Brendan Howell @praxeology@post.lurk.org

Pretty proud of Other Worlds's new issue. Here, French designer Anaëlle Beignon tackles the notion of obsolescence, showing how it is not an "essential" feature of a device, but a relational quality involving societal and technical expectations. https://buttondown.email/otherworlds/archive/ow-2-design-for-obsolete-devices-by-anaelle/

Every time I watch a Greg Wilson talk on software engineering, I learn something. I also wish I'd been taught engineering at university.

Latest from Wilson:

* video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrVtA-ue-x0
* slides: https://third-bit.com/talks/greatest-hits/

Highly recommended, especially for free and open source developers.

I predict that in 50 years or so, the way we use plastics today—from clothing to cosmetics to packaging—will be viewed the same way we now think of DDT or freon

500.000 Menschen nutzen die #Gorillas-App. Für die Drittanbieter #Braze und #Segment bedeutet das 500.000 Namen, Mail-Adressen und Standortverläufe gepaart mit Millionen von Suchbegriffen. Nur mal so zur Veranschaulichung. https://mobilsicher.de/apptest/frisch-getestet-gorillas-android

Come on in, folks, the water's fine

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GDK92DNLSGWTV6MP

I had set myself to do daily Shoebot sketches more than a month ago, and silently lost the pace a few days into it. I'm still bummed that I didn't make it, but there was a decent reason.

I've been rather active around covid contact tracing apps, doing media outreach and general activism as part of the PT digital rights group (@d3). After months of hard work (and confirmation of failure scenarios), we got a grant from a European NGO to write a report about the portuguese corona tracing app experiment.

So I switched my evenings from Shoebot dabbling to investigative mode, sourcing hundreds of news to establish a timeline, gathering data and making charts. The report was delivered but we're energised enough to adapt it into a format aimed at a Portuguese audience -- lawmakers, media and concerned citizens.

As a way to kind of redeem myself from setting Shoebot aside, I'm using it to make the visualizations for the report. And now I have loads of plans to build a plugin for Shoebot to provide easy ways to visualise datasets -- the Python coding style is bliss for me, compared to other specialised frameworks like Bokeh or D3 (which I love and use for more demanding contexts).

This is a work-in-progress chart, made for analysis and not (yet) aesthetics, but I'm pretty excited with how it's turning out.

https://calebkruse.com/10-projects/seeing-blue/

And here I was thinking that I could see blue just fine. :/

For Today's Diversion, I ported
@neauoire's UXN stack machine VM, written in portable C89, to a 286 :D. And well, it works!

Tonight I ported @neauoire@merveilles.town 's Uxn VM to the MegaGRRL hardware (my ESP32-powered VGM player). Seemed like it would be fun, and it was :)

Here is a little demo...

Had to lower the screen resolution (not enough RAM for full screen framebuffers!), but it has sound, output through the YM2612's DAC register. D-pad emulates a mouse. Also had to do a bodge to the drum-rack example to get it working on the lower resolution.

Philippe Aigrain, cofondateur de La Quadrature du Net, est décédé ce lundi.
Notre tristesse est infinie, mais nous ferons vivre son héritage de grande exigence, de douce bienveillance, et d'esprit aiguisé.
Tu nous manquera toujours.

https://www.laquadrature.net/2021/07/15/in-memoriam-philippe-aigrain-1949-2021/

cat of year

If you're into generative vector graphics I might have something cool for you: I finally found a workflow for script-based generation of vector primitives and text, including - and here it gets interesting - the ability to perform arbitrary scripted boolean operations between all objects (!), and the subsequent possibility to export all results as svg.

This might not look or sound like much, but to my surprise it was incredibly hard to find a library/approach for this. http://paperjs.org/ is what saved the day, they took on the complex and somewhat unthankful job of implementing fast and accurate boolean operations within an API and framework that is accessible and productive to work with. I've also used https://github.com/opentypejs/opentype.js here to get the text as a vector path, but it seems this might be do-able in Paper.js too, possibly.

While researching this I looked into scripting inkscape with python, directly using inkscape's libgeom library, using OpenSCAD, etc. ... so as you see I was already quite desperate. :D I'd be delighted to learn if you know of any alternative approaches to get the above-mentioned workflow done. This is powerful stuff and the more ways to do it, the better. :)

#decoy