This is the 42nd post in my on-going serial blogging saga. Another random collection of links, all typed out with a swollen finger from playing badminton with a naff racquet last night for the first time in ten years. It gets geekier the further down you go, but hopefully a bit of something for everyone.
Kung Fury – Okay, first of all, probably the best retrowave movie ever. “You don’t need that spine, it’s holding your back.”
A swim through jellyfish lake – I’ll confess, I’ll enjoy any video set to Einaudi and even more so if it’s Nuvole Bianche. This is pretty epic.
Eminem vs ASL – I still find it fascinating that of the few languages humans have actually created, we still don’t standardise. As such, here is Eminem played out in American Sign Language which shares only 31% of features with British Sign Language.
Jump by Google – Anyone got 16 GoPros knocking around? Because if you do this looks neat. Google are basically bringing features that used to be in the realm of big companies into the hands of big spenders and maybe one day the masses.
Battery phones in Ghana – It’s telling that while most of us lust after thinner and faster phones, the truth is what we really care about is how long it’s usable vs how much weight we’re willing to lug around. I’d happily trade screensize for a few more amps.
Harry Potter in Ancient Greek – Because, why not. Seeing the process of a book being written can be as fascinating as the final product itself, which is why following blogger/writers like Scalzi and Kay is enjoyable.
Bus animation – I wrote a small program to simulate traffic waves while at the Christ Church campus at Oxford Uni on a decrepit old machine (after seeing the great hall where they initially filmed Harry Potter (your fact of the day)). This is a much nicer visualisation though. Try screwing it up and seeing how long it takes to heal.
Wildbit’s new offices – We’re massive users of Beanstalk at 383, so I like following the company that make it. Their new offices are amazing, not only for fit-out, but also the fact they’ve gone for private offices for all the devs. Working in a chaotic open-plan office, headphones don’t offer the same level of isolation.
Three years of logging my inbox – If my inbox count isn’t at zero, something’s gone wrong. So seeing people let their email fill up is a little perplexing. But anyway, a nice overview of patterns (and a weird binge).
Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat – I love the web, but to most end users the distinction comes down to: one is a button I press on my phone to do something, and the other is a thing I have to type in to load slowly. There are always going to be things the web either can’t do, or just can’t do as well, and that is the downside of relying on abstractions.
Rearchitecting Github Pages – The big one here, they ran the entire service up until the start of this year on one server! (With failover, and quad core Xeons, but damm.) It seems like every new library, app and whacky idea has a repo on GitHub followed by a Pages account. Nice to see such a basic set-up (nginx & MySQL) performing so well.
Tackling npm’s naming problem – This is one (one!) thing that Composer got right in the PHP world.
Databranches – I’ve looked at using git as the database for a couple of apps recently. You’ve got full history, branches for previewing and at the end of the day, everything is a file. Git-annex is definitely useful, one to try.
Swift & Metal – If you’re using Metal, why you’d go for Swift as well is beyond me. But I can imagine there are use cases on mobile where this can be useful, regardless of what it’ll do to battery life.
So that’s another week, and another bunch of links. I would say comment if you enjoy them but a. I disabled comments a long time ago and b. nobody comments nowadays anyway.
