2024-01-01 Links

I use a RSS reader to build a river of content that I can dip my toes into, swim in, or picnic at for an entire day. What I get mostly is to improve my own imagination, and give me ideas to work on because I have few original ideas. I read more than I share, and that’s probably definitely a good thing.

Daily Reads:

Julia Evans on helping build a brag document I will be using it myself, and sharing with the folks I’ve been working with.

Nathan Baugh: Start at the end. Works for writing, and works for projects. His suggestion to copy work from your favourite author by hand, tear it apart to see why it works is a great warm up that I will recommence in 2024. The Best of 23 Workbuilders is also a compendium to several posts that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and learnt from.

Anne-Laure le Cunff of Ness Labs has earned her way into my must-reads. Her 2023 Annual Review might shed a light on why

John Durrant of Ordinary Mastery on Rules and Rulelessness

Simon Willison is another must-read, and his wrap up of the stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 will bring you mostly up-to-speed even if you didn’t know anything about it.

Rishad Tobaccowala has a blog and a podcast, and both are worthy of time. In Mind-Shi(f)t, he offers a few ideas on how to change your mind (not a bad thing, in case you’re wondering!)

Ben Werdmuller on Looking Forward to 2024 while acknowledging that it will be like the one gone by, difficult.

Richard Merrick reflecting on 2023 shares his discoveries of 3 brutal simplicities: leadership, efficiency, and belonging. Hard-hitting, as usual.

Om Malik does something more interesting than merely metrics – discover the inter-relationships between the topics he explored. I like this approach very much.

I learnt today that the symbol for section § can be typed on the Mac keyboard using Option+6. I don’t know what to do with this information yet 😆

Cal Newport on Metrics & Resolve Goal setting and time management are all prospective, in that they look boldly toward your desired future. Metrics, by contrast, are retrospective, merely leaving a record of what has already occurred. Tracking daily metrics is like a training regime for your will.

Kent Hendricks learned a lot of things in 2023.

I cherish the writings of photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward: the writing revolves around his now departed wife Rosemary. He’s been writing on his blog since 2009 or earlier, and has a wonderful away with words, as much as his mastery over the camera.

Allen Pike came bundled with the NetNewsWire app that I’ve been trying out, reading feeds on today. His November post titled "You Should Have A Research Question" grabbed me by the collar and smacked me against a wall of wasted decades. Brent Simmons, who started NetNewsWire writes why this particular software doesn’t take money from its users

Sara Campbell has the final word in Tiny Revolutions No. 106, which also makes it the quote of the day.

QOTD:

Our actions are our only belongings.
– HT: Sara Campbell, from a Buddhist treatise

Music:

This is one of my favourite tunes from the Morales Brothers that are Inka Gold, panpipes and guitar make a great vibe: El Condor Pasa

2023-12-31 Links

Happy New Year, whatever Happy or New means to you!

Daily Reads:

Doc Searls on how categorisation gets humans wrong, with a personal example.

Downloaded a new newsreader app called NetNewsWire. I’ve been using Feedbro all year, probably longer, and I’m not entirely sure why I want to switch, other than to check it out because someone who’s blog I follow regularly mentioned it, and I’d never heard of it before. It’s a Mac specific app, so that’s probably one reason. Anyway, will be a try-out and see approach for a bit.

The choice I made was before reading this post that Tracy Durnell shared on her blog: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley. consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new.

Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack is available to read on this beautiful website.

QOTD:

the mind, when its interests are divided, takes in nothing very deeply.
– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Music:

Isto (Chris White) performs Imagine – the perfect song for New Year’s Eve.

2023-12-30 Building Slides From Obsidian Notes

I’ve spent much of the day learning how to create slides in Obsidian, using an amazing plug-in called Advanced Slides that I linked to [[2023-12-26 Links#^b75353 | a few days ago]]. I’ve been reading documentation, and trying things out.

I took a YouTube video from Duarte about presentation mindsets and turned them into a basic set of slides. I then took a blog post from Leo Babauta about mindset changes, and turned that into a more interesting/advanced set of slides, including speaker notes, background images that are hyperlinks from Unsplash (what happens when I don’t have an internet connection? 🤔).

Creating Layouts using <grid> or <split> features is the bee’s knees. There’s a lot more to go before I can be comfortable in creating templates and the like but for now, I’m pretty pleased with how far I’ve come, and excited about how much farther I can go. Who knew markdown could get this interesting?!

