Technology

Smart watches have the potential to “switch the media paradigm from an endless stream to a concentrated dispatch.” niemanlab.org/2019/01/leave-…

George Bush, Who Steered Nation in Tumultuous Times, Is Dead at 94

I like this Bush obit as a crash course on the political forces that shaped the world during my formative years.

24 Ways

Always delighted to see this advent calendar of web design articles light up my RSS feed every December.

The Fun Is Back in Social Media…Again!

TikTok probably feels a lot like Flickr or Twitter in the early days, where everyone… See more →

“What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t ‘truth,’ but trust.” nymag.com/intelligencer/…

“You may forget Facebook; it could happen sooner than you expect. But it’s not likely to forget you.” nytimes.com/2018/12/12/mag…

Seeing 2018’s YouTube Rewind backlash, thinking about the conflicting motivations of creative communities, attention economies, gatekeepers.

I like this idea. Lately I’ve been moving my Sass math into calc/variable configurations like the ones @chriscoyier describes here. twitter.com/css/status/107…

Whatever I did to make Google think I ought to have repeated exposure to this ad, I’m sorry.

can’t wait til we’re using our phones as walking sticks twitter.com/forgottentowel…

Opened Photoshop. Discovered that proportional scaling with the Shift key is broken. Closed Photoshop.

Hello, dear reader!

November is gone, but its links remain.

I published a couple of nerdy blog posts in November: one about how I’m using my Letterboxd data to address my cinematic blindspots, and one about a common convention of editorial design that’s currently incompatible with CSS Grid.

Lots of interesting stuff in the links this month; for what it’s worth, my favorites are Earworm’s series of videos about jazz.

As usual, you can get many… See more →

im on ur squarespace site, hittin esc

“Punishing individual bad actors doesn’t change the incentives that brought them to the platform in the first place.” youtu.be/wZSRxfHMr5s

I’ve been making websites for 20 years. I read a bunch about how to set up webmentions and gave up before I started. 🤷🏻‍♂️ twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Good food for thought in this post from @paulrobertlloyd about barriers to entry that impede the web’s potential. paulrobertlloyd.com/2018/11/warp_a…

I’ve worked with most of these folks and they’re really effing smart. twitter.com/themarkup/stat…

2. A Visual History of Computing 1945–1979, by @Docubyte (via @kottke) docubyte.com/works/guide-to…

If you’ve worked on design software and made decisions about how to represent text objects in exported SVG, I have so many questions for you

Reminder: the earliest influential web design teachers were women, specifically greats @jenville and @lyndaweinman. thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-books-that…

Another round of Adobe updates, same bunch of stupid bugs that haven’t been fixed.

My new favorite Tumblr is full of colorful animations of vintage electronics. electronicitems.tumblr.com

Hello, dear reader!

September is gone, but its links remain.

It was a big month for me, as I finally finished the project I was preoccupied with for most of the summer: Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited, inspired by Sol LeWitt. I also wrote about why and how I did it.

This month’s newsletter is a few days late because I wanted to include Robtober 2018, my annual deep dive into horror films which always takes… See more →

I want a smaller phone, not bigger. I want to do less with it, not more.

👀 lifewire.com/basic-cell-pho…

If you’re at an internet conference and your hotel room number is 404, do you make a sound?

PSA: URLs aren’t broken. Shitty implementations of them are, junked up with database gobbledygook, UTM codes, etc. Design URLS for users. twitter.com/wired/status/1…

“Google is just a doorman, not the destination. Yet [they believe] that they should dictate how the web evolves.” polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-…

ISPs are inventing fun new terminology to use in place of “selective throttling.” See? Killing net neutrality has spurred innovation! twitter.com/business/statu…

Hello, dear reader!

August is gone, but its links remain.

My site was quiet in August, as I’ve been heads-down on a project I’m pretty excited about. Its release is just one facet of the ambitious September I have planned, so if all goes well, there will be much to report in next month’s newsletter.

My alter-ego Windhammer recently returned to the competitive air guitar stage for his 10th anniversary, tying for second in the… See more →

Dude on my flight has one of those giant iPads and he looks like he’s in a Honey I Shrunk the Kids reboot.

why is outlook still

People of Earth, I love you. But your vertical videos are killing me.

I feed the kids with React and have React take them to school, where their teacher is React. Didn’t know I had kids? I made them with React.

New home screen arrangement for maximum practicality and minimum frivolity.

Hello, dear reader!

June is gone, but its links remain.

It was a relatively busy month on my site! I had an unexpected reason to revisit an animated student film I made 20 years ago, wrote about designing better concert listings, chronicled my experience learning about the future of typography at the Ampersand conference, and offered middling reviews of the year’s most celebrated horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary.

This month’s links are the sort… See more →

“By embracing the cumbersome, painfully slow nature of my workflow, I was in a way trying to commune with my computer graphics forefathers.” twitter.com/kottke/status/…

Did the internet weaken critical thinking, or merely enable more efficient exploitation of an existing weakness? newyorker.com/science/elemen…

Hello, dear reader!

May is gone, but its links remain.

The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.

The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →

“The internet is a utility world for me now. It is efficient and all-encompassing. It is not very much fun.” nymag.com/selectall/2018…

Even absent the obvious dangers of inviting giant corporations to spy on you, the smart speaker’s appeal eludes me. nytimes.com/2018/05/10/tec…

“[M]ore weapons tend to create more violence, and cyberweapons may be even harder to regulate than guns.” newyorker.com/magazine/2018/…

I only use Instagram for short videos of live music, but it’s stopped recording my audio, taking my already low opinion of IG to new depths.

Hello, dear reader!

April is gone, but its links remain.

I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.

The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →

AT&T appears to be much better at collecting money than spending it, so congrats to their shareholders I guess?

“Assume that anyone you’re teaching has no knowledge but infinite intelligence.” adactio.com/journal/13747

Superb @davatron5000 post of collected wisdom. (In the spirit of Cunningham’s Law, I say Sturgeon’s Law is missing.) daverupert.com/2018/04/eponym…

It turns out that when you broadcast your love of personal sites, people send you their personal sites. 🤗 twitter.com/robweychert/st…

I love visiting people’s personal sites and seeing how they present themselves to the world when the format is entirely up to them.

Virtually every time I see a URL to someone’s personal site—in a social media profile, email, resumé, etc—I get a twinge of excitement.

My favorite thing about iOS updates is using Look Up and discovering that my system’s dictionary has vanished yet again. Always a hoot!

The advent of 280 made this doubly true (literally). twitter.com/robweychert/st…