The meanwhiling… logo. noa ks

Links i like

This is a page of pages i think are interesting!

Saint John’s Bible

A new illuminated bible? Very cool

The Compose key is magic

A small article about one of my favourite keys on the keyboard.

Humanæ by Angélica Dass

An art project where pictures are taken of people’s faces, and the background is matched to the colour of their nose.

Link archive

Linking to external pages often ends up with a collection of dead links. Thassilo gets around this by archiving every page they link to, and adding an archive link whenever they link somewhere. This archive link is a single page with all the relevant assets embedded. They use this command:

monolith --isolate --no-js --output static/archive/%title%-%timestamp%.html <URL>

Is that in the bible?

Interesting blog about things in the bible. Well written and readable, but nicely academic rather than with any particular prejudice.

Early christian writings

A huge collection of christian writings from the first couple of centuries ad. All of them have english translations, some have their original language as well.

6.001 Structure and interpretation of computer programs

Watch twenty video lectures of hal abelson and gerald jay sussman going through the first edition of the sicp book.

Consistent cursive

A free online cursive course. I haven’t gone through it yet, but it’s on my list of things to do sooner rather than later.

[I Blame the W3C’s HTML Standard for Ordered Lists](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1819759.html”>I Blame the W3C’s HTML Standard for Ordered Lists)

On the poor analysis of what should and should not count as content and appearance in the html/css stack, and the real world problems that arise from the ordered list tag not properly representing ordered lists.

Non-canonical books referenced in the bible

An interesting overview of the state of literature around the time that the bible was being written. It’s not a secret that there are plenty of related books that didn’t make the final cut.

Ancient computers

An entry in the engineering and technology history wiki mostly about abacuses.

Easy forth

A small ebook to teach a programming language called forth

Arguments against the metric system

A quite well written article articulating things i’ve argued about for ages now, which is that the imperial system is full of warts but does some things better than the metric system.

List of eating utensils

I find eating etiquette totally fascinating. This page gives a bit of an overview of what goes on around the world. Not a total overview, but enough to pique your interest!

A guide to understanding small seasons

The traditional chinese lunisolar calendar organised the year into twenty four microseasons, which each having a corresponding natural phenomenon.

A quick and dirty critique of primitivist & anticiv thought

A well written article on how primitivism is not a particularly well thought out system to hold.

The small things Manifesto

A short article encouraging people to make things for the sake of making them, and it doesn’t matter if they’re not the best most high quality thing in the world because they exist now and they didn’t a minute ago

Lady gaga talks about penis rumour

Lady gaga talks about penis rumour

About shakespeare and dick jokes

While it’s good to shout from the rooftops that shakespeare is a dirty dirty man, the dichotomy between serious shakespeare and dirty shakespeare is an unnecessary distinction.

[A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels](https://www.aaycock.com/simplenetwork/“>A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels)

An installation of connected underground tunnels. It’s something really simple but is just quite exciting.

Well-Sorted Version

It’s the bible in alphabetical order. All the punctuation, word breaks, and so on are in the same places, but the letters have been sorted. Tauba auerbach had [a similar project](http://www.taubaauerbach.com/view.php?id=73&alt=164).

Green honey

A visualisation of different colour terms in english and chinese, taken from wikipedia and displayed in different ways.

What herbs can you smoke

Information on the much wider than you’d imagine world of coating your lungs in combustible plant matter

Cognate - Readable and concise concatenative programming

The big idea here is that lower case words are ignored, which means they can be added to make any expression read more naturally. Of course this only works for languages that use alphabets with a case distinction, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.

The Quest for a Hairless Body

A long article about the lack of body hair on statues, sculptures, and paintings of the female body throughout history. Considers social factors, like the idea that body hair was seen as pornographic, or that many cultures removed the hair, and that sometimes hair was removed by restorers for those reasons.

[[https://www.door.link/][[ door ]​]]

A site with a collection of hand-curated mixtapes, inspired by the intentional listening it is so hard to find these days. Often there is a divide between playlist people and album people; this is a playlist person who wants to fight against the convenience of modern playlists.

