Cool Links

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).

If you use a Mac, you probably know that Spotlight (the search box/launcher that opens when you press ⌘+Space) is shit. It’s slow, inconsistent, slow, and tries to do too much at once. (did I say it’s slow?)

TinyStart strips out all the useless stuff and keeps just the essentials, which means it’s really fast. You can launch apps, links and folders, and also pick emojis (it’s better than the built-in emoji picker too!). It’s a €5 one-time purchase, with free updates forever.

It does less than alternatives like Raycast (which is free) on purpose, but has the added bonus of never having to deal with features you’re not interested in, because it’s not trying to sell you anything extra. (plus, it’s just inevitable that Raycast will enshittify eventually…)

A great explainer (as always) from Josh Comeau going over the now safe-to-use CSS Scroll-Driven animations, which allow animating elements based on their scroll position on a page, such as entry/exit animations, scroll progress and more, without a single line of JavaScript!

I tried this out a while ago and loved how simple it is, but I always feel like those kind of animations are a bit too much for the type of stuff I build. 😅 Good to have the know-how, though.

… and glass breaks (or scratches). Short and sweet video by MKBHD explaining how smartphone brands achieve their yearly “more scratch resistance” or “more shatter resistance” claims, while the end product always seems the exact same.

If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a spoiler: Glass cannot be both more resistant to scratches and to shattering, they gotta choose one. So they just alternate every year to be able to make one of those two claims.

I think it’s worth noting that when people don’t seem interested in the distinction between real and not real it may not be that they don’t care about what’s real. It may be that their capacity, their energy, their ability to distinguish is less than yours.

A very heartfelt piece about information burnout.

Ever wondered why, in software development, a group of characters is called a “string”? This won’t provide you the answer, but will make it easier to understand.

We may have tools that allow us be “100x more productive” now, but our brain is the same lump of meat it was thousands of years ago. What happens when it can no longer keep track of the things we are doing?

This bottleneck is what’s happening in our brains. When you ask a machine to build infinite apps, it will do that. When you ask a machine that generates more tasks, it will do that. […] You didn’t fix the bottleneck, you moved it downstream.

[…]

At the end of the chain of 10,000-watt GPUs sitting in a data center in Iowa is the 40-watt lump of meat inside your skull. It’s an incredible, efficient, miraculous lump of meat that has millions of years of bio-engineering behind it… but understanding is the new bottleneck. If brains are a scarce resource, then we should take care to not over-produce inventory.

The Brazilian Amazon now has a brand and a logo, with the intent of promoting the 9 states it occupies as a tourist destination! And wow, that logo is a thing of beauty.

The entire branding is pretty neat, but the logo is especially stunning. Each letter is based on real curves of the Amazon river (the longest river in the world), and each letter is also from a different state! Great taste and great execution, here. And all made in Brazil. 🇧🇷

And not only the logo, but they also made a type font called Igaratype, and you can play around and let the Amazon river spell out whatever you want in this live playground.

Another great article by Josh explaining a neat little trick on how to make the header of a website dynamic… by having it not do anything at all. Don’t worry, it’s quite simple and he explains it way better than I ever could.

Bonus points for not requiring a single line of JavaScript.

A world map where people can anonymously write about memories they’ve had in specific places. You can write your own or just roam around reading the memories of other people. It’s fun to look around places I know and see what kind of experiences people had there.