It’s been a long time since Panic sold their excellent Katamari Damacy shirts. Though mine are holding up quite nicely, it’s exciting to see a shop open with brand new merchandise. I’m taken by the jumper, sober and reserved, entirely unlike the video game. The shirts pale in comparison to those sold by Panic, though.
As someone who gets excited by software, I love reading the change notes for each release. Changelogs aren’t just for software, though. Anything digital can benefit from one. It may be no surprise that I maintain a changelog for this site and for Build Your OmniFocus Workflow.
Though the changelog for this site is really just for me, in the case of the book, it’s quite important. Readers want to know they’ve both got the latest edition of the book as well as what to look for should there be any new content.
Steven Pressfield:
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.
My writing here is mostly an exercise for myself. Regardless, I still aspire to write something worthy, just in case anyone is reading. My thanks (and apologies) if you are.
(via Gabe Weatherhead, the Macdrifter.)
The BBC continue to demonstrate that they don’t understand podcasting. Even if they do understand it, they appear to have little respect for the open and free concepts upon which podcasting was founded. They’re now further alienating listeners who use Google and Android services by attempting to deny access to most podcasts.
By ‘podcast’ of course I do really mean podcast. As I wrote, the BBC appear to want to gather as much data as possible so as to serve, via their distributor, more targeted advertising. Data which they can easily collect by forcing users into using their wretched Sounds app. As the subtitle read:
Were it BBC Smells, this would stink
The stench is rising.
Rosemary Orchard, my distinguished co-conspirator on Build Your OmniFocus Workflow is an avid user of the app Drafts. In this review written for MacStories, she discusses what Drafts is and how well, as an iOS app, it has made the jump to macOS.
Though I’ve tried Drafts for iOS in the past, it isn’t quite my cup of tea. Nevertheless, it’s a great app which looks very promising on macOS. It’s always a pleasure to see a new app for the Mac.
Hiroki Ogasawara is a member of the sociology faculty at Kobe University. In this interview with the Japan Times, he’s strikingly forthright.
On the 2020 Tokyo Olympics:
It’s a social disaster and happens at the expense of what else needs to be done in other areas of society.…
[Preparation for the games] is disgusting. Violent gentrification, forcible removal of local residents and profit-making for global economic elites by stealing public funds collected through tax.
Regarding the higher education of Japanese students and their futures as office drones:
They quickly compromise themselves for what the job market demands. Stupid.
They are [getting better at English] if you support the government’s idea of producing a “global human resource”; that is, office workers who speak business English and know how to use Excel.… (emphasis added)
I think Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation) sees culture as something that has to be reserved for an exclusive elite. It doesn’t want the majority of company employees to have time and space for “useless” pursuits, because culture is all about respecting “useless” activity.
Having studied in London, he compares it and Kyoto, the city that is perhaps the most ‘ye olde Japan’ (if you will) of all:
London is better by far. Not because Kyoto is inflated by tourists but because in London you are exposed to raw diversity, not cosmetic multiculturalism. In Kyoto, talk of symbiosis and cross-culture is quite superficial. It’s just marketing. (emphasis added)
Finally, on new world Japan:
I’m worried about the backlash when too much property and tourist sites are bought and run by foreign owners and investors. You never know when exclusive ethnic absolutism will erupt.
I wasn’t previously aware of Mr Ogasawara, but crikey, this was quite the introduction. I suspect that he’s widely dismissed, if even noticed, by the Japanese public. People need not be intimidated or fearful of his criticism as it demonstrates that he cares about his homeland deeply.
(via Mulboyne.)
Ben Ubois of Feedbin:
The Mercury Parser API, made by Postlight, is shutting down.
Mercury Parser is the service that powers a number of popular features on Feedbin. These include: extracting the full content from partial content feeds, viewing the content of links in Feedbin, and displaying articles that are linked to from tweets.