Two Timelines of the Ancient Kingdoms of Judah and Israel

Here are two timelines based on the content of A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (2nd edition), by J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes. The timelines are interesting, but another interesting aspect is that they are written in html, rather than being images or svgs.

Notes on Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building

A long page highlighting the key points and examples from the text.

Penboard: Resurrecting Graffiti

At some point graffiti, the palm os handwriting-based input method, disappeared. But it’s still a fun little thing, and this person considers it the best way to input text on a mobile device. So they made a new version for android.

Michael Pollan - Unhappy Meals

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” is a pretty famous quote by now i think. But this article is much longer than that. The core premise is that nutrition science is changing and keeps giving us new best practices and supplements and so on, but ultimately all we need to do is eat food, not too much of it, and mostly plants. Don’t get caught up in tracking macronutrients and calories, just eat good, proper food, and you’ll be okay.

books hidden in Debian source packages

Just a simple list of text files containing books. All the books are in the debian package repositories. I had no idea that there was so much literature just hiding on my computer! The books are of course in the public domain.

Resources on Traditional China: Translations and Course Materials by Robert Eno

A selection of course teaching materials on the subject of China, freely available online for non-commercial use. There’s a huge amount of content here worth digging into.

Web Apps in Lisp: Know-how

Have you ever wanted to make web apps in lisp? Luckily, the inexhaustible Vindarel has made a guide on how you can do just that! Vindarel has made so many valuable resources for the common lisp community, and it’s really nice to see a newer guide on doing practical things with the language.

Arabic root system overview

For a long time i’ve admired, with fear, from a distance, the Arabic root system. I vaguely knew that words were made up of clusters of consonants, and changing the vowels changed the meaning, but this page breaks down exactly what that means in practice.

Jonny M’s music

Jonny M is a man who makes some pretty good reggae music. The unique selling point is that it’s all in esperanto. Although i’m currently in a phase where i think that learning esperanto is not a good use of my time, i still enjoy this music a lot, and probably harbour warmer sentiment towards the language than most other people who know what it is but don’t speak it.

B-612 by Natalia Balska

An interactive art installation made up of a plant and a neural network. The neural network controls how much water the plant gets based on information from sensors, with the idea that over time it gets better at distributing the optimum amount of water to maintain the plant’s happiness.

Wikipedia — Onfim

It turns out that humans have always been concerned about the same old things. Onfim and his possessions were preserved, so we can read his notebooks and see that a boy from the thirteenth century got bored while doing his homework and drew pictures of himself killing people, proving once and for all that actually people never change.

The Emacs’s Gamegrid library #1

Emacs comes with tetris, as well as some other games. In graphical mode, tetris is made of nice graphical squares, and that’s because it uses the gamegrid library. But this library doesn’t have a whole lot of documentation! Luckily this website has some tutorials explaining how to do stuff with gamegrid. I’m not sure i’m every going to make use of it, but it’s cool that someone has gone to the effort.

Prof. Dr. Style

A really amazing article about the creation of websites by people who do not care so much about making nice websites as about sharing information. The intersection of professionalism and tacky, apparently juvenile or outdated design practices. I really like this article. One of the sad parts is that over time more and more of the links stop working or redirect to clinical university pages.

Travel Independent . info

A huge, detailed site with a long history, documenting all the different aspects of solo travel. Where you can go, what you should take, and so on. Lots of recommendations for the majority of countries.

The Anglish (Anglisc) Wiki

What if the Normans hadn’t won the battle of hastings, and english had not been dramatically influenced by the french language? The anglisc project aims to develop the english language without any words derived from romance languages. Some of them sound really great, and some sound a bit weird, but as a thought experiment i think this is really interesting!

The Ground Gives Way - A New Roguelike Game

This is really cool! A roguelike inspired by the accessibility of console games, with only a few buttons and an emphasis on uniqueness between replays. I haven’t played it myself yet. Roguelikes as a genre kind of have a lot of walls for new players, and there is a lot that could be done design-wise to combat that. A project that acknowledges that and wants to change things is very welcome.

