Cool Links

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Another cool little web utility. This one lets you squoosh your image files to greatly reduce their file size without any significant loss in quality. Especially useful if you have a website of your own and want to optimize your images.

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.

This is beautiful. This Obsidian plugin completely overhauls the file navigation and makes it actually usable. It fixes one of the app’s biggest problems for me: navigation.

You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.

A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that’s been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don’t know much about).

Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.

Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.

Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.

This one is a banger. It’s both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.

This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.

I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.

Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.

I think it’s widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it’s really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more…).

But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it’s too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.

… is just to be alive.

Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.

One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.

We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.

Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.

Time and time again, we’ve been seeing companies that go all-in on AI in hopes of not falling behind or standing out while the bubble doesn’t burst. This article has some real life testimonies of employees that are being forced to use AI in their work - even if it makes things harder and makes the results worse.

Obsidian, my note-taking, second-brain, CMS app just got a huge feature: Notion-like databases, here simply called Bases. You can use them with any files in your vault and in my initial testing, it’s pretty powerful!

I’m already using it to manage Cool Links, and looking forward to use it for more of my stuff in the future.

What exactly is this site? I don’t know. But it looks awesome.

I always have trouble understanding SVGs, but thanks to this article, I will have teensy bit less trouble than before. Josh’s articles are always a gem with all the interactivity and this is no exception.

CSS is finally getting functions! And if you’re struggling to think of good use cases for them or thinks they don’t make sense at all Una will change your mind real quick.

Too bad they’re still only supported in Chromium and are probably ways off from being usable in production. But it’s nice to get a glimpse of what the future holds.

Sharing Ahmad Shadeed’s posts here kinda feel like cheating at this point. They’re always a gem!

This one goes extremely in-depth into redesigning the hero layout of Time.com. Ahmad explains his thought process on every step of the way, and dives into a lot of fun, new-ish CSS principles like container and style queries, :has, grid and even text wrapping!

A masterclass, really.