Springfield MO US
I’m doing some writing on an old netbook like it’s 2009.
This little corner of my website is where I collect things from the everyday goings-on in my life. It’s a chronicle, exhibit, and junk-drawer all at once. I have not had a social media profile in quite a few years now, so this part of my website fills a similiar purpose to what those places did for me in years past.
I’m doing some writing on an old netbook like it’s 2009.
Getting old is wanting to redesign your website because the text you yourself wrote a week ago is too small to read in the early hours of the morning.
I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write
It’s easy to lose sight of why we’re doing something when the thing we’re doing is complex.
Oskar Wickström applying Bringhurst to the web: rem proportions, justified text with actual hyphenation, one typeface doing all the work. I tried the vertical-rhythm half on my own site and backed it out; the per-element discipline cost more than it returned.
justif - publication-grade text justification for the web
This is a neat project that brings Knuth-Plass justification to the web.
Recreating the Canon Cat document interface
Alexander Obenauer on rebuilding the Canon Cat’s document interface. The bit I keep coming back to is from the Cat’s own How-To Guide:
When our designers created the Cat they threw out all the junk that makes computers clunky and held onto the personality and immediacy of a typewriter.
Things I Stopped Self-Hosting (And Why Cloud or Managed Won)
I’ve been feeling the time burden lately with all of the services I’ve been hosting. I hate renting everything, but I’m also feeling an intense need to get some of my time back.
Sometimes trying to run Linux feels like being one of those historical reenactors who pretend to live as life used to be, all while living a life that in no way meshes with the real world.
I have a stack of floppy disks at home that I’ve always wanted to try and pull data off of.
It’s interesting to think of computing within limits as having societal benefits.
Sometimes I do get nostalgic for things, but you know what…? Old software is just as buggy and unusable as all of these here-today-gone-tomorrow web apps.
An unease about where I fit into things is a thread you can follow throughout my entire time of making a living by doing things with computers. But I’m not sure I’ve ever had more questions about where I fit into all of it than I do now.
I like to watch this video every once in a while to remind myself that there was once a time when we thought about how humans interact with computers. We used to put a lot of thought into how computers exist to support a human’s interests. Now it often feels like computers exist to make money for everyone other than the human using the computer.