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  1. James Meek · Who holds the welding rod? Our Turbine Futures · LRB 15 July 2021

    Long article on making wind turbine towers and the international labour market (which maybe makes it sound duller than it is).

  2. Place-based carbon calculator

    It was interesting to spend a while poking around at the stats for our area. Lots of overlays and things to look at. Generally, our area’s below average. (via Web Curios)

  3. Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com

    “Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future…” (via @tomcritchlow)

  4. Oh Hello Ana - So I am now a naturalised citizen…

    Even a smooth and successful testing and application process sounds like a stressful, expensive hassle. Nations are weird things aren’t they. (Congrats Ana!)

  5. Atlas Minor • Fireworks

    What a great photo, and a lovely paragraph that echoes my mind at the moment.

  6. Home | Layers of London | Recording the Layers of London’s Rich Heritage

    I think this is a good collection of old maps layered on a modern one although I was slightly baffled when trying it on an iPad. (via Things Magazine)

  7. Sensemaking: Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps

    Lots of interesting advice for structuring Django projects (and some more general advice). (via Simon Willison)

  8. Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30 | Books | The Guardian

    “The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year.” “I don’t even remember what my pre-internet brain felt like.”

  9. Web Badges World | The ultimate archive of 80x15 pixel button art

    One for the old nostalgic web folk. (via Web Curios)

  10. nickjj/docker-django-example

    Another handy example project full of experience.

  11. bfirsh/django-docker-heroku-template

    Lots of handy things to copy here.

  12. In search of the new

    Robin Sloan gets lots of recommendations for SF books “that could only have been written in the last ten years, … that hinge on experi­ences and feelings new in the last ten years, … that repre­sent the current leading edge of the genre’s specu­la­tive and stylistic devel­op­ment?”

  13. Gill Partington · Your hat sucks: UbuWeb · LRB 1 April 2021

    About UbuWeb and Kenneth Goldsmith.

  14. Alternatives to The Guardian - news | Ask MetaFilter

    Some suggestions but, unsurprisingly and unfortunately, there’s no one good leftish, UK-based, news source.

  15. Jean-Luc Godard in the USA | Sight & Sound

    I don’t know much about Godard but enjoyed this article from 1968 about him, America and revolution. “A film is a theoretical rifle and a rifle a practical film.”

  16. Exxon Lost a Climate Proxy Fight - Bloomberg

    If every news story’s background was explained as well as Matt Levine explains this Exxon vote thing then I’d have a much better understanding of what was going on in the world.

  17. LadBaby and the wild rise of the Facebook Famous | WIRED UK

    Mainly interesting for the differences between famous creators and the types of content on different platforms. (also via Web Curios)

  18. Play to Lose — Real Life

    A similar theme to the previous, the financialisation of everything, but from a different point of view. NFTs, crypto, Wall Street Bets, etc as “revenge capitalism”, supporting not fighting capitalism. (via Web Curios)

  19. The Great Online Game - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

    There’s something true in here about how the world does or can work for some people, wrapped up in a lot of horrible crypto business awfulness. (via Web Curios, who said much the same)

  20. The Kitchen Bladesmith - Craftsmanship Magazine

    Long article about a man who makes knives, what makes knives sharp, what makes them easier to sharpen, etc. (via Web Curios)

  21. @lemonodor/Advisory Circular bots / Twitter

    Twitter bots that automatically post when a helicopter’s detected flying in circles over a particular city. Includes @SkyCirclesLON. (via Ask MetaFilter)

  22. HackSoftware/Django-Styleguide: Django styleguide used in HackSoft projects

    Interesting to see how people settle on organising things. (via Simon Willison)

  23. virtualvacation.us - Explore The World From Home

    It feels more magical than I expected to suddenly see full-window, high quality video of walking round a foreign city, more so than browsing YouTube for the same.

  24. Root System Drawings - Wageningen University & Research - Image Collections

    40 years worth of drawings of plant roots. More interesting than it might sound.

  25. How a Jeopardy! Contestant’s Hand Gesture Became Part of a Conspiracy - The New York Times

    I love/hate this. Quite amazing where we’ve got to.

  26. The Absurdity is the Point - Galaxy Brain

    A decent attempt to try and describe the weirdness of the current state of internet / crypto / meme news. “Personally, it scrambles my brain.” (via Web Curios)

  27. The Ballad of the Canceled Cretin - Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At

    Good takes. (Although 32 years ago the headmistress vetoed “cretin” in a play I’d written, as offensive to those with cretinism, so no one’s perfect Ed.)

  28. CoopCycle

    “A federation of bike delivery co-ops” including the free, open software to manage deliveries and apps for the couriers. Excellent. (via the Guardian)

  29. Accounting for big expenses and depreciation in your FIRE budget - Monevator

    I haven’t often seen this aspect discussed at length in early retirement planning articles.

  30. Atlas Minor • 8½

    “Could you leave everything behind and start from zero again? Pick one thing, and one only, and be absolutely devoted to it? Make it the reason for your existence, the thing that contains everything, that becomes everything, because your dedication to it makes it last forever?”