#676

What's making me happy 2017-12-06

After my last post, I said I wouldn't do a #happy post on a Wednesday. And yet. Here I am. Weekends have been busy of late, and haven't been able to get a post out. Sorry about that! So here's a midweek treat.

Lately, I've been playing Stardew Valley. It's been good for 30 minutes of play here and there. I miss Destiny, but just haven't had the time to commit.

@samantha_gold designed and manufactured some cool earrings and was featured on Motherboard!

A Japanese Home Designed Around a Climbable Earthquake-Proof Bookshelf is awesome. Also from Japan: Akira Murals!

The 200-year evolution of the can opener is fascinating. I love seeing how design changes over time.

James Greig's Self-care for the creative soul was a great listen.

Contrast Guide was an interesting education in color as I'm working redesigning this site, slowly but surely.

Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting was a fascinating read on the creative process, and got me to go and watch a ton of videos on film design. My favorite was Satoshi Kon - Editing Space & Time.

Deborah Kass on Design Matters with Debbie Millman was a great listen on the history of pop-art.

In the Pretty Pictures category: Star Wars Posters Mix Series Iconography With Pop Art Sheen.

I love D&D, and @wilw's answer to "What’s the best entry point for Dungeons and Dragons?" was great. Highly recommend for people interested in playing.

In video game news, one of the greatest video game series of all time is getting a re-release: Mega Man X 1-8 coming to PC, PS4, Switch and Xbox One. Also Capcom announced Mega Man 11. Time for some jump and shoot platforming!

@EWDurbin put up some amazing slides on Twitter about working with legacy code bases which were fascinating and well designed. Also given in the wonderful town of Petaluma, California, which makes me happy.

I love a good look at the inside of someone's bag, so I enjoyed What’s in your bag, Chaim Gartenberg? Reminded me that I've been meaning to put one up here for a bit.

I really enjoyed Tyler Cowen on the longform podcast. It lead me to his Best non-fiction books of 2017, which is a fantastic list. I wanna read all of these!

Also on Lonform, Carol Loomis was great.

Listen Notes is a cool podcast search engine. It's not perfect, but I am enjoying it for finding podcasts about people I like.

I'm super excited that Wikimedia Foundation funded six Outreachy interns. I love seeing companies support groups like Outreachy. Such a neat mission.

The 5 essential Slack channels you didn’t know your team needed has some good tips on building work culture.

As A Solo Developer, I Decided To Offer Phone Support is a neat read on customer support.

I really enjoy @rwitoff, and his talks lately on Coinbase have been great!

I talk about keeping time with computers fairly regularly on this blog, so I was excited about the launch announcement of Amazon Time Sync Service. Google Time has been around for a while, so I'm excited to see diversity in cloud NTP servers.

Triplebyte's Software Engineer Salary Data made the rounds. Slightly concerned about the numbers here, but still interesting to be reminded how batshit the bay area is.

google/oss-fuzz is continuous fuzzing of open source software, which is just awesome.

I'm starting to play with a2o/snoopy, a tool to log every executed command to syslog.

With all of the nonsense about the FCC being full of fake comments and wanting to kill Net Neutrality, sunlightlabs/fcc-net-neutrality-comments is an old but great tool for scraping, parsing and making sense of the flood of comments submitted to the FCC.

netboot.xyz is cool. Could be fun to setup in a lab.

Also in Linux news, Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME.

I love how much Google is open sourcing lately, and google/metallb is just another cool thing.

I really liked David Karp's resignation letter from Tumblr.

I love Tiny Desk, and I enjoyed Ted Leo's performance. But what I have been really loving is All Songs Considered is going through their ten-year history one year at a time. Their 2008 Remembered talks about the creation of Tiny Desk.

Hope you all have a great day and a solid rest of your week!

/Nat