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.

• Africa is a Country

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.

• As We May Think
• As We May Think (Wikipedia)

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.

• Still Going

Matt Mullenweg Interview

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

• How to buy a social network

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.

• My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop
• The Cave BBS Turns 20

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.

• Plaits Firmware Update

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.

• Obsolete Sounds

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.

• Charles Saatchi

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

• Online Archive

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.

• zk
• zk-nvim
• Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method

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.

• Folk tales of Tumblr
• The God of Arepo
• Maeve Travis’ Graphic Novel
• Reimana Yee’s Graphic Novel

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.

• tracery-mastodon-bot
• Tracery
• Cheap Bots, Done Quick!

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.

• Swardspeak (Wikipedia)
• Swardspeak: A Queer Perspective
• A secret gay language has gone mainstream in the Philippines

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.

• sqlite-utils
• Datasette

Apple Music Companions

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.

• Companion apps for Apple Music on macOS

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

• DJ Screw

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.

• Literature Clock
• E-Reader Clock
• litime, a CLI equivalent
• The literary clock is ticking…
• The Clock (2010)

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.

• hurl.dev

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’.

• Based on a True True Story?

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

• public_domains
• Public (sub-)domains

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.

• the peculiar case of japanese web design
• why Japan’s internet is weirdly designed (video)
• Why Japanese Web Design Is So… Different

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.

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
• Digital Gardening
• Brad Wood’s Digital Garden
• wikifolder
• Piles
• gwern.net

A directory of weblogs, organised into categories. Made by Phil Gyford.

• ooh.directory
• Announcement thread on Mastodon
• Phil’s weblog

Gemroff

…heavily inspired by both Gemtext and Roff. The markup language itself is line-based like Gemtext, but supports inline markup as well as some additional block markup.

With a CLI utility for converting to Gemtext, HTML & plain text.

• Source code
• Announcement (Gemini)

Ineffective Non-Altruism

Now, I think it tells you quite a lot about Effective Altruism that someone can say in all seriousness “I’ve decided to stop working on evidence-backed poverty relief programs and start working on stopping Skynet from The Terminator, because I think it is the most rational use of my time.”

• ‘Defective Altruism’, Nathan J. Robinson

See also:

• Why I am not an effective altruist
• Effective altruism’s most controversial idea

Pronatalism

Very wealthy white people who believe themselves to be genetically superior are having lots of children. The ‘Fourteen Words’ for tech industry sociopaths.

• Inside the movement to take control of human evolution
• Fourteen Words (Wikipedia)

The PhD thesis of Dr. Michael Atkins, aka Cheddar Gorgeous (currently starring in RuPaul’s Drag Race UK). The ‘visual ethnography’ aspect is interesting – the thesis includes a graphic novel, drawings, sketches.

• Cruising the Village: A visual ethnography of public sex between men in Manchester city centre.
• See also Tearoom Trade (Wikipedia)

Charm

…tools to make the command line glamorous

I like the look of Gum - a set of shell script helpers including choosers, file pickers, confirmation dialogs, &c. - and Soft Serve, a self-hostable git server with a TUI.

• Charm
• Gum
• Soft Serve

Mastodon

Some older links that give context to current discussions on Mastodon re: its development model, moderation, defederation, homophobia & racism.

• Mourning Mastodon (2017)
• A thread responding to the above by Creatrix Tiara (2017)
• A thread on content warnings & ‘anti-politics culture’ by bundog (2017)
• Fringe Mastodev (2018-2019)
• Mastodon is crumbling and many blame its creator (2019)

spartan:// is a client-to-server protocol designed for hobbyists. Spartan draws on ideas from gemini, gopher, and http to create something new, yet familiar. It strives to be simple, fun, and inspiring.

Similar to Gemini, sans TLS.

• Spartan
• Gemini

Spring ‘83

Another niche protocol, based around 2217 byte fragments of HTML/CSS and public key cryptography. Now defunct, I think?

• Spring ‘83 Draft Protocol
• Specifying Spring ‘83

Mason

mason.nvim is a Neovim plugin that allows you to easily manage external editor tooling such as LSP servers, DAP servers, linters, and formatters through a single interface.

I was wary of using yet another package manager, but managing external tools inside Neovim is much more convenient than keeping track of stuff installed with brew, npm, pip, &c..