Bibliography of Scheme-related Research

This page is a list of academic papers about scheme. The papers are categorised into subpages, and there’s some interesting stuff although i openly admit that most of it goes over my head.

The foundation for intentional community

I didn’t realise this was a thing! A directory of communities of people living together and often trying to get away from the nine-to-five. Either the concept is not popular outside of europe and the usa, or the directory is not used by people outside of europe and the usa. I would guess the latter, but i cannot be certain.

1966 Sprite 400

I think that mid-century caravans have some really adorable designs, and the sprite 400 is just about the quintessential retro caravan. Here’s a nice article talking about the author’s personal experience with the model, and why it’s so popular.

Lake Inari mobile cabins

Have you ever wanted to stay in a little cabin on a frozen lake, surrounded by nothing except ice and the northern lights? Me neither, until i saw that this was a thing that i could actually go and do. It sounds a little terrifying, but also totally amazing and beautiful.

CARDIAC - CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation

Non-electronic computer systems are a pet interest of mine, and this one is an old one, but not so old that electronic computers didn’t exist. It was designed at bell labs with the intention of explaining how electronic computers worked, because at the time most people had no way of accessing an electronic computer.

Dasher on-screen keyboard

A totally different way of entering text, the letters most likely to appear next in a sequence appear as expanding boxes at the edge of the screen. It looks kind of like a game. The developers suggest that it is well suited for use with eye-tracking technologies.

vrs - a personal computer software runtime

Using emacs as much as i do, the rough edges start to become apparent, and i start to wonder what other similar but differently designed systems would look like. Here’s one such system being built by one person as their own personal “endgame” environment. There are some really cool ideas here.

The Harvard Student Who Killed Her Roommate (archive.is link)

A very affecting story of the dual tragedy of the ways that two international students spent their lives at harvard university, how they dealt with socialising and the difficulties they faced, and what could have eventually led to their murder and suicide.

The Art of Lisp & Writing

I think that Richard P. Gabriel really knows how to write. In this essay, which is the foreword to a book about common lisp, he talks about why he loves lisp so much, because it is creative and flexible. It’s a beautiful metaphor, and although it heavily leans into the semi-mythical lisp-mystique, i appreciate the passion and love that he has for this language.

Doing Nothing

A list of links, summaries, and other thoughts on doing nothing, often as a planned act. Reads as a collection of research notes, and is not really organised or with a thread. That said it’s still worth reading through and using as a jumping board for finding more resources about the subject.

Unusual holidays

A list of holidays that the author has invented for themself. Most of them have some kind of functional aspect to them, and i guess making a day out of it makes them more likely to do it. I think it’s a nice idea.

A programming system

Andrey Listopadov spends some time thinking about what his perfect programming system would look like. He wants something practical and flexible, which makes sense given he’s an emacs user. The focus is not on a language, but on an entire environment that could be used as a complete interface to a computer.

A portrait of Tenochtitlan - a 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec Empire

An impressive project that aims to create a rendering of what the aztec capital would have looked like at the peak of its power, about five hundred years ago.

Nadim Kobeissi’s favourite paintings

A selection of paintings that Nadim Kobeissi likes. I don’t know who Nadim Kobeissi is, or why they like these paintings. All i know is that they might remove them in the future if they outgrow them, meaning that this page is not an archive but a living window into their current taste. When i looked, it seems that they lke Magritte and pictures of people going about their life.

Mr TIFF

The story of trying to uncover who was responsible for designing the TIFF file format. A surprisingly poignant tale.

Until Death Do Us Part - Thomas Sauvin

A tiny art book inside of a packet of chinese double happiness cigarettes. The book is made up of pictures of brides and grooms engaging in cigarette games at a wedding. This is a chinese custom where the groom must undertake a series of challenges, and the forfeits for failure involve creative uses of cigarettes (such as smoking many cigarettes at once, or spicy or acidic cigarettes).

Save standard time

An american charity dedicated to promoting the removal of daylight saving time, as an unhelpful and in fact actively harmful system.

