Damian’s notes

People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities — Until They Live in One (Wired).

Someone’s created a guessing game where you’re told whether your guess is alphabetically before or after the answer. Feels like a binary chop should be the way to go, but thinking of words equidistant between two other words is more confusing than doing the same thing with numbers …

New blog post by me:

I was one of the guest observers at the election count on the evening of
4 July 2024 and it was interesting seeing the process in action in detail.

Wisdom Kaye, a model, director, stylist, photographer, videographer, and all-around social media personality, takes on the challenge of styling himself as different typefaces. Papyrus has never looked so cool.

There are eight different flavours of UUID and here is a short post on when you might use some of them. I like using v5 UUIDs for things that have a natural unique identifier (in some scope) but some protocol requires the entities to also have a UUID.

I’m at the town hall as one of the people observing the counting of the vote. Dozens of people carefully counting, recounting and stacking pieces of paper.

I voted in the city elections this morning before work. This is the first time I have voted under the new voter-suppression-lite regulations, so I had to show my Australian passport before voting. No crowds at all this time of day, so the extra ID faff was not an issue.

pi40 Keyboard Kit: A 40% Planck-style keyboard kit with mostly through-hole soldered parts and a Raspberry Pi as its controller.

The idea of a through-hole kit is that you can solder on all the parts yourself—even the diodes and microcontroller—and it shows this off by having the diodes arranged under a window in a pretty pattern. Looks like the microcontroller board itself requires some trickier soldering since it has pads rather than pins.

Brutalist Web Design is an approach to website design I have been giving some thought to recently. The term brutalism is often associated with Brutalist Architecture, however it can apply to other forms of construction, such as web design.

I take it as a stripping back of the needless decoration and clutter that has made websites less rather than more readable over time—not to mention wasting bandwidth and battery downloading and rendering piles and piles of JavaScript instead of tending to the basics of HTML and CSS.

There isn’t a Brutalist framework to install. It’s just a set of design nudges, described in this manifesto.