However, this is actually good news, because Postlight open-sourced Mercury Parser, and it has already improved significantly. Bugs have been fixed, results have become more accurate, and in the case of Feedbin, it is now much faster.…
Self-hosting [the open-source Mercury project] also means that I can open up access to this service to Feedbin customers and app developers.… Please get in touch if you’d like to use it in your app, whether your users are logged in to a Feedbin account or not.…
Thanks to Postlight for running Mercury Parser free-of-charge all these years!
Hear, hear!
Similarly, praise goes to Feedbin for contributing to the community like this.
It’s irritating that some sites don’t offer their full article content via their RSS and JSON feeds but Mercury has made it virtually irrelevant. Now that Feedbin are hosting it, even when invoking the Mercury service in an app like Reeder, the full content arrives almost instantaneously. It’s fantastic, especially whilst on mobile.
I enthusiastically subscribe to Feedbin’s service and now I’m even more pleased.
Neven Mrgan:
Broccoli is wonderful. I can’t convince you of this any more than I can convince you that the color purple is pretty. Broccoli’s qualities become self-evident to you at some point later in life, when your taste buds are bored with sugar and ham and they crave something that reminds them of Mother Earth.
All hail the brassicas and the colour purple.
This year’s High Committee vote came down to a tight three-way finish. Would Jimbob Ghostkeeper achieve the rare People’s Choice-High Committee double, as did Vanilla Dong in 2007 and Shamus Beaglehole in 2014? Would Salami Blessing ride the top overall seed to victory, just like Kobe Buffalomeat did last year? Or would Dr. Narwhals Mating reach the point of climax despite the controversy surrounding his name change?
Ultimately, after receiving the most overall points in our advanced scoring system and receiving the most first-place votes from our Committee, it was Salami Blessing, a recent engineering school graduate from Nigeria, who came out on top. (emphasis added)
I agree completely with the High Committee as I found Mr Ghostkeeper’s forename lacklustre. Salami Blessing, which is particularly comical to a native English speaker, seems a better choice.
Doubtless the 2019 tournament is imminent.
Jon Hicks:
Rushy Common is part of the Lower Windrush Valley Project, and area of gravel pit lakes, created by gravel extraction when the A40 was built. It’s what I call my ‘local patch’ – not necessarily a birding hot spot, but my closest place to relax and watch birds. It’s the place where I observe the comings and goings throughout the year, and feel inspired to to paint what I see.
These illustrations, done with Procreate on iPad Pro, are beautiful. I love the mood of the Peregrine Falcon and the water reflecting the Great White Egret is evocative. I’m looking forward to seeing more of these.
If you’d like to hear examples of labiodental sounds other than /f/ and /v/, an interactive International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart is the place to go.
(My favourite vowel is the close front rounded vowel, /y/.)
In a study published in Science (pay wall) last week, Blasi, Moran et al. propose that labiodental sounds (in English, /f/ and /v/) may have developed as a result of changing human diet.
Our ancestors ate harder foods, which ground down our front teeth. This gave us a bite where our top and bottom teeth met. Though possible, labiodental sounds would have been difficult to produce and thus unlikely to appear in language, the authors argue.
As our diets began incorporating softer foods, our top teeth weren’t ground down as much, so the teeth stayed closer to the front of our mouths. The authors suggest that because of this, labiodental sounds became easier to produce and thus were introduced into the pantheon of potential sounds for language. These sounds now feature in many languages worldwide.
Whilst not without detractors (this is science after all, the debate never ends), it’s an interesting theory nonetheless.
(via the Science in Action podcast.)
Yuki Hagiwara:
It has taken more than a century, but Japanese banks are finally parting ways with a piece of technology that hasn’t felt cutting edge since the shogun reigned.
Hanko, the personal stamps required for even simple transactions in Japan since the 1800s, are getting phased out at some of the country’s biggest financial institutions.
This is encouraging news, but I’m not sure how far this will go in eliminating the use of hanko/inkan throughout society. I’m not too bothered by the system myself, but that ivory continues to be used for making them, especially ivory of ‘dubious origin’, is despicable.
