First up: welcome to all you new subscribers who arrived via a mention in the Bizarro Devs newsletter! You are all great.
Also, if you didn’t arrive via this mechanism, you’re also great! And you should subscribe to Bizarro Devs. I mean, if it mentions cool stuff like this, it must be good!
There’s this wizard I follow, his name is Craig.
Craig Mod’s a writer, designer, publisher, photographer, thinker and walker, often doing all of those things simultaneously. He was a product designer at Flipboard, he’s an advisor at Medium; he’s done startup-ey things.
But I’d rather talk about his most recent project: a six-week, 1000 km walk through Japan, which he documented through a few Instagram posts and that was about it.
Just kidding! He actually documented and shared this ridiculous journey through a bespoke SMS publishing system he created. To receive his messages, you subscribed with a phone number. Every day he sent you a photo from the journey along with a really lovely, lyrical description of his day’s travel. The messages used to come through about 8pm in Australia, and they felt personal, like he had somehow sense whatever daily stress I had accumulated and wanted to offer me a respite.
When he finished his trip, he printed one copy of a book compiling his photos with subscribers’ replies. Glorious.
He also discussed the trip in his two newsletters, then provided daily audio snapshots in a binaural (3D stereo sound) podcast. From what I understand, he had these special headphones with which to record. The resulting audio allowed you to hear pretty much exactly what his ears were hearing in that moment. Wild.
Japan’s cool and all, and I guess I like walking, but I do love the idea that there’s someone who’s insanely passionate about a specific thing, and who wants to tell me about it via two innovative publishing experiments.
I realise I’ve now told you about a thing which has ended. But the podcast still exists, he’s written great stuff about it, and you should just generally keep track of him. I have no idea what he’ll do next, but I know it’ll be interesting and worthwhile and new.
Star Guitar
(Check This Out)
Ben emailed to mention this project, Spotify Chords, that he wanted to share with y’all. So here’s the intro direct from the horse’s mouth.
I specifically remember an issue of Versioning where you linked to an article where a guy used TensorFlow to teach his computer how to race Mario Kart. I thought that was the coolest intersection of really smart tech and fun/pop culture, and it sent me down a rabbit hole of dabbling in Python and AI. Long story short, I spent a year or so incorporating AI into a guitar site I built as a hobby and integrating with Spotify to teach you how to play any song.
Nice one, Ben! If you have something similarly great you wanna share with the crew, please reply to this email or tweet at me (or yell loudly if you live in Melbourne) and let me know!
Snoozefest
(Try/Learn This)
You should use boring technology. So: Postgres (not really). A transcript/adaptation of a very good talk about keeping technology “baggage” low, so you can solve problems rather than maintaining weird new stuff you’ve decided to use.
Learn about programming and programming languages at the same time. In case you’re short on time.
And then learn how to improve your JavaScript performance.
Don Bradman’s 13th Sequel to Cricket
(Some Silly Things)
The moon landing was good, huh? Arguably the best landing of any kind. It’s the 50th anniversary of the landing, so I have some moon links for you here:
Follow the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 50 years ago, in real-time, with all 50 channels of Mission Control audio available.
And then pair that audio with the 13 Seconds to the Moon podcast, which will give you the background. For example, did you know JFK was actually quite interested in doing a massive desalination project, rather than the landing? Makes for a worse speech.
Oh, and here’s the source code to the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer. Not sure what you could even accomplish with that to be honest, it seems kinda ineffective.
Kiwi subscribers who have even a passing interest in cricket, I know this is a tough time given Sunday’s rough Cricket World Cup final outcome. But the theme of this newsletter is sharing positivity in trying times, so I think now is a good time to introduce you to cricket’s next big thing:
This is Jim Johnman, and he stars in two good episodes of Monster Factory, a YouTube series where two brothers use videogame character creation tools to create all sorts of wonderful individuals. (Yes, I’m aware I’m now two for two in terms of newsletters mentioning McElroy brothers projects.)
Speaking of games, a Reddit thread where gamers share their hidden gems on Steam.
Last thing in the gaming realm: Quantum TicTacToe. It’s like normal Tic-Tac-Toe, but everything is quantum. Or isn’t quantum. Or both is and isn’t quantum. Wait…
(A game you can both win and not win does sound a lot like the cricket final, now that I think about it.)
Finally, a list of citogenisis incidents. Times where someone lied on Wikipedia, then a credible source found the “fact” and repeated it without checking it. And then Wikipedia used this new “credible” reporting as a reference for the original falsehood. Buuuut is this list real? I don’t trust anything anymore. Now worried I will be cited as a reference down the line for this made-up list.
~CTA~
That’s it! This week I’m emailing you from a desk in my local library, because libraries are cool and working from one helps me not be distracted by Mario Maker 2.
Mildly interesting thing about this library: the internet password used to be changed manually every morning. You’d have to log in to a library computer to retrieve it, then connect to the WiFi, visit ‘abc.net’ (yep) to get a dialog box in which to enter this new password. When I was in my depths of job hunting despair, I thought to myself, “I could definitely be a sysadmin for this library.” But they seem to have fixed it, so maybe not.
In the meantime, what good things have you seen (or better yet, made) recently? Reply to this email or tweet at me so I can share it with your 163 new friends.