The secret life of Tim Hunkin

More people should know about Tim Hunkin, a man who makes arcade machines. But his arcade machines are unique and hilarious. I visited one of his arcades (or galleries? i’m not sure is the more appropriate term) a long time ago and i’ve not stopped thinking about the zoltar machine that had been turned into a doctor’s note writer ever since.

The Goon Squad: Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation by Daniel Kolitz

Don’t leave just yet! This article is long and funny and scary, and incredibly well written. Documenting a weird subculture of people who want to masturbate all the time so that they can reach orgasm-induced enlightenment. Really worth reading.

Why I Quit Chipotle and What I Eat Instead

This post is petty and entitled and i relate to almost none of it, but one thing that i find quite amusing is that the meal he ends up developing is very similar to what i eat every day. I put grains, lentils, and frozen vegetables in a rice cooker and end up with a delicious meal for basically no money. It’s great!

roons — a kit for building mechanical computers — technical overview

It is possible to make mechanical logic gates, and roons is a project that makes that easy to do. It’s like lego but for a very particular kind of nerd (me).

History of philosophy without any gaps podcast

A lot of philosophy and history podcasts only go over the highlights, and even then only within a particular subfield. A podcast that boldly claims to cover the entire history of philosophy across the world is impressive, and these episodes are thorough and interesting.

On The Death of Daydreaming

Here’s an article about daydreaming. It’s nice in that it doesn’t describe the good old days without phones with rose-tinted glasses; boredom is not fun and everyone didn’t spend all their time being happy and friendly to strangers. But it does point out some of the perhaps hidden necessities of daydreaming.

Beni Bischof’s personal website

I really like the design of this personal website. Raw and dense. Beni is a visual artist who seems to be really into sausages.

An Engine for an Editor

This article discusses the key advantages of emacs’s fundamental design decisions: by being text based but giving some of that text extra features, we can add layers of interaction while still maintaining a common denominator that allows packages to arbitrarily interact with one another.

you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand

As software has become more mainstream, it has taken on the characteristics common to other mainstream things, like clothing; no longer is it purely pragmatic, but choosing a particular piece of software has a story associated with it. This is something that apple has known for a long time, and i think also that the ruby on rails community leant into early with their macs and textmate. But now there are adverts for individual pieces of software in real-life public spaces, like notion, and so using notion has a particular story associated with it, while using obsidian has a different story associated with it.

Printing the web: making webpages look good on paper

A comprehensive article on how to make websites printable. I don’t often print websites onto paper, but i often save them as a pdf, so i appreciate when people put thought into this. The current version of this site could definitely do with some work in that sphere.

Conlang Syntax Test Cases

A list of 218 sentences designed to test different aspects of a language. Sentences with different vocabulary but the same grammar are removed.

Digital Resources for Musicology

This website aims to provide a starting point for musicologists to access many open access projects, such as digital scans of scores, newspapers, and so on. I don’t know much about this field but it looks quite comprehensive.

Gay history and literature: essays by Rictor Norton

Essays and links to essays about homosexuality, mostly in the context of different periods of British history. The site has a very old design, but it is still being updated.

A Hebrew - English Bible According to the Masoretic Text and the JPS 1917 Edition

It’s exactly what it says. This page also provides links to purely hebrew editions, as well as versions in french, spanish, and portugese.

A Scheme Primer

I don’t know much scheme, but this document seems to walk through all the most essential parts. The level of detail is a bit wonky, in that i can’t work out whether it’s written for someone with prior programming experience (but it spends too much time on simple concepts), or someone new to the field (it just assumes the reader knows a lot of stuff already). Regardless, it’s nice to have the key points all on one page.

Learn to read Hangul, the Korean alphabet

A nicely designed and easy introduction to hangul. Although hangul looks a bit like chinese characters, it’s actually an alphabet, so doesn’t take too long to get familiar with. Of course, i still don’t know what any of the words mean.

Dead Simple Sites - Minimal website inspiration

It’s true that this website looks very similar to a lot of these sites, and i also like that this exists and encourages people to make simple sites, but i can’t help but find an inspiration page where every site looks identical quite funny. Another small gripe is that this seems to be only based on aesthetics, as opening a couple of sites took thirty-plus seconds to load.

