Cool Links

There’s hardly a working day in which Safari doesn’t make my life harder. I’m not the only one who feels like that. Alex Russell goes in great detail on how shitty the situation of Apple’s browser is especially because they block any sort of competition in their main platform.

Apple is consistently out-engineered and out-invested by a non-profit with 1/40th the web-derived revenue.

These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it.

Don’t let the title turn you off in case these words mean nothing to you — Sophie’s website is a joy to open every time, with multiple fun themes to choose from. And she added a new dynamic element to one of them, making the background reflect the sky of the current time of day.

She noted it was hard to get to this result, but reading it, it feels pretty simple to understand. Which is the mark of a good developer and writer.

Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.

Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.

I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.

Really good article about literal and metaphorical midwinters and (tech) work.

A 3D museum in which you can walk on all about the history of WordPress, with displays for each release, some of the history behind them, all that. Really cool!

Half Life 2 running fully through your browser? Sure! Why not?

Definitely not the best way to do it, but walking around in one of the best games ever on my browser is a pretty cool concept. Especially since there’s no way to run it natively on a Mac nowadays.

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

Yes! Me too! Lots of drafts got abandoned because I eventually caught myself thinking that while writing it. Past couple years I’ve been trying to detach myself from that way of thinking but it’s a slow process.

Sometimes a blog post will only have a target audience of one (the writer) and that is perfectly fine.

Incredible visual demonstration of how the absurd size of modern SUVs turns them into even deadlier machines. Not only the hood height makes them deadlier in a possible collision, but the vastly increased blind spots make collisions more likely to happen.

This is so cool! TownSquare adds a small virtual square at the footer of a website, on which visitors can walk around, jump, high-five and talk to each other. And this can connect multiple websites together!

Strongly considering adding this somewhere on my website.

This is so good! Overworld is a gaming news aggregator that is actually usable. It groups together all news for a single topic under a single headline, and also curates gaming-related stuff (that’s not necessarily news) in a “worth your time” section. And it looks great too!

Yesss! I’ve waited for this for so long! One of the worst parts of my job is trying to implement those kind of separators (really common in designs) without this functionality being an actual thing yet. So many hacks, complex calculations, for something so visually trivial.

And even if it takes a while to get to other browsers, it’s mostly a visual drawback if not supported; so I can already start thinking about using it.

A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.

I found out later that this is just one out of many other “toy” collections. I recommend checking those out as well!

This website allows you to find the latitude of your city (or whatever city you want) and shows all the cities in the same latitude all around the world (or in the mirrored latitute i.e. opposite hemisphere).

My home city is opposite to Cairo, which is neat. The one I’m currently living in is parallel to Vancouver, which is also neat.

Will it ever be? Probably not. What will happen then? Nothing good for us probably.

A nicely put-together timeline with a lot (all?) of the photos from the Artemis II mission that orbited around the Moon. The sequence of the spacecraft approaching the Moon is breathtaking!

I’ve been using clamp() for fluid text sizing for a while, and this article highlights the pros of using the round() CSS function to make the fluidity more predictable! I love the card height examples too, as that’s something that’s consistently a pain in almost every project I work on.

This is like a landing page + search engine for the old internet! It allows you to search for stuff on the Internet Archive without having to necessarily know the URL of every website you wanna visit.

I found some forum threads from 1998 of people discussing the imminent launch of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Fascinating stuff.

Never thought I’d be linking to Einstein here, but this is a great essay about what constitutes humankind and society, how they differ, and how they mold each other (though this relationship is far from balanced).

The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

Still a great read even if “socialism” is a trigger word for you, by the way.

If you drive, you’ve probably hopped around between Waze, Google Maps and even Apple Maps at some point. Each has their own pros and cons, and while Waze used to have the edge on real-time information, that edge was stolen by Google Maps (not literally stolen; they’re literally developed by the same team).

But besides that, this case study goes into the differences between the 3 apps and how each displays similar things differently in order to highlight their own strengths.

Not that you asked, but my favorites are Apple Maps for actual navigation and Google Maps for everything else.

Incredible video essay going deep into the use of George Orwell’s 1984 by the entire political spectrum as something that validates their ideals. It also goes a bit into Orwell’s life explaining the context around the book’s original publication and how it was never prophetic, but reflective of a perpetual feeling in Orwell’s mind (and ours).