Damian’s notes

A breezy lecture on the chaotic formation, merging and splitting of colleges that has lead to Oxford's chaotic urban architecture, in the form of a Twitter thread.

‘Oxford is an architectural disaster because the colleges keep cannibalising each other. The University has, over a millennium, had a couple hundred colleges and halls. There are now 45.’

Qlavier has created a 3 × 13 macropad, like a extremely maximalist combined numeric keypad and nav cluster.

If for some reason you want to replace HTML’s default ‘select’ element with a web component of your own, it is way more complicated than you might think. This article outlines some of the complications that will need to be addressed in your quixotic mission to reimplement the unimplementable.

A BBC Radio 3 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles for orchestra and half a dozen actors, led by Mark Gatiss and Sanjeev Bhaskar as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

The Street Design Manual of Oslo, translated into English (PDF). As well as trying to make their city more navigable on foot, by cycle and by wheelchair, it has a lot to say about trees, snow storage, and stormwater management.

Of interest to active-travel promoters in English-speaking countries.

Chloe Dewe Mathews’s photographic project Thames Log examines the ever-changing nature of our relationship to water, from ancient pagan festivities through to the rituals of modern life.

I encountered this as an open-air exhibition in Christ Church Meadows during the lockdown summer of 2021—the photos mounted on boards on the edge of the river they document, captioned meticulously with the Doves Type famously relegated to the Thames in its own ritual in 1917. A poignant reminder of our connection to people via the river we share, at a time of forced separation.

A few years back I created an interactive article navigator as an exercise in learning React. I thought I’d see what it was like doing it over now I’ve been writing UIs in React for a few years.

Thought I would see whether rewriting a React component in Svelte resulted in smaller JavaScript bundle. What I discovered is that the current version of the Storybook plugin for Svelte is incompatible with the current version of SvelteKit. So it goes.

Also my chair just broke in two pieces so I should probably sort that out first … ☹️

Graduate student Devaki Vadakepat Menon found photographs in the Pitt Rivers collection from a project to document the castes of southern India at the beginning of the twentieth century.