NvdH had a short video that showed all this. The fun is being able to do it myself 😅

PS: I’ve not figured out how to embed or share the presentations. Learning in public is important to me, even if I’m the only one reading and looking through this stuff. Something to figure out.

QOTD:

The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? – Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer

Music:

Leonard Cohen in Warsaw Poland in 1985. His opening remarks about the politics caught my attention.

2023-12-29 Links

Daily Reads:

Jim Nielsen: Blogging is like composting

Irving Wladawsky-Berger draws parallels between the internet and the World Wide Web and the current state of play with AI in The Duelling Visions for the Soul of AI

Taking classical music recommendations from an economist. Tyler Cowen’s 2023 Classical Music discoveries

Warpnews: Advances in CRISPR technology Base editing, prime editing, epigenome editing are beyond my awareness, let alone knowledge. I’m interested in understanding a bit more about this world in 2024 and beyond. Mathias Sundin, the Angry Optimist, has a selection of fact-based optimistic articles from 2023 in this hopescrolling article

A collection of 2023 reviews, in the hope that my own imagination can take some flight 😅
Tom MacWright has a wonderful quote in his, from a NYTimes opinion piece: “I get what I want, but I know what to want.”
Ryan Holiday did "less" in 2023. His focus for 2024 is "systems". I used this as a prompt for my own exploration in my morning pages.
Ewan McIntosh on how to be messy and brilliant – with book stacks! Not strictly a 2023 review, but one for the holidays. Brad Carter, his business partner, shares a trick to remember the year gone by using a paper and pen.

Ithaca by CP Cavafy, read by Sean Connery. This moved me to tears, and I can’t describe why. …Hope that your journey is a long one…

So much good stuff in the world! Donald Hall on his wife Jane Kenyon: The Third Thing has the quote of the day.

StrangestLoop: Things that aren’t doing the thing

Michael Lopp shares his Seven Steps To Fixing Stalled To-Do Tasks

Seth Godin: Rewriting for humans is an example of taking something dense, and making it accessible.

By the way, I’m so grateful for the (new?) right click option in Firefox that says "Copy Link without site tracking" – I hate the referral links and clear them out each time I share the link.

QOTD:

What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment.
– Donald Hall

Music:

Christy Moore: Ordinary Man

2023-12-28 Links

Daily Reads:

What would Socrates Do? Prof. Tamar Gendler of Yale, on the Hidden Brain podcast, points out that the same questions that affect contemporary life were tackled a couple of millennia ago

Four Timeless Investing Principles That Never Change Darius Foroux with another reminder that one of the principles of investing is doing nothing.

I’m with Doc Sears on this one: Feeling is Human However good AI gets, the machine is not feeling, merely emulating.

Joanna Stern interviews iPhone thief Aaron Johnson. Stunning.

Om Malik on Second Chances.

Sam Altman: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

QOTD:

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
– Mortimer J. Adler

Music:

Angelo Debarre, Thomas Dutronc, Manoir de Mes Reves

Learning HTML

After multiple unsuccessful attempts at grokking HTML, I finally took Dave Gray’s Learn HTML tutorial for beginners It’s about 4 hours long, and gives a very good overview and a project to complete to understand the basics of HTML.

I’ve spent about 10 hours in total on this whole thing: making notes, doing the project at the end, and then looking through the areas that caused me trouble a few times. Well worth the effort, methinks – not least because I at least understand why I could not get those ioslide templates to work for me 😺

Hyper Text Markup Language

The Standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. Assisted by Cascading Style Sheets and scripting languages like JavaScript

Installation of tools

  • VS Code as code editor
  • Plugins: Live Server, Prettier, vscode-icons, github (dark) theme
  • Some Chrome extensions (I didn’t use this)
  • My own GIthub & Git configuration
  • HTML validation service from W3C.

