onfocus

Field Notes really knocked this National Parks edition out of the, um, recreation enclosure. If you don't already have stacks of these nicely designed notebooks this edition would be a good place to start.

Fascinated by this report that the recent earthquakes in California disrupted the atmosphere 13 hours before the quake. It’s the first I’ve heard of ionospheric anomalies before earthquakes.

I really enjoyed this history lesson / manifesto / questioning. (lesfesquesto?) As the author says, "I find that both building and designing is a constant cycle of having a question and trying to find the answer." This offers some interesting questions including: what potentially important ideas have we forgotten and how can we use computers to iterate faster?

I was nodding along so much with this talk I hurt my neck. It's often hard to think about the forest of maintenance when you're in the trees of development, but it's critical because: "Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details."

"It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves..."

I think this is an important concept that I'm trying to understand. I wish there was a term for this idea: If the problem was really bad someone would have stopped it already. My hunch is this line of thinking is pervasive.

Casey Newton is back with another look at the human cost of social media.

I asked Harrison, a licensed clinical psychologist, whether Facebook would ever seek to place a limit on the amount of disturbing content a moderator is given in a day. How much is safe?

“I think that’s an open question,” he said.

Important reporting here that I hope will help people that these powerful corporations are forgetting.

Nice throwback idea—syndicate a few posts from weblogs you like on your own weblog. This is a bit of code to accomplish that but it shouldn’t be too hard to put something similar together in any environment.

This is another great post about changing digital habits, google edition. This is feeling more possible to me every day. I need to switch to Fathom Analytics here. Google Analytics is overkill for a personal website. And it wasn't mentioned in this post, but I still haven't found a good alternative to Google Maps on my phone. Apple Maps has been improving but it's still not as accurate in my experience.

Brent Simmons on his blog tech setup. I like his micro.blog idea but I have mixed feelings on syndicating out to services like Twitter and Facebook. a.) They are terrible for society and individuals. b.) I think you need to be ‘present’ and interacting for the social part of social media. Maybe you can do both, but: society.

Similarly: Always own your platform.

This is the first I’ve heard of Hawking’s no-boundary event theory. In this view time and matter exist due to the shape of the eternal universe, not because of an origin event like the big bang. Neat!

This is a fun font based on physical router templates that the national forest service uses to carve wooden signs. The great discussion at MetaFilter has some more context and also pointed to the similarly inspired Routed Gothic.

Have you ever opened Excel or Google Sheets just to add or average a few numbers? Me too! Postlight put together a wee application that can run in your phone browser for these situations. No logins or software updates required.