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CDs were better than this
[blog | October 16, 2020]
PermalinkMe: “Hey Siri, play Disney Radio”
Siri: “Now playing Radio Disney, presented by iHeartRadio”
🎵 weird tween pop starts playing 🎵
Me: “Hey Siri, play Disney songs…”
Siri: “Now playing Disney Radio”
🎵 mix of Disney soundtracks with extreme bias towards Mulan starts playing 🎵
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⎋ The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers @ css-tricks.com
[link | October 15, 2020]
In a stack I’m working with right now, the front end is in React, the API is in GraphQL and we use Apollo Client to work with data. We use a special “hook” in the React components to run the queries to fetch the data we need, and another special hook when we need to change that data. Guess who does that work? Is it some other kind of developer that specializes in this data layer work? No, it’s become the domain of the front-end developer.
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Reading List Oct 4th - 11th
[blog | October 11, 2020]
PermalinkI was trying to keep up with what I read in the last week on Friday mornings, but it turns out Friday mornings are crazy. Sunday mornings, not so much.
First up, some light reading about the Pandemic.
Will the Pandemic Socially Stunt My Kid?
The short answer is: The majority of neurotypical kids will be able to socialize just fine, even if we’re still wearing masks in a year.
This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic
Even in an overdispersed pandemic, it’s not pointless to do forward tracing to be able to warn and test people, if there are extra resources and testing capacity. But it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage.
Related: ‘What are we so afraid of?’
I read a lot of stories about Eddie Van Halen, who passed away this week. As a guitarist, I think the appeal of Van Halen was that he was one of a very, very small number of guitarists who could make a rhythm part as interesting as a lead. Hendrix was the other guitarist who could do that.
Eddie Van Halen’s Otherworldly Sounds
But by the late nineties, bands like Van Halen—who mostly eschewed profundity in favor of uncomplicated pleasure —were being supplanted by the more brooding and introspective rock music emerging from Seattle. Grunge was a pointed rebuttal to hedonism and excess. The eradication of joy was collateral damage.
After the economy collapsed in 2008, we were told to get off the path entirely, to think outside the box but still inside the system. Ambition was no longer limited by traditional power structures. Don’t let yourself be defined by the role you have in someone else’s company—create a new role at your own company. Social media allowed us to carve out our own identities online, and quickly we all became managers of our own “brand.” We had to monetize our brands. We started to hear the adjective “entrepreneurial” all the time to describe what our aims should be, even those of us who just wanted to create, who cared very little about managing the business side of creating.
Welcome to Your Bland New World
Of these values, the environment is the hardest circle to square, since even the greenest blands are hell-bent on growth. If the best thing an individual can do for the planet is have fewer children, then surely the genuinely eco-entrepreneur might wonder whether the world really needs a Wi-Fi controlled smart oven ( June ), or a Bluetooth-enabled coffee mug ( Ember ).
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⎋ Winamp Skin Museum @ skins.webamp.org
[link | October 8, 2020]
Maaaaaan I forgot how good (and unusable) some of those old Winamp skins were. The custom cursors and everything!
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Statamic on Digital Ocean App Platform
[blog | October 7, 2020]
PermalinkDigital Ocean released their App Platform the other day. It’s similar to Heroku, which has been around for forever, but I never really got along with how Heroku works and have always really liked Digital Ocean’s guides/documentation/shark loading animations, so thought I’d see what it’s about.
I decided to try this site but as a full-fledged Statamic site, not the statically generated version you’re looking at currently, hosted on Netlify. It was pretty easy, Digital Ocean has a sample repo for Laravel, but if you point it at a Statamic repo in Github you get all of the same settings. After that it was just adding some environmental variables, and letting it deploy.
Am I going to use it? Probably not. It was a neat test case, but the leap from this to what Netlify provides, where all of the content for the site is cached neatly on CDNs somewhere, is more than I feel like figuring out right now. A more likely step would be to deploy just the control panel to a Digital Ocean box, then let Statamic’s Git integration kick off a Netlify build and deploy.
Here’s the important parts of the App Spec file I ended up with, if anyone else ended up here trying to figure out how to get this working, with secrets obviously obscured:
name: bwc-statamic region: nyc services: - build_command: “php please stache:clear \nphp please static:clear” environment_slug: php envs: - key: STATAMIC_LICENSE_KEY scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME value: 1234 - key: APP_URL scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME value: your-app-address-here - key: APP_KEY scope: RUN_AND_BUILD_TIME value: 1234 http_port: 8080 routes: - path: / run_command: heroku-php-apache2 public/ -
Coolidge Reservation
[blog | October 6, 2020]
PermalinkThe kiddo and I set out for a hike yesterday. We planned on going to Ravenswood Park, but when we got there the parking lot was full. A sign outside said “if the lot is full, come back some other time”. On the way we had passed another parking lot in the woods with a sign that I didn’t get a chance to read as we drove by, but I figured, “it’s a trail, it’ll get us in the woods either way”.
So we drove down the road and pulled in. The parking lot sign read Coolidge Reservation. We found a trailhead and walked in, but picked the one that didn’t have a map, so I looked one up on my phone. Seemed like the trails were short and the other end was a big field by the ocean. Ended up being just the right amount of hiking for a 5 year old, about 2 miles with a little hill that looked out over the ocean, a huge field to run through, and nice rocky Atlantic Ocean cliffs.
Bungalow Hill, towering a whole 110 feet over the ocean below
this slightly angry face was brought about by me insisting she could not climb down the rocks to get closer to the water -
Book Notes
[blog | September 30, 2020]
PermalinkUpdating some book entries with interesting quotes from them. Probably my favorite this year:
Traveling across America, they were astonished at how deeply violence is embedded in our culture, how it has become the culture, what’s left of local color. We are a grisly nation.
My favorite book so far this year has been How to Do Nothing. I captured some things from there, but I recommend reading the whole thing, if you can.
My Year of Meats
How to Do Nothing
Smarter Faster Better
Big Magic
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
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