Damian’s notes

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).

Sorry to see Resolute Bay closing down. They made jeans with Cordura denim in a cut designed for the convenience and comfort of cyclists. They're selling off their remaining stock heavily discounted so there is a bargain to be had if you wear an unusual size.

As part of my attempt to get back in to the swing of blogs and feeds and the IndieWeb in general, here is Julia Evans’s list of blogging myths about myths that discourage people from blogging. This was originally a 10-minute talk with her trademark stick-figure cartoons as slides.

I have finally done something I should have done long ago and replaced Twitter on my phone home screen with NetNewsWire. If I am mindlessly scrolling to kill time (and have run out of Mastodon posts) then amassing a bunch of RSS feeds is probably healthier than what Twitter has to offer nowadays.

Here to celebrate is a note from Brent Simmons on why NetNewsWire does not need to and can’t afford to accept cash donations.

Here’s a YouTube video about making a pinhole camera in Blender and then going increasingly demented making better and better Blender models of the optics of camera lenses. A tour de force that will delight or appall camera or graphics nerds.