onfocus

I save links in Safari's Reading List on my iPhone so I can reference them later. Sharing them here on my blog is their final resting place. Once posted here, I remove the links from my reading list and the cycle of cruft can begin again. It's a similar process to—and as exciting as—defragmenting your hard drive. How many hours did I spend watching the defrag visualization colors rearrange themselves in Windows Disk Defragmenter? That's rhetorical, but many. Many hours. Of watching. Now you too can watch the metaphorical defrag colors along with me:

First, go listen to the latest episode of Matt Haughey's podcast Hobby Horse where he interviews people about their side projects. In Episode 4 he talks with Erica Baker about ancestry and geneology and it absolutely changed the way I look at family trees. We’re all connected in ways I hadn’t thought about before. So great—go listen!

While I'm talking podcasts, Gimlet has a new one out called The Habitat that I'm hooked on after one episode. It's about a NASA study to determine how six humans live together for a year in a confined space. They're trying to simulate the conditions that people would live in on a mission to Mars. You can binge the whole thing.

Last week I posted about the SmugMug/Flickr exchange and I've been enjoying the takes: Tom Coates, Ben Cerveny, Jim Ray, and for context this 2012 article (cold take?) by Mat Honan: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.

Did you know you can look up at least some of the interests Twitter has assigned to you for personalized advertising? I was surprised at how accurate some of the more obscure interests were but I shouldn't be. We need more privacy and dumber phones.

Google set up a new way to query information in books called Talk to Books. As an introvert I feel like Google really gets me with this project, you know? I'll just be over here talking to books.

@lhl found a tumblr dedicated to gathering depictions of floppy disks in anime. It's even better than it sounds.

ok, off to delete my reading list. Defrag complete!

I have officially jumped on the Accelerated Mobile Pages bandwagon. Every post page here at onfocus now has an AMP version. (You can append /amp to any post URL to see it in action. This post, AMPed. I'll wait here.)

Pretty similar, eh? I thought it would be good to get a sense of how AMP pages are different from standard HTML. There are some proprietary tags and some required JavaScript dependencies. I guess if you're loading a dozen JS libraries and a million lines of CSS, going through the AMP conversion process could help get you thinking about minimalism. Not much to change here. I could probably combine a couple JavaScript files into one.

In 2003 I added WAP cards to this site. Those are long gone. Maybe AMP is the new future.

Update from the future: Hello from 2019. At some point I removed AMP from my site because I think it's a walled garden that doesn't necessarily improve performance—especially for a small site like this. AMP gives Google more control in a world where they have enough.