Category: Links

• 10 Ways to Ease Your Coronavirus Anxiety – These simple tips will help you relax and put things in perspective — in between washing your hands, of course.
• A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers – Good tips from HBR
• A cough, and our hearts stop: Coping with coronavirus anxiety and fear – More tips
• How to Introvert & Save the World – Didn’t read yet.
• Spacejoy – Get expert help to design and decorate your Home online | Interior design services – Looking at redoing my office, need help.
• @jeffjarvis/COVID / Twitter – Jeff Jarvis has a good list of COVID experts on twitter.

• Desktop-Class Productivity for iPad – Things Blog – Cultured Code – Release notes with cool tips.
• Individual vs collective climate action – Those who are concerned about the climate crisis need to do a better job at highlighting that more than 70% of the climate problem is caused by just 100 corporations
• Not a ‘math person’? You may be better at learning to code than you think – New research from the University of Washington finds that a natural aptitude for learning languages is a stronger predictor of learning to program than basic math knowledge, or numeracy.

• A High-Resolution Audio Primer – a report on a scientific article presented at last year’s AES meeting, in which the authors used test tones and a modest audio system (albeit in an anechoic chamber) to prove that listeners can discriminate between high-rez and CD-rez audio.
• Don’t think twice – Billy Strings – I recently learned how to play this. But not like Billy does. 
• My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s – Gwern.net – Worth a scroll through
• A Text Renaissance – “Text though, is definitely going through a renaissance, and as primarily a producer of text, that’s what interests me the most. What comes out the other end may or may not look anything like blogging. It might be a case of a New Blogging as an Elder Medium in an explosion of new textual media.”
• Overview of how ONIX handles various rights attributes – Some work-related research. 

• Opinion | Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? – Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills? The same people who should be fixing them.
• Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be? – Alberto Acerbi & Charlotte Brand | Aeon Ideas – Are popular songs today happier or sadder than they were 50 years…
• How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables – The tech giant is engineering a way to encourage its employees to eat healthier — and it might just help the rest of…
• Mac Open Web, by Brian Warren – Good collection of apps, all of which are useful in a variety of ways for independent web writers/coders.
• Publish To Apple News – WordPress plugin | WordPress.org – Started pushing out my RSS feed to Apple News this week, here’s how.
• 100 greatest bootlegs: #127 BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS – Paul’s Mall, Boston 1975 (Flac) – Building up my collection of lossless live show recordings.
• Pollstar | Hotstar: Billy Strings Goes Beyond Bluegrass – Good read on a great guitar player. Billy’s origin story gets richer every time it’s told.

note: forgot to hit publish on this on Friday 🙁 will try to do better this week!

How To Expand Launchpad

Hard for me to imagine Launchpad ever being as useful as Alfred for launching apps. That said, this tip for expanding the rows/columns of Launchpad might make a more compelling use case. Via Chris Hannah via @JPEGuin

On being able to write about whatever the hell you are interested in:

As someone with a bunch of interests, I’m all for a non-directional approach to blogging (via Josh Ginter and Initial Charge). I’m tired of reading commercial sites, have stocked my RSS app with independent publishers and have no regrets, especially when blog authors stray from their usual topics.

Joe Henry – Welcoming Flies at the Picnic. 

Loved hearing this rebroadcast of Krisa Tippett’s interview with a very articulate songwriter.

Reeder 4 tips

This old review (from May, 2019) of Reeder 4 has some interesting usage tips/hints that I wasn’t aware of, worth a read if you use Reeder for your feeds.

Ambitiously titling this post Friday Links thinking that I may be able to do it again next Friday and the one after that. We’ll see!

Anyway, some links I’ve enjoyed from around the web over the past few days:

The rise, fall and resurrection of Flickr – Ferdy Christant

When you support free, you support billionaires. When you pay, you support sane businesses and real creators. Start paying for things that cost money. If you can’t afford to, use fewer things, which generally make you happier anyway.

Very long but interesting post about Flickr. Where it is now, where it came from, etc. I haven’t renewed my Flickr Pro account in forever and don’t expect that I will simply because I have no need for it but we will definitely lose an important piece of Internet history if Flickr can’t sustain itself.

Time Out: We Don’t Give Music Enough Time to Grow on Us Anymore

A few years ago I started making playlists in iTunes that only contained 3-5 albums and listened to those tracks exclusively for a few weeks before rotating them out. There is something about becoming really familiar with a recording, a whole album preferably, that rewards in a way that superficially skimming the surface of Spotify just doesn’t deliver. Thinking about restarting this practice somehow.

Genius loci

Learned this phrase this week. the prevailing character or atmosphere of a place. Love it.