random-things-sunday
- A live-updating version of the ‘What a week, huh?’ meme: source code and documentation at github.com/dnlzro/tintin or just see it live here: tintin.dlazaro.ca
- Patrick Trainer (ab)used the DuckDB RDBMS by creating a Doom-like game engine where SQL queries do all the rendering logic. Kudos and hats off to this amazing (and utterly impractical) hack: www.hey.earth/posts/duckdb-doom
- WebAIM accessibility checker. Check that the contrast between foreground and background colors is big enough. You don’t even need to be old or have bad eyesight to benefit from good contrast, as sometimes the external circumstances like a glare on your screen make the text hard to read if the contrast is not there. There’s really no excuse for bad contrast.
- Name all the colors at Color Names.org. This is a fun effort to name all the 16,777,216 colors in the RGB color space. Almost a quarter of the colors have been named as of writing this. No need to register, just pick a color and think of a name for it! For example, the dark mode background color of this blog is called Oriental Popcornflower. 🍿💐
- macOS has a built-in utility app called Digital Color Meter with which you can pick the color code of anything on your screen.
- Finally, an infuriating optical illusion: these two faces are the same color! The illusion is based on a phenomenon called color constancy, where the surrounding context tricks our brain.
- Something to listen. My brilliant colleague Annika Madejska, who is something of a thought-leader in the ethics of AI, was recently interviewed in the Creative Leaders Unplugged podcast. Listen to the episode where she shares not only her thoughts about ethics and AI, but about having ADHD, or being “neuro-spicy”, as she puts it! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube.
- Something to read. I don’t use Facebook a lot, but one of the best groups there is the Dull Men’s Club®️. People make long posts with images about mundane stuff they’re excited about – think parking lots, drain covers, and envelopes – and the general vibe just is so supportive compared to your usual toxicity of the internet. As an inside joke, the images are often expected to contain a banana for scale. 🍌
- Something to watch. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is an American half an hour long news satire late-night talk show with British sarcasm. Oliver delivers commentary and deep dives into all kinds of topical matters, often about the government, big companies, or public figures. It’s my main source of information into what’s wrong with the USA. You might want to start with, say, the episode about data brokers , which explains that if you’re using a free product, then you are in fact the product.
- Mark Rober, known for glitter bombs and squirrel obstacle courses, snuck a LIDAR system into a Disneyland rollercoaster to map it out, and then tested Tesla’s camera based driving aids against another car equipped with a LIDAR.
- Shawn from the Stuff Made Here channel had a rare failed project, trying to make a helicopter powered by a flywheel.
Random Things Sunday #4
Just a couple of things this time. Not going to force it if I don’t have something worth sharing. 🤷
Random Things Sunday #3: Color
This time there’s a common theme with the links: color. 🎨 I’ve recently been subtly tweaking the colors of my blog, so I’ve (re)discovered these resources:
Random Things Sunday #2
Three random things!
List(s) of Random Things
About a week ago I was exploring other random blogs when I came across the 7 Things This Week [#172] post by Jarrod Blundy. What caught my eye was the number on the title: Jarrod has been persistently listing seven things each week for more than three years already! In this day and age of single-click fire-and-forget retweets I find it admirable that someone can resist that urge to share the links immediately and do instead a little bit of curating, even adding a sentence or two of their own justifying why a particular link is interesting.
It surprised me too that literally just a random collection of links had this effect on me, so I dug deeper using Gemini’s new Deep Research feature. (And this time I mean that Google AI, not the Gemini protocol.) I must say Gemini is impressive: it formed a research plan according to my ramblings, then went away and crunched the internet for maybe ten minutes or so, and eventually returned with a convincing full report of the history of “lists of things” in print and online media.
I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but I learned, for example, that the Time magazine started a Potpourri column of random things already in 1923. For the online world, an early example of something similar is Dave Winer’s DaveNet newsletter that started in 1994. I looked it up and found the DaveNet archive – and oh boy isn’t it a treasure trove if you’re interested in the early world wide web! Dave covered, for example, the browser wars that I also recently referred to, and the rise of the new and exciting programming language called Java. Dave wrote his newsletter for ten years and posted between one and a dozed emails each month, so check it out!
As for myself, I won’t dare to commit to posting a regular list of things, but I’ll keep the concept in mind and start now with a very short list. Specifically, it’s a shout out to a couple of my favorite YouTubers and their most recent work.