Links
🔗 Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Are Now Open Source
Wow, I did not expect that. Although I probably should have since it’s owned by Automattic now.
🔗 Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads?
The well of bad ideas may not be bottomless, but it certainly is deep.
🔗 Google suffers from a digital petro curse
Hearing the story about Stadia reminded me of this post by DHH. His thoughts on why Google can’t keep a new product around for more than a few years is insightful.
Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
What’s there more to say? 🤷
🔗 Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement lacks crosswalks, checkboxes, Google
I wonder: if Google, as many suspect, is using CAPTCHA for image recognition training, how certain are they of the positive results? If everyone were to start clicking anything other than crosswalks, would that screw up their training data?
Drop in replacement for the github.com/pkg/errors package. The original package is archived as there’s a plan to change how Go handles errors. But not all of us are ready to adopt this yet.
🔗 A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes
A great reference site I stumbled along when I was trying to find the perfect arrow to include in a webpage. Nice, clean, and quite comprehensive. No awful ads either, which is a breath of fresh air.
Dad and I have been watching YouTube cab-rides of the NYC subway system recently. Part of the fun is trying to understand the various track configurations and how the system operates. The size of the network never ceases to amaze.
Facinating website for the casual Melbourne train buff. A lot of great photos of rail infrastructure, plus what appears to be routine “photos from 10 years ago” posts, which brings me back. Link via my dad.
🔗 Publishing your work increases your luck (via Github’s The Readme Project)
I found this very inspiring. Given where it was published the subject matter is about software, but I believe that it could apply to pretty much any creative endeavour.
🔗 Stop checking the news before you do deep work
Yes! I always fall into this trap.
🔗 Google loses two execs: one for Messaging and Workspace, another for Payments
Two thoughts I came away with after reading this.
The first is an attempt to understand how Google can think that they can put out anything — the version of US Google Pay app for example — and expect people to flock to it. I no expert, but I’m not sure why the physics of user adoption should be any different if you’re a multi-billion dollar company. People will use your software if it’s good, and they won’t if it’s not. And if you force people to change their habits because you want to completely throw out your existing version for “reasons”, you’re giving users an opportunity to choose whether they want to even continue using your stuff.
It happened to me when they shutdown Inbox. I had the opportunity to change to something else, which I did: Fastmail. Since I was forced to change my habits, I may as well have changed them for the better.
The second — and this is probably obvious — is that the a good indication of the health of one of Google’s app is how often they rebrand it. Since it’s launch, Gmail has always been Gmail. I can’t even name what Google’s messaging app is called now.
🔗 Internet Explorer was once synonymous with the Internet, but today it’s gone for good
So long, Internet Explorer. We sadly knew you all too well.
Worth pointing out that support for an “IE compatibility mode” won’t be removed from Edge until 2029, so can we really say that IE is dead?
🔗 How I Experience the Web Today (via Daring Fireball)
I think most people have seen this. What got me to post it here, apart from bookmarking it, was wondering how anyone with a real website like this expects visitors to stick around, let alone visit it again in the future.
This resonated with me today. I’ve been thinking on how we can use what we’ve built a few months for something new, and just how much easier it would have been if we’ve built it as designed, rather than rushed it out to meet a deadline. A perennial problem.
🔗 A New Hope for Object Storage: R2 enters open beta
I’ve been looking forward to giving R2 a try for a while.
🔗 Facebook on 30 Percent Platform Fees: ‘Hold Our Beer’
Meta talking about platform fees for the metaverse feels to me like a school rock-band talking about how they’d divvy up revenue from ticket sales before they get their first gig.
🔗 Not an April Fool: Dyson announces apocalyptic filter-headphone combo
Yes, the product is weird, but what prompted this link-post is the remark about this being a “perfect addition to your Mega Man cosplay project.” I believe in the games, you could always see Mega Man’s mouth.
The subject here is photography but I think it can be applied to any other creative endeavour out there. Resonated for me as well.