Football, Bush, Hypercard & Mullenweg

The (African) Arab Cup

Morocco’s World Cup heroics are forging a new, dissident Third-World solidarity, reflecting the multifaceted nature of Moroccan identity itself: simultaneously Arab, African, and Amazigh… In importing Moroccan stadium culture to Doha, this World Cup also brought hyper-local debates about Moroccan language and national identity to the world stage.

As We May Think

Consider a future device… in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay on the future of information storage, organisation & retrieval.

Still Going

I recently wrote a short e-zine about my personal experience and feelings with using old hardware and software today. I figured that it would be perfect to write that in HyperCard which is a piece of software that was discontinued back in 1998.

Matt Mullenweg Interview

On buying and running Tumblr, content moderation, Apple’s App Store approval process, Musk, Twitter, &c.

BBS, Plaits, Sounds & Saatchi

Benj Edwards’ BBS Memoir

Thirty years ago last week—on November 25, 1992—my BBS came online for the first time. I was only 11 years old, working from my dad’s Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling 24-hour system with over 1,000 users. After a seven-year pause between 1998 and 2005, I’ve been running it again ever since. Here’s the story of how it started and the challenges I faced along the way.

New Plaits Firmware

An unexpected update to the discontinued Mutable Instruments eurorack module, adding a new bank of synthesis models and DX7 SysEx patch loading.

Obsolete Sounds

Obsolete Sounds is the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening.

Saatchi Compendium

He changed British creativity, global advertising and the world of Art. But unlike most big names in our business, Charles Saatchi has a tiny digital footprint, in terms of his advertising career. Only half a dozen photos, only two interviews and just a handful of credits on Saatchi & Saatchi’s creative work.

All of which are collected here, including scans of every ad credited to Saatchi.

Letterforms, Zettelkasten & Tumblr Tales

Letterform Online Archive

для голоса, designed by El Lissitzky (1918)

An archive of type specimens, design periodicals, adverts, calligraphy, &c.

zk

zk is a command-line tool helping you to maintain a plain text Zettelkasten or personal wiki.

The Zettelkasten method is a bit too hardcore for me, but this is a great tool for keeping a bunch of notes that link to each other.

Tumblr Stories

A long list of new folktales written on Tumblr. The best known example, ‘The God of Arepo’, is based on a writing prompt–Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up.–and written by three people. It’s been adapted as a graphic novel, twice.

Botmaking, Swardspeak, Databases & Music Companions

Mastobot

Create a generative Mastodon bot using Tracery. This is a version of Cheap Bots, Done Quick! that runs as a single bot.

A Glitch project, so you can easily ‘remix’ it.

Swardspeak

Swardspeak (also known as gay speak or “gay lingo”) is an argot or cant slang derived from Taglish (Tagalog-English code-switching) and used by a number of LGBT people in the Philippines.

The Swardspeak meanings of famous names are wonderful. E.g. Julie Andrews means to be caught cheating because the Tagalog for to be caught is hulì, which rhymes with Julie.

sqlite-utils

This library and command-line utility helps create SQLite databases from an existing collection of data. It is designed as a useful complement to Datasette.

Lets you insert JSON/CSV/TSV data into a SQLite database, run queries against a database & return JSON/CSV/TSV, create databases, generally monkey about with stuff in your databases, &c.

Apple Music Companions

A silver-grey oblong music player interface with play and seek buttons, a volume slider and details of the currently playing song

Control Music.app with modern recreations of the iTunes 10 MiniPlayer, the Mac OS X Tiger iTunes Dashboard widget, or the mostly-forgotten Music Player from the first Mac OS X Public Beta.

Amusingly, I can’t try them out because my Macbook Pro is too old.

Screw, Clock, Hurl & Truth

DJ Screw Discography

The Internet Archive has 380 DJ Screw tapes, digitised and organised.

Literature Clock

A clock that tells the time with literary quotations. Lovely.

The quotes were originally gathered by readers of The Guardian Books Blog, inspired by Christian Marclay’s 2010 video installation ‘The Clock’, a 24 hour montage of film & TV clips showing the current time.

Hurl

Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format. It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for fetching data, testing HTTP sessions and testing XML / JSON APIs.

Based on a True True Story?

Explore your favourite “based on a true story” films scene-by-scene, beat-by-beat and test their veracity on a data level.

Scrub through a film’s timeline to view scene descriptions and fact-checks, complete with sources. I like the option to set the pedantry level from ‘C’mon, it’s movies!’ to ‘Only the absolute truth’.

Public Domains, Japanese Web Design & Digital Gardens

public_domains

public_domains searches through a text (such as a novel like Moby Dick) and looks for possible host names to use.

Includes an option to check if the domain is available.

Some lovely examples, culled from The Waste Land:

  1. fiddled.whisper.music
  2. copper.burned.green
  3. little.patience.here

the peculiar case of japanese web design

Sabrina Cruz on the ways Japanese web design differs from the rest of the world, and the reasons behind it.

Maggie Appleton on Digital Gardening

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.