Damian’s notes

XKCD on Black Holes vs Regular Holes

jless is a command-line tool for reading, exploring, and searching through JSON data.

Election maps tend to give a distorted impression because constituencies vary in size. Here is a nice visualization of the Australian state of play before the election in 2022, using an map made of 150 hexagons. The geography is almost unrecognizable because Australia’s population is largely concentrated in cities and towns.

Flipnote Studio is an animation app created by Nintendo for the Nintendo DSi in 2008. The official sharing service was, alas! closed down in 2013 but now there is a fan archive of 44 million flipnotes.

Wuffs is a programming language specialized for writing codec libraries that must be fast and also free of obvious security bugs like numeric overflows and buffer overrun errors—such as the image decoders in a web browser. Moving overflow checks in to the compiler makes code more annoying to write but also eliminates the need for run-time checks, meaning the resulting code can be faster than C or Rust.

Illustrated article about Photo-Lettering, Inc., focussing on the ten women listed among the 252 names in the 1971 edition of Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Styles.

Allen Pike offers ever-timely advice in the use of hyperlinks in prose to best serve your readers, if any.

Lite XL, a Super Fast Editor Written in Lua I should try out some time. Apparently it’s about 3MiB, which is a rounding error by modern standards. (Though, alas! it does not appear to have a Homebrew formula, which will make it harder to install on my Homebrew-organized Mac.)

A zine describing how modern computers represent integers and floating point numbers internally—the latest in the series by Julia Evans of friendly introductions to programming concepts as little zines you can print out yourself or buy ready-printed (though shipping will be expensive if you’re outside the USA).