Some day when I’m in a particularly good mood, ask about the difference between a ‘sign’ and a signature when signing a document.
Puzzled by ps? Flummoxed by find? Always wondered about awk? The Bite Size Command Line zine is here to help! Every page takes a command line tool and explains the most important things to know about it.
Julia Evans makes these great comics which are packed with useful information. She recently released another, Bite Size Networking, which looks just as informative as the others in the ‘Bite Size’ series. I love that these are hand-written.
Jeff Johnson, formerly of Rogue Amoeba, purveyor of StopTheMadness and Underpass, has made this site which is:
Dedicated to shaming apps for their bad release notes.
I’m so pleased someone has done this. It’s so frustrating performing an update and not knowing what’s going to change upon doing it. I want to know if a bug I encounter has been corrected or if a feature I use is changing.
Fortunately there’s less of the trend of silly stories being told in release notes, but I’m sick of reading ‘Bug fixes and performance enhancements’ with no further information.
The shot shows the kind of interaction President Obama had with President Putin during his tenure. It was 2014, a particularly tense time between the two countries. You can see in the facial expressions and gestures that this was a very serious conversation. There are interpreters stood behind them, but I get the impression from Putin’s face that he understood exactly what was being said in English.
The more I look at this photo, the more the meaning in the body language deepens.
(via Paul Kafasis.)
Looks like a nice tool to try out the next time I need to write a complex regular expression.
(via Jonathan Wight.)
Kris Sowersby:
Heldane is a hybrid, a bastard, a fabrication. I vultured my way through history picking the bones from old fonts I like to make something new. I hesitate to call it original, but it is new. But only in a strict temporal sense — that is, this exact typeface hasn’t existed before. I used to say Heldane is “my Garamond” as a shorthand explanation, despite having very little to do with Garamont’s work. But it’s very much in the garalde genre. I’ve drawn fuzzy golden threads from his contemporaries to weave my own texture.
There are so many things I love about this typeface. My highlights include the spur on the G, the swash capital M and of course the pilcrow/capitulum ¶.
Jason Kottke:
Language is power and words are meaningful beyond their simple or intended definitions. For any given problematic word, there are so many other words you can use.
Spot on.
This stood out to me as I was writing about BBEdit last week. I appreciate the spirit Bare Bones inject into the tag line for the product, but the verb used rubs me the wrong way.
At first it seemed like a foregone conclusion that I’d use the language of the tag line more directly to title the article, the image file or simply quote it in the article body. Ultimately I decided I didn’t want that word appearing on this site with that meaning.
Brett Terpstra:
If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine ever since it was added as an option in Safari and only have to resort to Google occasionally, mostly for things in Japanese.
The transition was simple, as most of the skills I’d picked up using Google over the years transferred. Since then I’ve learnt some new tricks, like prioritising search results from a country or region and of course their fantastic bang searches.
Monthly series in which historical novelist Sarah Dunant delves into the past for stories and moments that help frame the present, bringing to life worlds that span the centuries.
Another of my favourite podcasts. The month-long interval between episodes makes them all the more sweet. Sarah Dunant’s voice is a joy and the stories she tells and presents are doubly so. This month’s programme is on shame – may the rough music not come for thee, friend.
Listening in a darkened room with headphones recommended.
Indra Kupferschmid at Alphabettes:
If you are looking for a humanist sans-serif with a slight English flair, here are some less overused and ambivalent alternatives…
A couple of my favourites:
On the subject of BBEdit, you can play around with it and several other applications using this System 7 emulator in your browser, thanks to a port done by James Friend.
There are several other versions:
John Boardley at I Love Typography:
Decorative borders were employed to demarcate or divide books, chapters or sections and, from the last decades of the fifteenth century, were used at the beginning of books as openers or title-pages.
I’ve always loved these sorts of illustrations and whilst mostly unrelated, may have something to do with the violet-y sumire drapes happening on this site.
Of I Love Typography though, John recently launched a Patreon campaign which is criminally under-funded.