Bookmarks (RSS feed)

A look inside the git folder we all normally ignore.

"Figure out ways to let notes “bump into” each other." I particularly like this tip about organising Obsidian notes in such a way that knowledge emerges rather than gets defined.

Value Study is a free iOS app that I've made, aimed at people learning to draw or paint, for visualising where shadows and highlights appear within photo references or directly from your camera.

It's very common in product teams to be focussing on getting through the ever-increasing backlog. This article looks at why doing less is doing more.

A pattern I often use in my code is to use a map that produces a slightly different result, with nulls, and use filter(Boolean) to remove those nulls. It turns out TypeScript does not allow it. This blog post has a solution to that, it feels unnecessary but seems to work well.

This CMS uses your existing website repo as storage, so there are no databases involved.

One of the hardest things about learning to draw for me has been deciding what to draw! These drawing prompts look pretty helpful.

This is a great video by Henrik Kniberg about product ownership, it explains the whole agile process in a very easy to understand way.

In this blog post, Jack Franklin explains how to improve unit tests by keeping it all simple and clear.

"Day.js 2KB immutable date library alternative to Moment.js with the same modern API" This seems like a good step forward, Moment is brilliant it is quite large, this could be a good replacement.

These are some of the git commands that Alejandro Narvaja has found most useful.

The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources. This shows just how one single product can affect pretty much everything.

Quite often I need a quick way to trim an SVG so it has no whitespace, I use this JS Fiddle I found as it makes it really simple to do. I'm not sure who wrote it but it basically modifies the viewbox to be the SVG's bounding box then returns the updated SVG. Nice and simple.

This is a colour contrast checker with so much more information than the others, brilliant!

This is a website full of public domain ebooks that have been carefully edited and ensured to be high quality.

I began working on NHS 111 online around the stage of going into private beta. It was my first time on a government project and so I had not experienced or understood the stages required to get the Government Digital Services approval. This document explains all of the steps taken to meet the GDS requirements, it feels like a case-study in the work we've done over the past couple of years.

One of the hardest part of developing a digital product that is already in production is how to safely release often. This is an interesting article about how they do it on the passport service.

This is a wonderful site full it watercolour paintings across the world.

This is an open access article written by Magnus Madsen, Ondřej Lhoták and Frank Tip, published by the ACM in 2017. I'm bookmarking it here to read later but it appears to provide a framework to better understand Promises in JavaScript. According to the abstract: "Based on λ_p, we introduce the promise graph, a program representation that can assist programmers with debugging of promise-based code."

This is a nice little blog post explaining how to use a tiny amount of php to host static sites on heroku. Bookmarked because I use Dokku so the same technique will work on that.

This website has a lot of free videos about digital painting that seem very good.

In this blog post Manuel Matuzovic explains how to build a website that proves accessibility checkers cannot be trusted to find all issues. I wrote a post myself about relying on accessibility checkers shortly after reading this post.

This is a brilliant WebGL fluid simulation, shows how beautiful the output of code can be!

This is a brilliant web app for turning black and white images to colour, works very well!

This blog post by our product owner on 111 online, Steve Bellerby, explains how we try to make the website inclusive.

This is a very good video by Craig Perko about improving architecture of games in Unity using events and mixins.

This is a lovely blog full of brilliant fantasy-style maps and lots of expertise.

This is a really nice little trick for having hover state on parent and child to give a nice effect.

After trying to drag and drop an image into a GitHub Wiki with no success, I found this article explaining how. Essentially after you've made the first page you can clone the wiki (it is a git repository with markdown files in it). From there you can add images to a folder and commit them like any other git repository.

This article by the New York Times (about the awful fire at Notre-Dame) is a masterclass in web design. it uses a 3D model with impressive scrolling (a rare good example) and bitesize text to really help the reader quickly understand everything.

Mat Johnson is a designer I work alongside on 111 online, in this article he explains the trials and tribulations of trying to guide a user to the questions that are most appropriate to them. We are far from the holy grail, but I think acknowledging that is quite refreshing!

In this article Harry Roberts explains all the important headers for caching that most of us have likely seen and completely ignored!

A list of 20 very useful tips for sketchnoting... an art that impresses me everytime!

Runway is a fascinating tool that combines AI models with an intuitive interface.

This is a really nice little article full of helpful well designed tools ideal for web designers.

This is a fascinating page about an island that has its own cloud.

I thought these two quotes from Gary Barlow seemed quite relevant to how I feel about the process of learning. "Give me the rules of music, because once I knew the rules of music as a writer then I knew how to break them". "For me having those years of being in a bedroom and being able to make mistakes and not being judged, it was crucial for me"

New Adventures 2019 was an incredible conference and some of the slides are already up on Notist.

Usually I would use dd to write images to SD cards but I always worry I will mess it up. Today I used BalenaEtcher and it was dead simple and worked really well.

This article is really good. A few weeks ago I was wondering about comparing Vue and React on a "how would the other do it" kind of level and this does exactly that.

"A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux" Quite simply a beautiful website.

I saw this blog post from Cloudflare via a tweet from Ilya Grigorik. It explains how to see timings (dns lookup etc) for every curl request.

I tested it myself and it works really well. You add the following to ~/.curlrc (you will probably need to make the file too).

-w "dnslookup: %{time_namelookup} | connect: %{time_connect} | appconnect: %{time_appconnect} | pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer} | starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer} | total: %{time_total} | size: %{size_download}\n"

This is an article about programming time by Zach Holman.

This blog post by Sam Oakley explains how to share data between an iOS app and its related share extension using Core Data.

This is a very interesting article into training reinforcement learning algorithms on environments that they create themselves.

