How are you today?

A Year of Working Remotely

The way to look at remote work is that it’s a series of tradeoffs. You enjoy benefits in exchange for disadvantages. The uptake of remote work over the next decade will depend most on the minimization of those disadvantages rather than the maximization of the benefits.

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble

Reflecting on what I’ve learned from building a community for designers, learning how to run a business, and navigating some tough life years proved both fun and difficult. I thought I’d share those thoughts in hypertext should they be useful. And so here we are.

Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer

Using duct tape to craft the letters gives his work a distinctive style. He begins by running long strips of tape vertically and horizontally across the surface of the sign. He then slices away the excess to form each character. Some extra tape and a few curved cuts make the bends. It’s a straightforward process, but even the simplest signs take him hours to produce.

Incredible!

I’d love a thingamajig that only did email, like a BlackBerry 850 for 2019.

Fast Software, the Best Software

I love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.

Superhuman is Spying on You

When faced with making a product decision that is even mildly uncomfortable, employees often first look towards expressed company principles like “Always put the customer first”, but the next thing they look for is precedent.

There’s not much you can’t do with Bash.

jetpack-markdown

I use the jetpack-markdown WordPress plugin to write my weblog posts in Markdown. Although jetpack-markdown is no longer maintained, it was still available to download using wp-cli. Whilst doing some maintenance on reyhan.org, I discovered this is no longer the case1:

wp plugin install jetpack-markdown --activate
Warning: jetpack-markdown: Plugin not found.
Error: No plugins installed.

With little inclination to research a replacement, I went looking for the source code and was thankful that it’s still online. In addition, the latest version still seems to be available to download2:

wp plugin install https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack-markdown.3.9.6.zip
Downloading installation package from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack-markdown.3.9.6.zip...                                                   
Unpacking the package...
Installing the plugin...
Plugin installed successfully.
Activating 'jetpack-markdown'...
Plugin 'jetpack-markdown' activated.
  1. From the plugin description: This plugin was closed on April 28, 2019 and is no longer available for download. ↩
  2. Though who knows how long for? I downloaded the zip and added it to my build process for future use. ↩

The New Wilderness

Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Just like you can’t drop out of the oil economy by refusing to drive a car, you can’t opt out of the surveillance economy by forswearing technology (and for many people, that choice is not an option). While there may be worthy reasons to take your life off the grid, the infrastructure will go up around you whether you use it or not.

The Clever Cryptography Behind Apple’s ‘Find My’ Feature

In upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, the new Find My feature will broadcast Bluetooth signals from Apple devices even when they’re offline, allowing nearby Apple devices to relay their location to the cloud.

I thought this feature was one of the more interesting things Apple announced this week.

@1111Resolver

Tweet your DNS queries to me and I’ll resolve them with 1.1.1.1! A and AAAA only.

An unstructured digest of stuff that I've found on the information superhighway.