Damian’s notes

Web tool that tells you how well colour combinations work, with simulations of various forms of partial vision. (It has the usual limitation that is your site uses translucent backgrounds or ink you need to screen shot it and find the effective colours via your favourite graphics editor’s eye dropper.)

If I am reading this right, according to Geekbench the feeblest of Apple’s new MacBooks is approaching 2.7× faster on single-core and 5.9× on multi-core compared with my current 11ʺ (early 2014)—not to mention double the RAM. Caveat being that I don’t think I would achieve the milti-core speed-up on my typical workday dominated by editing and compiling. No information yet on Minecraft frame rates.

Python 3.9 adds IANA time zone support. Its tzinfo implementations behave slightly differently from the pytz package used in Django when it comes to calculations crossing daylight-savings-time boundaries, so there is going to be a gradual process of replacement and deprecation in future versions.

Kottke’s picks from the winners of the 2020 Astronomy Photographer of the Year, for those who like space shots.

The “Finkbeiner Test” was created to help reporters write about scientists without getting distracted by the fact that they are women.

I am often in favour oif a less-is-more approach to web development: HTML Is pretty flexible and accessible by default, and a lot of front-end work perversely make the content less flexible and harder to use. Why not cleave more closely to the natural properties of HTML as a medium?

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which Proteus is a terrible friend. An audio version of the complete play. Part of an irregularly updated podcast from the BBC.

Overview of the Open-Source landscape for Apple-Sillicon-based Macs from the Register.

Homebrew is the package manager used to install open-source software on Macs. The new MacBooks and Mac Minis based on Apple Sillicon will entail a lot of updates, summarized on this massive GitHub issue.