Feed Weekly #217

Feed weekly October 13, 2023

Dear internet. Thank you for the abundance of great, silly, egalitarian mix of useful vs. useless insights in the intersection of design and tech. Without you, we would have normal jobs.

Reading list

  • Irresistible to all three readers out there, allow yourself to feel supremely justified to dive deep into the subject of typography, albeit computational, courtesy of the MIT Media Lab. It's live later today, so be quick.
  • The trial against Sam Bankman Fried of FTX is in its second week, and a lot of details are emerging. On the day of the bankruptcy, someone tried to steal a billion worth of currency, and Wired has a thrilling article on it.
  • The race is on to crack the Vesuvius Challenge, awarding $700k to whomever are able to unearth text from a bunch of vulcanised scrolls, and in that double the amount of texts from antiquity. There is new hope, as a sequence of students has found a way to find sufficient evidence of ink to form a word in an equally old vulcanised unopened scroll. Sounds too good to be true? NO. You obviously can't resist clicking this link, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with anything we normally talk about on this journal.
  • A computer needs something actually random in order to duplicate randomness, which is of extreme importance to cryptography. Cloudflare has a wall of lava lamps to help generate randomness.

Design of the week

  • Looking for a veritable digital coffee table book that begs for a sleep-disabled iPad that you can just haphazardly leave behind in the corner of your visitors eyes, extruding your excellent sensibility and taste for everything beautiful? Archive for Space got you covered. It's functional once you get the hang of it.
  • We love this minimalist and tool-like navigation interface allowing for massive gorgeous photography.
  • PH17 is an aesthetical stretch for some, but it's a cool digital poster of sorts promoting an EP.
  • Mouthwash, the creators of the Apple mirage we've discussed earlier has a research space that went online recently. Well made.
  • Well this is just nice.

Tech of the week

  • Craft Cloud CMS hosting is coming, and you can request access now.
  • ActivityPub is a new open protocol, famously utilised by Mastodon. WP can now publish on it, becoming federated platforms.
  • In our continued quest for environmental certification, we came across Krystal, a UK hosting service promising to be one hundred percent green. Intriguing.
  • GSAP, one of the last strongholds of silly visual identities in the macro of tech, have caved to the pressure and become extremely cool all of a sudden. While decidedly nice, something also gets lost. That loss is too much to handle for one of our colleagues, who will spend the rest of the day deposing and entire drawer of green socks.

Go in peace.