a built-in logic deduction engine. It's not free, it's like a second program you are writing alongside the main one.

A selection of Webfinger files as produced by common Fediverse apps

Un média pour explorer des alternatives numériques qui vous respectent !

Yay jQuery 4! I don't do such things nowadays, but this release made me glad. I wish it an even brighter future.

Дамстер дайвинг, или Как я отправилась за едой на мусорку Достоверно о натуральной косметике, органических продуктах и экостиле жизни. Главное органик-издание страны.

Wiki on trash. Dumpster divers go here.

Stract is an open source search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results. It's a search engine made for hackers and tinkerers just like ourselves. No more searches where some of the terms in the query arent used, and the engine tries to guess what you really meant. You get what you search for.

AGPLv3! Doesn't work in my outdated Safari though...

Via Nix of Merveilles.

Datagubbe giving good advice in a bullet list. My favorite items are:

• Disable notfications. I'd recommend to at least turn their sound off.

• Use smaller software, use less applications.

• Avoid social media. I'm building one haha.

• Delete unused accounts.

• Thank FOSS maintainers. That includes me.

• Disable blinking cursor.

My least favorite is his recommendation to use laptops less. I myself should use it more, so I don't use the phone. And I don't have a desktop or a place for it.

Статья про заброшенные станции
Я очень рад, что моя гипотеза про их существование подтвердилась.

Лондонское метро насчитывает 270 станций. Ну и жесть. В Казани десяток.

A collection of GUI screenshots.

On these pages you will find many screen shots of various desktop computer Graphical User Interfaces and operating systems. Many different people have had different ideas of how a GUI should work and these screen shots show many of the more popular ones.

Still maintained. A sweet collection. It's older than me.

via viznut

We use “minimal computing” to refer to computing done under some set of significant constraints of hardware, software, education, network capacity, power, or other factors. Minimal computing includes both the maintenance, refurbishing, and use of machines to do DH work out of necessity along with the use of new streamlined computing hardware like the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino micro controller to do DH work by choice. This dichotomy of choice vs. necessity focuses attention on computing that is decidedly not high-performance. By operating at this intersection between choice and necessity minimal computing forces important concepts and practices within the DH community to the fore. In this way minimal computing is also an critical movement, akin to environmentalism, asking for balance between gains and costs in related areas that include social justice issues and de-manufacturing and reuse, not to mention re-thinking high-income assumptions about “e-waste” and what people do with it. Minimal computing thus relates to issues of aesthetics, culture, environment, global relationships of power and knowledge production, and other economic, infrastructural and material conditions.

They are not active anymore. They have a cute abacus as a logo.

On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.

iScape, short for information landscape, was something interesting, lost in time because it was commerical. It offers users to manage their information in a 3D space, creating a digital palace.

The iScape world is a multi-modal, multi-user, collaborative 3-D virtual environment that is interconnected with standard web pages.

This paper presents iScape, a shared virtual desktop world dedicated to the collaborative exploration and management of information. Data mining and information visualization techniques are applied to extract and visualize semantic relationships in search results. A three-dimensional (3-D) online browser system is exploited to facilitate complex and sophisticated human-computer and human-human interaction.

I had similar ideas, twenty years later, but never actually started implementing them because it's damn hard.

Also, a cute book is out!

The <model> element will provide a way to easily present 3D content in a web page without any scripting. Just like with <img> and <video>, HTML makes it possible for <model> to work in a robust and simple manner across web browsers on any platform. Model is still undergoing specification and is subject to change, but we expect it will work like this:

<modelsrc="asset/example-3d-model"width="400"height="300"></model>

New WebKit brings easy 3D-models to web.

A good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text.

This article used to be published on AMP, by the way. No longer! Tells a lot about AMP reliability.

A Mongolian abugida.

Programmers are the builders of ontologies.

Tiles is a simple Python module meant to help with code generation.
It provides a way to work with rectangular areas of text as atomic units.
This is particularly important if proper indentation of the generated code
is desired.

Don't publish a blog post, without any marketing, and expect people to magically discover it.

It doesn't work like that. I'm sorry.

At the very least, you can promote your blog to social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter or Hacker News.

Гришаев рассказывает, какой Preview.app на маке крутой. Это всё правда, и фичи действительно крутые. Пользуюсь всеми, кроме импорта с Айфона и лупы. Да, даже подпись я так ставил!

Matthew comments on an article that profanity is to be avoided. He thinks that it's not up to the article author to decide and that he will swear as before. I'll continue this thread and reply here.

I don't swear in Russian, like, at all. People usually don't notice this, but when they do, they are so surprised. Swearing is a norm with Russian youth, and I don't accept that. The only problem with not swearing is the discomfort when I want to quote somebody who said something I wouldn't say; I haven't found a solution yet. Some people find joy in trying to persuade me to say something “bad”.

I'm more tolerant in that regard in English, though. Perhaps it's because it's not my native language. I don't swear much though. You'd have to invest a lot of time to find an English text of mine where I said something profane. I myself wouldn't even bother.

P. S. Definitions of “profanity” vary. I have my own.

Apple released a language for configs. It's well-designed, take a look. Has Go bindings. I would've considered it if I needed a config language.