The previous commenter is probably correct in one sense. Whatever version of React I was working with in 2017 is surely unsupported now and lol-nobody-uses-that-anymore-grandpa. And maybe everyone works with NextJS or Vue or Svelte or NewerJS.
But, at the same time, I’ve been programming long enough to understand that experience with a particular framework isn’t specifically valuable. The ability to learn and understand how software works and then help build/improve it is valuable and transferable.
Also, perhaps my least favorite part of web development is the ”everything is an app now” shift that happened however many years ago.
I kind of just maybe want a job writing high quality, accessible, rigorous html and css? Is that a thing? Jobs for companies that leverage static site generators maybe?
Hi! Launched Reasonable Colors today. It’s an open-source color system for building accessible, nice-looking color palettes.
The reason this might be interesting is that it’s built programmatically within the LCH color space. All of the color shades are pinned within certain relative luminance ranges, which means all of their contrast ratios end up being rather uniform.
You can do simple “shade number math” to find high-contrast combinations.
Examples:
- Pick a color, move 2 shades apart, contrast ratio guaranteed to be at least 3:1
- Pick a color, move 3 shades apart, contrast ratio guaranteed to be at least 4.5:1
- Pick a color, move 4 shades apart, contrast ratio guaranteed to be at least 7:1
We’ll be firmly upper middle class, but I am aware that the housing market is pretty brutal at the moment.
If we moved, it wouldn’t be for financial benefit, looking for a quality of life improvement. Our bet would be that the social safety net (healthcare, public school quality, etc) would help blunt the higher cost of living.
I wrote a bit recently about why I still collect music on CDs. Here are my 3 reasons, which echo a lot of the comments:
1. To Support the Artist, 2. To Own the Music, 3. To Collect Artifacts (which is fun)
I also found a few recent attempts at creating new physical music formats, but most of them require Internet connectivity and are essentially cloud services that have physical access tokens :( I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.
I like that you mention “collecting artifacts.“ I have a pretty extensive video game OST vinyl collection. The first thing I do when one comes in the mail is open it up, deep clean the record, drop it on the record player, and spin it. But while it’s playing, I actually have the audio routed through a recorder capturing it as 96kHz/24bit wav.
I have so far archived every video game vinyl I have and I’ve slowly doing the rest of my vinyl collection. It’s been a really fun project, and like you said with “artifacts,“ I feel like I’ve got my own little museum of sorts going on. Plus it’s fun to cut them into sides (not tracks), compress into 48kHz wav, FLAC, and mp3, add the album art, and get them on my phone and home server. So I basically can take my vinyl anywhere I go!
Is it the most practical exercise? Of course not. But it’s really fun in its own way. I just like archive diving a lot given my history background, so making my own archive scratches a similar itch I guess.
I’ve been thinking of doing something myself. Any tips on the recording end of things? Is routing to a laptop good enough? Do computers even have stereo line in anymore …
I use a zoom h6n - which records to an SD card - so I can separate the stereo left and right into their own mono recordings then recombine on the back end (this allows me to use the XLR ports instead of 1/8” stereo port for better fidelity). This isn’t strictly necessary, just make sure you’re getting the stereo audio and not combining it into a mono track (unless of course it’s not stereo vinyl).
A computer is totally fine. You should be able to do it through the headphone port if you have one (I’d be surprised if you didn’t). It just all depends on what output options your turntable has. My technics 1200 mk II are RCA out so I go turntable -> left RCA right RCA adapted to their own XLR -> zoom h6.
> I ended up just lamenting that we never got the Sony MiniDisc revolution that we all deserved.
I recently got "into" MiniDisc myself. I completely skipped that format back in the day, but noticed some artists i liked were releasing albums on MD (through Bandcamp). I had also watched some YT videos on the format, and thought "why not". So I bought a portable player and a deck for at home.
It's a really cool format. I can buy releases from artists i like, or use NetMD to "burn" them myself. I have a small collection of MD's now, and i do enjoy playing that more than just pressing play on some Spotify playlist.
Also read your blogpost. MD does tick most of the "ideal format" boxes, except for "easy to reproduce". If you use an existing MD as a source to create a new MD, the lossy compression will not allow a 1:1 copy.
There's a small but fairly active community around minidisc.wiki, and some developers reverse engineering the netMD protocol and the firmware on the players. They already have some modern NetMD clients right now, making it a breeze to use the format.
These are composites, not the actual photos, if I recall correctly. The perspective is shifted and I guess the horizon is just inferred from the corners?
I really liked this explanation of how the photos were transmit. I believe Don Mitchell was able to find the original data files for some of the transmissions and rebuild the photos in higher quality:
The underlying idea of a license that prevents people from doing things with the software that are deemed to be unethical is fundamentally flawed. Any such license would only apply to situations where the licensee does something with the software that is considered unethical by the licensor, but is not actually illegal per se. In that case, the worst thing that the licensor would be able to do according to the terms of the license is make you go through an arbitration process and try to revoke your license. They can't put you in jail or stop you from using some replacement to do the same thing.
This license is a fool's attempt to police people. There is a lot of hubris in believing that it is possible to prevent human rights violations using a software license. In reality, the responsibility to administer justice is the responsibility of the legal system and the actual police. The only thing this license does is give its authors a false sense of importance.
A very small bit of writing, a reading log, some photos, and link to other work.