Damian’s notes

Slides & notes from a talk by Simon Willison mostly on his projects Datasette and Dogsheep aimed at streamlining the process of aggregating and publishing datasets and searching one’s personal data.

Australian National anthem, Advance Australia Fair, has again been tweaked by the Prime Minister to better represent modern Australia.

What if everything on the Internet were real? Blog comic by Boulet

Twitter thread on how before the debut of Amazing Stories in 1926 there was a thriving fandom living in the letter pages of Western Story Magazine

A cool portfolio web site that only works if you DISABLE JavaScript.

You are probably too young to remember the days when web designers were required take in to account surfers who routinely disabled JavaScript for security reasons (which still apply, but which we ignore because we want to use Twitter).

Insisting on having JavaScript disabled is a bit extreme but it demonstrates as nothing else could that you can produce sophisticated layouts with CSS alone.

The solution to Britain’s constitutional woes is not convening a constitutional court and rewriting the constitution from scratch, since that will never happen and in any case ground-up rewrites are notoriously risky. Better to concentrate on patching the existing system instead. It urgently needs it.

Given the brief of an alien alphabet for use in a children’s hospital, British type designer Jeremy Tankard put the work in to make something splendid replete with a fictional history and two styles (corporate Sans and informal Hand).

The Fonts in Use web site has been running for 10 years now, detailing almost 17,000 uses of fonts in the real world.

Beth Moon’s 14-year quest to photograph ancient trees has taken her across the world. Some of her subjects grow in isolation, on remote mountainsides, private estates, or nature preserves; others maintain a proud, though often precarious, existence in the midst of civilization.