As part of their story about the downfall of Twitter, The Verge has compiled an archive of Great Tweets. I might just be tired, but I’ve been laughing for 15 minutes at these.
Not on the list, but a couple of favourites of mine:
“There’s still so much we don’t know about HTML. Even now, scientists are discovering new tags almost every day”
@Orteil42
“Stepping down from my job to devote myself full time to reading the emails from my kids schools”
Joseph Birbiglia @joebirbigs (deleted)
This video (that I found via Waxy, who found it via the Tom Scott newsletter) does a great job of illustrating how you can visualize subtle or hidden change over time in video:
In a much less sophisticated example of a similar principle, I sometimes use the ‘Difference’ filter mode in Photoshop (or other image tools) to catch small changes between two images.
As a simple example, these first two images (screenshots of the WordPress settings screen) are almost identical. The third image uses a ‘difference’ blend mode to make this small change obvious.
The differences between the first two images are: a checkbox was moved down a few pixels, and the word “register” was replaced with “join”. If you open the first two images (A & B) in two browser tabs, you can also switch quickly between them and your brain will do the work to highlight the change (just like the T-Rex did in Jurassic Park before it ate that lawyer off the toilet).
As a bonus, the Web has native support for this ‘difference’ blend mode via the CSS mix-blend-mode property. I was able to put together a quick example with some simple HTML/CSS that shows the difference mode without a tool like Photoshop.
See the Pen Blend Mode by Steven Garrity (@sgarrity) on CodePen.
If you’re taking a photo and for some reason there’s a door open into a bathroom in the background (which you can probably avoid), follow my #1 photography pro tip:
Close the toilet seat.
I asked my coworkers today: We have terms for the children of your siblings, or the children of your children. What do you call the children of your work -friends?
I was satisfied with one colleague’s suggestion of “Coworker once removed.”
Then, many hours later, it dawned on me: Businiece (or the slightly less perfect, Businephew).
All in a day’s work.
If you start a timer on the macOS Clock application and close it, it keeps counting. Like, forever.
I’m up to 284 days. Apparently I started a new “lap” after a few months. Onward.
This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.
When I was a child, our family bought a coconut from the grocery store. It was a rare and exotic novelty.
We all gathered to try and access the strange and nourishing coconut milk trapped inside the huge hairy stone.
In a time before YouTube, we had to resort to our own ingenuity to open the coconut. We moved the operation out into our garage where we tried a hammer and nails. We tried a drill and screwdriver.
Eventually, we smashed the coconut open and watched as a tiny splash of coconut milk trickled out onto the dirty garage floor.
AI features keep popping up in all of the digital products I use. Figma, Photoshop, Notion, Zoom. These products tend to prompt acceptance of vague privacy terms that may or may not feed your private/company data into the AI slurry.
Figma added some AI generation tools into their FigJam product under a “Beta” caveat. I’m both impressed at how candid they are and troubled at how they are comfortable shipping a feature that requires such a warning:
“AI outputs can be misleading or wrong”
— FigJam product, which uses AI…
Also, if you ask the Photoshop’s AI-powered “Generative Fill” feature to draw something “with a transparent background”, it renders a messy checker-board background that is sometimes used to illustrate transparency.
Lots of power, lots of potential, lots of problems.
Nice cover of Nothing Compares 2 U by Choir! Choir! Choir! with Feist. Found via Kottke.
My distaste for band names with punctuation notwithstanding.
If you enjoy Canadian rock music from the past three decades, you may enjoy the Trans-Canada Highwaymen.
If you saw me laughing while walking home from one of my kids’ schools this week, it was because a podcast host said that the two subjects of his story:
“They go together like Jack & Meg White, or Ant-Man & The Wasp”.
Jonathan Goldstein in episode #54 of Heavyweight