Text Basics

  • index.html is always the first page to build.
  • ⚠ Every <element> that shows up needs a corresponding </element> close-tag element
  • Anatomy of a <html> document
    • <head>
      • <title> Title shows up on the browser tab
      • <meta>
        • name="author"
        • name="description" a longer description
      • <link rel="icon" href="html5.png" > relate to an icon, with a hypertext reference to a file or resource.
      • <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/stylesheet.css" > relate to an icon, with a hypertext reference to a file or resource.
    • <body>
      • <header>
      • <main>
      • <footer>
  • Keyboard shortcuts will save so much time in navigating around text in the code editor
  • Elements
    • Block Level elements
      • Each html page should have only one <h1> element
      • There can be more than one <h2> on a page, and each <h2> can have more than one <h3> element. Headers have semantic importance
      • <hr> is a horizontal rule with some semantic meaning attached to it
      • <br> is a line break
      • <p> paragraph
      • <nav> navigation area
        • attribute <aria-label=""> I don’t know what this does tbh
      • <section>
      • <article>
      • <img>
      • <figure> a better way of doing images
        • <img> as above
        • <figcaption> includes a caption under the image
        • gives a bit of padding / indentation to this section
      • <aside> renders as a toggle button, and requires some more details. A semantic element
        • <details> A headline question, for example
        • <summary> A bit more detail (this messes with my head)
      • <time datetime="08:00">8 am</time>
      • <time datetime="PT3H">3 hours</time>
      • <mark> highlights the text
    • inline elements
      • <em> italics
      • <strong> bold
      • <a href="">hyperlink to somewhere</a> anchor tag, hyperlinking to other html documents
      • <abbr title="Tooltip> allows some expansion of an abbreviation using the tooltip, but isn’t an accessible to all assisted technologies.
      • <address> allows semantic meaning to the text
    • HTML entities
      • &nbsp; whitespace
      • &copy; copyright symbol
      • &lt; less than
      • &gt; greater than

<!-- Comment --> won’t show up on the page but can show up in the “Inspect” view on a browser.

Lists

<li> creates a list item inside one of the following tags:

  • <ul> Unordered lists, shows up as bullet lists
  • <ol> Ordered lists, show up as numbered
  • <dl> Description lists, like a table but not as pretty. NOTE: Doesn’t need a <li> item
    • <dt> Description term
    • <dd> Description detail

Adding Links

  • not the same as the <link> tag seen in the <head> part of the <html> document.
  • <a href=""></a> is an anchor tag.
  • Links can be of three types:
    • Absolute reference: <a href="https://google.com">Open a Google Search</a> links to Google with the words “Open a Google Search” showing up with an underline.
    • Relative reference: <a href="main.css"></a> links to the file named main.css in the same folder as the document.
    • Internal reference: directly to the <section> in the document, identified with a id="specific_name attribute. Then refer to the document as <a href="#specific_name>
  • This tag can link to any other html document, whether in the same folder, or on the Internet. You can also link to a specific place in the same html document, and uses some special characters to identify the location.
  • <a href="#">Back to top</a> takes you to the top of the existing page
  • <a href="/">Home</a> takes you to the index.html document
  • Special attributes in anchor tags:
    • <a href="favicon.png" download>HTML favicon</a> to download the file
    • <a href="mailto:random@randommail.com">my email ID</a> to start an email
    • <a href="tel:+19845022345">Call Us</a> works best on a mobile
    • the attribute target="_blank" opens the link in a new tab

Some linking rules:

  1. Avoid the whole link itself
  2. Avoid “Links to” phrase
  3. Keep link text short
  4. No links that say “click here” 😨


lorem*3 can give you three paragraphs of lorem ipsum placeholder

Adding Images

  • Save images in a separate folder, usually titled img
  • Block level element to include image:
<img src="img/file_name.jpg" 
	alt="a descriptive file, allows accesible tools"
	title="shows up on hover"
	width="400, width of the image"
	height="200, height of the image"
	loading="lazy, improves page load performance">

Providing width & height to deal with [cumulative layout shift](https://web.dev/articles/cls)

