Damian’s notes

Breakdown on life on Earth in terms of biomass (measured in millions of tonnes of carbon). Scroll down for a surprise!

Simon Willison’s approach to creating template repositories in GitHub, with a Cookiecutter step to set the name of the components in the source code automatically when someone uses the template.

ComicAd is an attempt at being what Project Wonderful was: an ad network that does not rely on intrusive tracking of individual users‘ behaviours. A lot of what is wrong about the internet can be blamed on the reliance on advertising to fund sites. ComicAd aims to provide an ethnical alternative that also helps people discover new webcomics.

Information about how you might want to tweak your website design for Safari 15 in a video from WWDC 2021 with Jen Simmons. There are new CSS features for exposing the "safe" viewport (where you know browser chrome will not occlude your page's text).

For those who want a work of art to do their daily typing on: the Keymacs A620N-88 is a recreation of the famous Symbolics Lisp keyboard, with Matias switches (or any ALPS-style you prefer), a choice of ANSI or Lisp layout, and a custom spherical key-cap set.

Django SQL Dashboard provides an authenticated interface for executing read-only SQL queries directly against your PostgreSQL database, allowing exploration and visualization of your data with minimal friction. Queries can be bookmarked and turned in to publish dashboards.

One of my bugbears is user databases that assume or impose first-name, surname fields, based on assumptions about how people's names are structured. This W3C note on personal names around the world outlines some of the ways names are understood around the world, and has suggestions for designing UIs accordingly.

Bloated CSS frameworks are a needless waste of bandwidth (possible exception for those still supporting IE11). Here are minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components, created by Stephanie Eckles of ModernCSS.dev

Observable Plot is a free, open-source JavaScript library from Mike Bostock, creator of D3. Simple incantations in its fluent API form a DSL for creating visualizations of tabular data with the minimum of friction.