Saturday 15th October, 2022 - Turning the World Inside Out

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Oct 15, 2022

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

The world sucks at the minute! What a week. I don’t have the energy to go into any of the details. Not a huge amount of links, it’s mostly podcasts with some commentary this week.

The good news is that all my leg mutilations have cleared up, though one leg is still about 1 cm fatter than the other, which is weird. The scaring is quite bad. I was going back through the photos I’ve taken along the way, put together an album, and was shocked to discover it started back in January. That’s 10 months of blood, puss and swollen limbs. A lot of freakin’ pain. It’s been about a week now, really really really hoping there isn’t a resurgence. It’s really affected me mentally, any hint at leg injury or infection and my body and mind just go into a sort of “No No No No No” mode.

Reasonably good progress on the ssg. I’ve put all the pieces together to create a homepage that shows all the latest stuff, it looks very minimal and boring at the minute, basically it’s just text, but I quite like the simplicity. Now that I have all the plugins working together, there are quite a few things that obviously need smoothing out to give a better site-wide consistency.

I’ve also been reverting the npx workaround I had to implement in all the deployments a few weeks back. It was necessary because the Netlify cli action suddenly stopped working. I got a message from the support forum, apparently they fixed the bug. I haven’t gotten around to converting all the existing linkblog data to markdown, but I’ve written the code, just need to test it, get it working on some test data, make sure it works, then do the data conversion.

I tried porting my current landing page from markjgsmith.com and it just renders a completely empty page. I have no idea what’s happening there, as far as I can tell I’ve copied the page and resources across exactly. It’s just a static html page. I’d like to keep the nice looking landing page if possible, because it looks a bit more professional than just a bunch of text. The plan is to turn the current text homepage into a ‘latest’ page.

Anyhow that’s the state of the universe for me, broken but slowly getting better.

Podcasts

You don’t actually know about what your future self wants (TED Talks Daily Podcast) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkczIuZmVlZGJ1cm5lci5jb20vdGVkdGFsa3NfYXVkaW8/episode/ZW4uYXVkaW8udGFsay50ZWQuY29tOjk3NTM2?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjYk8mRmuH6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
John’s freakin’ out! (Punk News Podcast) - Interesting discussion about new music genres between people from different generations, brains listening to music; also interesting and funny bit about the minutia and realities of organising a band night https://audioboom.com/posts/8170726
Zuckerberg on the Quest Pro, our impressions, and the state of VR games (Vergecast Podcast) - It’s uncanny how much David Pierce sounds like Mark Zuckerberg in this episode, and how much the other bloke, who I haven’t heard before sounds like a very sad Nilay; he sort of sounds like how I feel a lot of the time; also yawn VR stuff (sorry Mark) https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vdmVyZ2VjYXN0/episode/NTAyNjUwYjItYzY0Zi0xMWVjLTg5YWEtZjNiOTc5MmNlODE1?sa=X&ved=0CAgQuIEEahcKEwjYk8mRmuH6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Receptivity vs Preconceptions on the Road (Rolf Potts Podcast) - I found the discussion around how this american black man was treated while traveling in Africa, as well as his experience living in France very interesting; americans are treated differently internationally, somewhat independently of skin color; great episode, a nice mixture of positivity and reality; also there was a guy Tim Ferris interviewed last week about Ketamine, he really reminds me of Rolf https://rolfpotts.com/podcast/travel-preconceptions-eddy-harris
Culture as Code (a16z Podcast) - Honestly as I put together the links this morning I can’t really remember much about this apart from there was some interesting historical perspectives about culture, and I must of enjoyed it, else I wouldn’t have saved it https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/culture-as-code-rerun-eL9hlgGW
Young Churchill: Prisoner and Fugitive (The Rest is History Podcast) - This story is so good one starts to wonder how true it is; I seriously had no idea about Churchill’s adventurous past, he’s like some sort of pre-Spielberg british Indiana Jones https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/241-young-churchill-prisoner-and-fugitive
Classic Desert Island Discs - Andrea Levy - It’s a really nice window into what it was like to grow up as an immigrant in the UK; I hope I haven’t got it mixed up, I also can’t quite remember listening to this apart from that I liked it https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0cxt1yg
Michael Saylor’s Deep Dive into Bitcoin Energy Misconceptions BTC099 (Bitcoin Podcast) - At times he can be a bit long winded, but it’s worth listening to because some of this monetary stuff is difficult to grasp, so you have to keep listening to things over and over so the fundamentals stick in your head, and his examples really are very good; whenever I see Saylor on YouTube I can’t stop thinking that it’s Tom Cruise wearing some sort of face mask https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RoZS1pbnZlc3RvcnMtcG9kY2FzdA/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL0NLUElZb1doOW5tNDMtSy14dWN5MWpGYXNobE9RRFItRE5pQ2VPVlRkRE0?sa=X&ved=0CAYQkfYCahcKEwjAiIngmuH6AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ
Forking SQL Lite, generative AI for music, saying no to sprints, awesome diagraming tools & state machine facts (Changelog Podcast) - Geez I’m having some memory issues this week, I know I liked this episode, I guess I’m some sort of a nerd https://changelog.com/podcast/news-2022-10-10
French History on Film (The Rest is History Podcast) - This starts off really good, it’s a bit tedious in the middle, but it gets good again at the end; I’d seen some of these films growing up, but mostly I like the anglo-french banter and interaction, after all these years you can still hear the tensions, but it’s mostly good humoured; one film I personally would have added to the list is La Haine, which depicts modern day France, very dark and real in places, but also multicultural and funny https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/french-history-on-film
The Path to Freedom and Sovereignty with Natalie Smolenski (What Bitcoin Did Podcast) - Lots of high level stuff about privacy and political regimes, making the observation that to most people the jump to Bitcoin is a big jump, and it finishes on CBCs but the most interesting part is the lead up to that; also my feeling is that the rabbit hole is much deeper than even this podcast makes out, and I think it’s ultimately about our civilisation’s journey out of world wide slavery culture, something which is just so unimaginably bonkers, that none of us can quite conceptualise it, because it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever done, bigger than both world wars even, by an order of magnitude at least, and though many believe it is behind us, we are in many ways still in it https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-path-of-freedom-and-sovereignty
Doppelgängers: Hey you, you’re me! (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - I really liked this episode, it’s fun, but I also think there’s more to it than they make out https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/doppelg-ngers-hey-you-youre-me
10 Cases of Mistaken Identity (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - Kind of scary https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-cases-of-mistaken-identity

Mark Smith’s Newsletter

Saturday 15th October, 2022 - Turning the World Inside Out

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Podcasts

Links