Damian’s notes

Steph Ango describes the philosophy of File over App in the belowlinked blog post. People of my age will often have documents in formats for which they have no matching software—in effect, they are lost. Well-known file formats that can be edited in many apps are so much safer.

Flexoki is a colour scheme for text and code—for example for syntax highlighting. Steph Ango designed this inspired by physical printing inks having co-founded a printing company Inkodye.

This video is a movie-length description of the case for solar panels (and by extension renewables in general) over oil- and gas- and maize-burning energy production, with a natural focus on the United States, especially the last third which is an outstanding polemic about why the US is NOT going all-in on solar panels instead of ever-more-marginal oil extraction.

I enjoyed this 12-minute video by Chris Spargo about why traffic signs in the world are standardized but only to some extent, and why Ireland, situated between the rest of Europe and the USA, ended up with a system that splits the difference between the systems used in the EU and the States.

A discussion of leap-year calculations, and how the formula for the best-distributed leap years is useful for various calendar calculations, but alas! not for actual leap years.

The Axios attack exploited amongst other things our expectation that a video call will often start with a hasty software update.

Apophenia, the human tendency to see patterns in random things illustrated by Grant Snider (one of a series of random words comics).

“Simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. And to make matters worse, complexity sells better.” — Edsger Dijkstra

It’s so much easier to show off a complex new solution than a simpler, better one. How can we address this?

So excited to see CSS Form Control Styling Module Level 1. In less than ten years time we will be able to style the menu drop down of SELECT elements with CSS and throw away the gigabytes of buggy JavaScript used to fake this feature for the last couple of decades.