October 2024 blend of links
Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.
“New York is a prison” scene, My Dinner with André (1981)・Thanks to the excellent show Community, I got to watch this movie five years ago, back when I lived in Paris. It’s an unusual, sometimes uncomfortable movie, but I enjoyed it more than I expected. This scene is the one I remember the most and the one I talk about all the time, comparing Paris and New York.
App Review: Paper・Text editing app extensive review? Check. Excitement about little software details? Check. Erlend went the extra mile with this blog post, and I’m very thankful. If you use an app that you love, you know what to do.
The Future of Minimalissimo・I feel like I’ve been reading Minimalissimo from the very early days and it’s sad to see it go into hibernation. “Mimo’s heyday is long gone. There was a time, back in the late 2010s, when sites like Minimalissimo were playing an important role in the web ecosystem and thousands of people were visiting the site daily. Over time though, that audience slowly drifted away. Consumption shifted, from websites to social media.”
My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee・Speaking of minimalism, Bradley Taunt says it all: “I snagged the cheapest and most basic coffee maker I could find. It cost me $12. It has no clock, no programming options, no base settings or cleaning functions. Hell, there aren’t even level numbers on the water reservoir tank.”
Slow roads, endless driving zen・Use with extreme caution, unless you’re OK with wasting half an hour driving around doing nothing, or if you find this as relaxing as I do. (via Kushaiah Felisilda)
HTML for People, by Blake Watson・Very well written and easy to understand. (via Weekly Thing)
Crazy Stupid Tech・A new newsletter, by Fred Vogelstein and Om Malik: “As Silicon Valley’s influence extends deeper into all corners of our economy and lives, there also have never been more interesting, crazy, stupid new and interesting technologies out there. They are not getting enough attention. So our goal is to tell you about them.” Already off to a great start with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince interview.
Modern-Day Magellan Discovers New Dining Options By Zooming In A Little On Google Maps・The Onion have been on fire recently. See also their piece on The New York Times shutting down.
xmit — launch fast・Well, this static files hosting service is a treasure. As you may know, I’ve been playing around with static site generators. Long story short, they’re over complicated, but I’ve managed to host the experimental Eleventy site on this very new service called xmit, and I think it’s brilliant. It’s (really) fast, it’s dead simple, it’s smart, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. It’s still the early days, so some glitches might occur, but it’s still free, so what is there to complain about really?
Dave Winer’s 30 years of blogging, and much more・Dan Gillmor posted a nice homage to Dave Winer, in which he quotes what he wrote in his book in 2004, remembering a meeting he had with Winer: “He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, ‘Edit This Page’—and, for me, nothing was ever the same again.”
More “Blend of links” posts here