words.charlie.town
Notice of Stolen EVGA GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards:
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that on October 29, 2021, a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards was stolen from a truck en route from San Francisco to our Southern California distribution center. These graphics cards are in high demand and each has an estimated retail value starting at $329.99 up to $1959.99 MSRP.
colordrops, Hacker News:
If 20 years ago a cyberpunk author pitched a story to me about thieves that steal a truckload full of AI-grade processors in order to profit off a digital gold rush I'd say "cool story bro but it doesn't make sense technically"
How to build a Low-Tech website: Software & Hardware:
In order to reduce the size of the images, without diminishing their role in the design and the blog itself, we reverted to a technique called dithering: [...] We chose dithering not only for the compression but also for the aesthetic and reading experience. Converting the images to grayscale and then dithering them allows us to scale them in a visually attractive way to 100% of the view port, despite their small sizes. This gives each article a visual consistency and provides the reader with pauses in the long articles.
I suspect my love for low-colour dithered images lies purely in the realm of nostalgia, but it's refreshing to see such care for webpage sizes in 2021. Great read!
It’s a brisk one this morning
Finished reading: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 📚
A thick, dystopian SciFi veneer, laid atop a man coming to terms with his own humanity and his place in society.
If you think that sounds like 1984 verbatim, you're not alone. First published in 1924 (in English), one might argue Orwell's inspiration is laid a little too bare.
music and code
see you at home, the band I'm in, is releasing their first single in several years this friday (2nd july), and it's going to be a lot of fun to finally have this song we've been working on for a long time out there in the wild.
it's made me also think about my relationships with creating music as a whole, as well as my relationship with writing code - and how they scratch similar itches.
it's easy to think of writing code as a "non-creative" task, but as spending five minutes on stackoverflow will tell you, there are plenty of (hypothetical) "right" and "wrong" ways to write more or less any code. there are parallels to this with music, to an extent - in that there are general "rules" for how things are meant to be done (both in the form of genres, and general gatekeep-ery from fans and other musicians).
on a personal level, both of these tasks require you to work creatively within the confines of what you're working on - and for me, it's great! it allows me to get into the sought after "flow state", where I'm happy to lose endless hours in pursuit of an end result.
everything old is new again
yes, I've redesigned my personal homepage once more.
but this time, I'm changing the core philosophy — to something that I think better represents how I'm feeling about the current state of the internet, and society in general.
given that I write php for a living (I know), I'm very aware that it's easy to make things sluggish and resource-intensive without even really thinking about it. things like fast server-side rendering and built in portability are things I've always been aware of, and have definitely taken for granted.
coming to this realisation happened around the same time as I discovered Sijmen J. Mulder's list of text-only websites, a great resource that aggregates websites that are made up (almost) entirely of text.
I loved the idea! I'd long thought that monolithic, break-if-you-disable-js SPAs were often rolled out by default, with no real thought to whether or not they might be better served with just plain ol' HTML and CSS. (also I discovered that the homepage of one of my favourite American funk outfits Vulfpeck was on Mulder's list, which if you're to take a look, quite clearly influenced my design...)
so, I've adopted that philosophy for my new personal site. I've got a new domain, a new homepage collating all my projects, pieces of writing, and contact details, and something design-wise that I believe will stand the test of time.
I assume you've seen it because you made it to this page, but if you haven't, go ahead and check out the new homepage (back link in the top left), and I hope to be posting a lot more on here in the months to come.
thanks for reading,
charlie.