Alanis Morissette: Ablaze (TV Debut) - YouTube »

This is just adorable but it’s also is a great example of how hard is to be a parent and not let your parenting affect your day job.

Andy Samberg Makes Each Day Count With Thundercat and ‘Not Too Much’ Bourbon - The New York Times »

Andy Samberg recommends some things he’s been enjoying recently. His review of Portrait of a Lady on Fire is pretty spot-on.

Andrew Canion - Replicating Hey.com Features in Regular Email Systems »

I love Hey a lot, but I’m not really sure this needed to be a platform as opposed to just an extension of a client. Andrew Canion does a great job of showing how close you can get with just MailMate.

MailMate and Tagging - BrettTerpstra.com »

If you need more examples of how powerful MailMate is once you get your head around it, Brett Terpstra has you covered.

The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice »

To commemorate his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly came up with 68 bits of unsolicited advice. Knowledge he’s gathered over his 68 years. And they’re all wonderful. My absolute favourite is

Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

This is something I’ve only recently come to realise and I’ve been trying to apply it wherever I can. Go read the rest, they’re worth your time.

Protecting Lives & Liberty: How Contact Tracing Can Foil COVID-19 & Big Brother »

There’s an old, not very funny joke about the two hardest things in computer science being cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

But I’d like to add that the real hardest thing is taking complicated concepts and explaining them in simple language so that even non-computer-people can comprehend them. And that’s something Nicky Case is great at. Along with security & privacy researcher Carmela Troncoso and epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, Nicky came up an explanation of how DP-3T works that is so great, so understandable that I’d feel comfortable showing it to my mother so she could make sense of it.

The reason I’m linking to it, besides it being a great example of how to do explainers like this properly, is that this is kiiiinda like the model proposed by both Google and Apple for their contact tracing protocol, and that’s probably something that’s going to become incredibly important over the next few months so it’s important people understand it.

How the Death of iTunes Explains the 2010s - The Atlantic »

What the idealized iPhone user and the idealized Gmail user shared was a perfect executive-functioning system: Every time they picked up their phone or opened their web browser, they knew exactly what they wanted to do, got it done with a calm single-mindedness, and then closed their device. This dream illuminated Inbox Zero and Kinfolk and minimalist writing apps. It didn’t work. What we got instead was Inbox Infinity and the algorithmic timeline. Each of us became a wanderer in a sea of content. Each of us adopted the tacit—but still shameful—assumption that we are just treading water, that the clock is always running, and that the work will never end.

This might be one of the best essays on technology (and my favourite topics: the internet that was and the internet that could have been) that I’ve ever read.

Cards Against Humanity Purchases Satire Site ClickHole From G/O Media »

I’ve already mentioned how much I don’t like Cards Against Humanity as a game, but I really admire them as a company. They’re constantly doing interesting things like buying a private island and giving 1 sq ft to each of their subscribers. This time, they’ve bought ClickHole and turned it into an independent, majority employee-owned company.

Basecamp Guide to Internal Communication »

I work remotely with a team that’s spread across Europe and I just before Christmas, I calculated that I lost a full third of my week to video calls, most of which should have been emails. So I read this and shouted OMFG YES to almost every point. Obviously, every team is different and this guide isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution (nor does it claim to be) but there’s so much in here to take on board.

(Until I sort out my professional blog, you’re just going to have to put up with the occasional work/devops related post on here, sorry about that.)

This Tom Hanks Story Will Help You Feel Less Bad - The New York Times »

I cried more than once while reading this profile of Tom Hanks. Just lovely.