`figure` allows non-image content too:
```html
<figure>
<p>
<code>&lt;h1&gt;Hello World!&lt;/h1;&gt;</code>
</p>
</figure>

will render as

	<h1>Hello World</h1>

Resources for images

Semantic Tags

  • These elements give additional meaning rather than just a separator
  • Very useful for assistive technology
  • Allows quick scan of the content on the page
  • <hr> as a separator of topics
  • See Anatomy of a html – Header, Main, Footer within the <main> section of the page as a ‘collection’
  • <section> can be called <article> with a specific unique id attribute to identify it. The difference between these two is not entirely clear: a thumb rule might be to consider an article as a self-containing blob of text, while <section> is merely carving off a small part of the document.
  • <aside>, <time> are examples of semantic tags. See

[!Caution]+
Avoid <div> and <span>; instead use semantic elements

Handy Tool: Chrome extension called HTML5 Outliner to see how the document shows up for assistive technologies. Remember that not everyone uses a mouse to browse the internet.

Tables

This caused me some trouble. I don’t understand this whole syntax just yet.

    • Structured tabular data, don’t ever use this for the whole html document!
    • They need a little css to make them reasonably legible 😺
    • Use semantics extensively here to make sense!
    • Elements to work with:
      • Table
        • <table>: defines the table
        • <caption>: creates a centred caption for the table
        • <tr>: create a row to hold the data
          • Use attribute colspan="n"to define how the text flows between columns
          • Use attribute rowspan="n" to define how the text flows between rows
      • Data headings
        • <thead>: creates a header section for the table.`
        • <tr>: create a row to insert the data, whether heading or content
        • <th>: creates the headers, with a scope="row" or scope="col"
          • In the <thead> element, scope will be col
          • In the <tbody> element, scope will be row
          • if row headers are needed, then first <th> is the html entity &nbsp;to create an empty column
      • Body
        • <tbody>: creates the body of the table
        • <tr>: create a row to insert the data
        • <th scope="row">: with value of the first column data
        • <td>: create the data in the column. Include the semantic element (for example <time>inside this element)
      • Footer
        • <tfoot>
    • Avoid using id attribute with tables. Very quickly becomes a PITA.

Forms and inputs

This was the most annoying, and least interesting. I might go back to this someday… or more likely, never!

2023-12-27 Links

Daily Reads:

Andy Chaleff in conversation with Dart Lindsley on the Work for Humans podcast

Some takeaways:

  • No one tells you when they stop trusting you
  • trust and respect on a 2x 2 grid. Dismissive when high trust and low respect. Skeptical when low trust and high respect
  • you are allowed to have beliefs but when they are blind beliefs and you use them to judge other people’s behaviour is when it becomes a problem
  • culture as shared expectations

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Plain Text

Tris Oaten of No Boilerplate makes the case for documenting everything as default, and shares some of his own decision records that work well for small teams.

Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas

Pretty sure I’ve picked this up before, but it was a good reminder from Rob Walker nonetheless

The Changing Room Illusion

I’ve watched this a few times now, and am still fascinated at how little I can actually catch.

QOTD:

If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.
\ -Susanne Langer, philosopher

Music:

Leonard Cohen: Dance Me To The End of Love

2023-12-26 Links

Daily Reads:

I got a book recommendation: Gabrielle Lakomski, Managing without Leadership. I’ve not read this book, nor found a reasonably priced copy yet, so will go on the backburner for a bit.

What to do with all those notes? Nicole van der Hoeven has ideas that she freely shares. Absolute goldmine of content from this generous lady!

Learning HTML & CSS is starting to payoff already – the Advanced Slides plugin for Obsidian creates some stunning slides with just markdown text wrapped in CSS magic spells. A huge thank you to MSzturc

QOTD:

I don’t want to be a great leader; I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown, offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes. The mechanic with the oilcan: that is my ideal in life.

– Baba Amte, social worker and activist

Music:

The Milk Carton Kids – Live From the Lincoln Theatre – never gets old

2023-12-24 Links

Merry Christmas to the two readers of this blog! It will be light reading, I’m still crook, so not a lot of reading today either.

Daily Reads:

I’ve restarted my attempt to learn HTML and CSS specifically because I’m using Obsidian for everything except presentations – and only because I don’t quite grok how the styles apply through all the plugins. 🤞

Slowly going through this 3+ hour conversation between Daniel Schmactenberger, Ian McGilchrist & John Vervaeke on the psychological drivers of the Metacrisis. 🤯

Music:

Carols from King’s: The Choir of King’s College, Cambride

2023-12-23 Links

Illness has taken hold of the adults in the household. Only skeletal routines expected, which doesn’t include posting here…

Daily Reads:

Margaret Atwood does some sermonizing and shares the sermons for us to cackle over and idolize.

Tracy Durnell explains how she’s Choosing between ideas for blog posts and her current WordPress plugins and customisations

QOTD:

How do we get people to understand that it is imperative to invest in potential? Both people and ideas deserve to be developed to allow them to reach their full capacity.
– Terence Eden on a book review of von Neuman by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Music:

Flyte: River