Damian’s notes

pi40 Keyboard Kit: A 40% Planck-style keyboard kit with mostly through-hole soldered parts and a Raspberry Pi as its controller.

The idea of a through-hole kit is that you can solder on all the parts yourself—even the diodes and microcontroller—and it shows this off by having the diodes arranged under a window in a pretty pattern. Looks like the microcontroller board itself requires some trickier soldering since it has pads rather than pins.

Brutalist Web Design is an approach to website design I have been giving some thought to recently. The term brutalism is often associated with Brutalist Architecture, however it can apply to other forms of construction, such as web design.

I take it as a stripping back of the needless decoration and clutter that has made websites less rather than more readable over time—not to mention wasting bandwidth and battery downloading and rendering piles and piles of JavaScript instead of tending to the basics of HTML and CSS.

There isn’t a Brutalist framework to install. It’s just a set of design nudges, described in this manifesto.

Yotta is a minimalistic FORTH-like language for x86-64 processors. Its most distinctive feature is that it comes with very few primitives, to the extent that its standard preamble starts by defining ‘;’ in the first definition that uses it.

A new arrival at Future Fonts: Synch, an exhuberently psychedelic typeface called Sync by James Plattner

HTML email was a terrible mistake, part the billionth: Kobold letters are email messages that use CSS tricks to make different content appear to the person they are forwarded to than is seen by the original recipient.

April Cools' Day is a more fun alternative to April Fools’ Day. The idea is pretty simple: 1 April, publish something genuine that's very different from your normal produced content.

Oxford towpath flooded between Iffley lock & the ring road bridge & further downstream as far as I could see. I got through on bicycle with wet feet but I won’t be risking it again til the water goes down.

The annotated Sandman: an unofficial collection of notes (preserved on the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine) on the Vertigo Sandman comics (1989–1996). Gaiman’s link says ‘They are terrific. Between them and
[Leslie S. Klinger]’s annotations, all knowledge is there’ (referring to DC’s own Annotated Sandman volumes).

Spicy Sections is a web component that takes sections and can display them as tabs or detail/summary depending on screen size.

It’s developed as part of explorations in Open UI, to get an idea of how a future ‘tabs’ element should be designed.