• mason.nvim

See also:

• mason-tool-installer
• formatter.nvim
• nvim-lint
• nvim-lspconfig

Lagrange is a desktop GUI client for browsing Geminispace. It offers modern conveniences familiar from web browsers, such as smooth scrolling, inline image viewing, multiple tabs, visual themes, Unicode fonts, bookmarks, history, and page outlines.

A joy to use. Thanks to its subscription features, I’ve been treating Lagrange as a Gopher & Gemini companion to NetNewsWire (and thinking of it as the spiritual successor to TurboGopher!).

• Lagrange
• NetNewsWire
• TurboGopher announcement

Gopher and Gemini Walker

…a terminal utility to navigate a folder structure containing a Gopher hole or a Gemini capsule.

Once I’d decided to set up a gemlog, I tried oodles of Gemini-related software–tools that let you convert Markdown to Gemtext and vice versa, gemlog generators, &c.–but this (plus a vim syntax plugin) is the only thing that stuck. It lets you make sure you haven’t made any terrible mistakes before publishing your capsule, without the bother of setting up a server locally.

• Gopher-and-Gemini-Walker
• gemini.vim
• Awesome Gemini, a big list of Gemini stuff
• My Gemlog

Mecha

The latest sub-sub-sub-genre in electronic music for nightclubs. An offshoot of the mountaineering-inspires, tomtom-heavy Gorge from Japan. Wild percussion, heavily processed samples, shades of juke, ballroom and Jersey club. Fun!

• Mecha Tools by Twofold

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Andrew Hickey’s deep dive into the history of rock ‘n’ roll (and blues, jazz, doowop, soul, R&B, pop, &c.) is an astonishing piece of work–each podcast episode is accompanied by a full transcript, exhaustive biblopgraphy and a playlist of every song mentioned.

• 500 Songs
• The playlist archive

A beautiful annotated illustration of my insides, drawn by Mr. Colin Chan after my thoracic outlet decompression surgery.

Whereas vi’s keystroke language follows verb-object order, Kakoune inverts that by following object-verb order. In real terms, that means you make a selection (object) before deciding what to do (verb) with it. The object might be a character, word, sentence, paragraph, parenthetical, regular expression, you name it; the verb might be delete, yank (copy), change, indent, or even transformative operations like lint, format, uppercase, etc. In Kakoune, it is with this reversed grammar, this postfix notation, that you interactively sweep up a group or groups of characters before acting on them. That way if your object isn’t quite right, you can immediately correct it without having to undo and redo your verb.

See also: Kakoune, the Text Editor I Didn’t Know I Needed, for instructions on using Kakoune on MacOS, and Why Kakonue, by developer Maxime Coste.

tilde.club is not a social network it is one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages.

I’ve been poking around tilde.club today. It’s good fun, the users are friendly and helpful, and there’s a very active mailing list.

I couldn’t quite work out what it’s actually for when I first logged in – turns out it’s just a shared server, with a tilde domain for your personal home page, plus a big community of people (well, men, mostly) who miss the old web.

Oh, and it’s a gopher server too. Here is my gopher hole: gopher://tilde.club/1/~mot (also available on the web).

If you like the sound of it, public sign-ups re-open on September 20th.

A tiny bejeweled perfume gun! Seriously. Circa 1804-1808, it’s a miniature flintlock pistol automaton made of gold and enamel with split pearls, and lovely little cased panels on each side depicting a hare and a hound.

The automaton mechanism sprays out perfume from a central gold rose when the hammer and trigger are struck. There’s also a watch concealed in the barrel of the gun, because of course there is.

From Monica McLaughlin’s antique jewelry newsletter, Dearest.

Via MetaFilter

Take a look inside the HARMAN technology factory in Mobberley, England where we manufacture the ILFORD and Kentmere ranges of black and white film, photographic paper and chemicals.

From emulsion making, R&D and coating to finishing, quality control, warehousing and distribution, for the first time ever we are officially taking you behind the scenes at ILFORD Photo to show how your favourite black and white analogue products end up in the hands of photographers and darkroom printers all over the world.

These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).

On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don’t have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling.

AO3’s trick is that it involves humans by design–around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012–who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. AO3’s Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018.

(Found while searching BBC Sounds for A History of Music and Technology, as recommended by Infovore.)

Indieweb.xyz is a syndication service—meaning you can notify us when you’ve posted on your blog and we’ll link back to you. The whole thing is organized like Reddit into subs, which are topic-based (usually) collections of links.

Powered by Webmention, which lets you notify a web page when you link to it, and specify via microformats whether your link is a comment, like, reply, &c.