I've recently been listening to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, it's a podcast that uses a chapter each week from Harry Potter to explore a theme (such as loyalty, grief, friendship) in quite a lot of depth from various viewpoints. They use religious and spiritual approaches, but in such a way that even as an atheist I enjoy all of the Jewish and Christian bible reading techniques that they use.

This is a tweet Martijn Cuppens that I think sums up the challenge and beauty of working on the web. Every browser is different, and you can never be quite sure what to expect. But if you design fluidly, this can bring out the best in a website not the worst.

This podcast is a fascinating exploration of health, lifestyle and food from a very scientific and medical approach. Each episode has very qualified people talking about their area of expertise.

A really insightful case study from a product designer working at Uber.

This is a nice article by Drew McLellan about implementing Webmentions into the Perch CMS. This is brilliant news, as it will lower the barrier of entry for people interested in indieweb. He mentions about moderation and how to deal with duplications, that's something I am intending to improve on my own site at some point too.

I've always had an interest in hexagonal grids, for both data visualisation and game development. This is a brilliant introduction to the various techniques.

This article by Daniel Beauchamp shows some great explorations into VR, as well as how you can often end up with good results completely by accident.

This helped me solve an issue I was having uploading a CSV in Angular 1.

This is a TED talk by Hans and Ola Rosling, discussing how our intuition needs to be flipped in order to more correctly understand the state of the world.

Recently I tried to create a Monopoly board using Grid in CSS, I didn't manage it. I kept getting three quarters of the way and then getting stuck. I tweeted about it and Jen Simmons' very quickly responded with an example!

An interesting article about research by the University of Washington on the use of virtual reality as being equal to a moderate dosage of opiates for controlling pain.

This is a brilliant article about how Uber went about creating a design system for their various maps and data visualisations.

This is a great intro to Docker, with a nice explanation of how it differs to Vagrant.

This is a great little website for dissecting shell commands.

This is the codebase for my 24 Ways article First Steps in VR.

This is a very handy short guide to changing iTerm2 profiles when SSHing into different servers.

This is an incredibly detailed and interesting exploration into the world of creative artificial intelligence, by Samim Winiger and Roelof Pieters.

Simon Russell has created some wonderful experiments merging sounds and geometry.

Amy Morin's TEDx talk is incredible powerful, she tackles the idea of bad thinking habits using her personal experience.

This slidedeck by Tony Parisi looks at how to start developing for the immersive web. I recently wrote about the opposite, the idea of building a subtle web.

This appears to be a very interesting article about how they went about redesigning Google Chrome. It is in my read later pile at the moment but looks like a very detailed article.

This is the video of a talk I gave at From The Front.

This is a fascinating post about human perception, so far I've only skimmed it so adding it to read in depth later.

This is an outstanding 3D model of brain activity measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while listening to two hours of stories.

This is a great article by Kris Jenkins. Where most article about functional programming are hard to follow, this one focuses on pure functions and just encourages everyone to stop hiding inputs and outputs. Worth reading.

I always forget which flags to use on wget to get the best archives, this seems to work well. Thanks to DArcy Norman for posting it.

wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links -e robots=off -P . https://url-to-site

This TED talk is phenomenal about a boy who lost the ability to communicate and it wasn't until he was an adult that people realised he was conscious at all.

In my recent attempt to learn the craft of cocktails, I have discovered The Drink Blog. It is a nicely designed website with lots of cocktails. This one in particular interests me, as I already have all of the ingredients!

These are my slides for a talk I gave at From The Front in Italy, September 2015, about maps on the web.

I really like this article by Jeremy Keith. As always, he has a special way with words that makes quite a controversial viewpoint seem trivially common sense.

This looks to be a good book about typography on the web.

This website is full of over 5000 documentaries!

A brilliant article about the differences between innerText and textContent.

This portal has a huge amount of old maps on, I could spend a long time looking through them all!

I asked Twitter how I could best improve my cooking skills and John Oxton-King wrote a full length blog post reply. Definitely advice I plan to follow.

This is a brilliant article about how important the Internet Archive is and how Google dropped the ball on preserving human knowledge.

I always have ports already open on random virtual machines, so this helps to solve that.

for VM in `VBoxManage list runningvms | awk '{ print $2; }'`; do VBoxManage controlvm $VM poweroff; done

An interesting canonical question on server fault about fighting email spam.

This is a very good article aimed at developers and UX designers for learning UI and visual design.

I had never heard of Margaret Hamilton before, but she appears to be quite an incredible person.

This Masters thesis by Heidi-Maria Lehtonen provides a very interesting analysis of the synthesis of a piano.

Teleport on Yosemite requires copying the app to the desktop and adding to accessibility.

John Oxton King recommended me to make a Gremolata for dishes that need some contrast in flavours, I had never heard of it before but sounds good. Essentially chopped lemon rind, parsley and garlic.

I find vim to be quite an essential tool, especially while working on servers. This handy little guide quickly shows the vim philosophy of combining verbs, nouns and modifiers.

A paper on using genetic algorithms and region growing for MRI segmentation by Elnomery A Zanaty and Ahmed S Ghiduk.

A paper about medical image segmentation by H S Prasantha, Dr Shashidhara H L, Dr K N B Murthy and Madhavi Lata G.

A paper titled "Study of Techniques used for Medical Image Segmentation and Computation of Statistical Test for Region Classification of Brain MRI" by Anamika Ahirwar.

A brilliant tumblr of maps.

We needed a way to search large spatial databases quickly, this provides a way to easily index the longitude and latitude of the data.

I was looking for a way to convert between filetypes, I forgot about GDAL.