Goncharov (1973) - a film that didn’t exist

A delightful internet thing, a group of people got together to document in depth Goncharov (1973), a film that was apparently produced in the Soviet Union but is in fact completely made up.

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

An incredibly pretentious blog post that i nevertheless sort of agree with, about how dictionaries have become more pragmatic, but in the process less interesting to read. I think there’s a time and a place for both, and sometimes i would be annoyed by the examples he gives, but other times i agree that they are quite beautiful.

Marathon OS - Gesture-first mobile linux inspired by bb10

I’m not sure that i’ll ever use a linux phone, or at least not for a long time, because the app situation is too dire and i’m less interested in having an open computer in my pocket than in not having a computer in my pocket at all, but i am still on board with this project. Plasma mobile sadly seems to have copied its ui from ios and android; gnome mobile is interesting, but doesn’t seem to have as much vision as a copy of bb10, which seems to have been universally loved.

The car free city

A website dedicated to urbanism. This page is the starting point to explaining why cars and cities should not mix. Unfortunately i don’t think there’s much chance of any of this taking hold in the short term.

Vestoj, a fashion magazine

Although it describes itself as a fashion magazine, there’s a lot of articles about a variety of subjects here, and i really like the design of the site.

Essays on Language Design

Essays about creating languages. The very long essay on lexical semantics is particularly interesting and helpful, if you want to make a language for yourself.

Typochina Chinese

A design website about Chinese typography and the development of Chinese characters.

Hebrew OT - Transliteration - Holy Name KJV

Get english and hebrew in both the hebrew alphabet and romanisation side by side. Also comes with references and search features. A very classic website design.

Joys of Small Game Development

A book slash manifesto slash guide on how to make small games, and why that is a desirable thing to learn and want to do. This page gives an overview of the different sections so you can jump in and out at will.

The scholarref tools: never deal with journal webpages again

A collection of shell scripts that can be used to manipulate academic papers without having to deal with the almost universally terrible website design that plagues academic publishers’ websites.

Learn biblical hebrew with the ancient languages institute

The ancient languages institute uses modern language teaching techniques to encourage students to engage with languages as languages rather than codes. I don’t know how effective it is because it’s an expensive course, but one day i’d like to give it a go.

Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People PDFs

A collection of one-page graphical guides to music theory concepts. They look good and are full of information. And they are available under a creative commons license!

Merlin’s Wisdom Project

It seems that this is a list of pieces of advice from Merlin Mann. Some of it is good, some of it i disagree with, and some is quite amusing.

In defence of ssss-low texting

An article about why we should stop expecting people to reply quickly. If someone replies quickly, it means they are distracted by their phone, rather than focusing on a task that they can get absorbed in.

Why and how to write things on the Internet

A nice thing about this article, as the author says in the introduction, is that it focuses on positive reasons to start blogging, rather than negative reasons against why not to, which works much better for most people. I can relate to a lot of what he says.

Atto - a basic-like language in the browser

Atto is a contained programming system, heavily inspired by basic, but running completely in the browser. It comes with a guide to introduce people to programming for the first time.

Fall in

We all live by clock time these days, and sometimes that’s necessary, but there’s nothing stopping us from paying more attention to the seasons and changing our routines and lives accordingly.

Plato on the kobo libra 2

I do a lot of my reading using a kobo ereader. Currently i use the default program, but i have stopped using calibre, which means it’s a little bit harder for me to use kepub files. Plato seems to have better support for normal epubs. Also, it seems to better support simplified chinese, which is not an option on kobo devices out of the box.

Toki Pona Bible Project

A project to translate the bible into toki pona. As of writing this, only three percent completed. The project appears to have an impressively rigorous procedure, but i find it interesting work happens on a verse-by-verse basis.

Clojure - Rationale

Why Rich Hickey decided to make a new programming language. He writes simply in order to explain what he liked and didn’t like about existing languages, and what he wanted in a new language to fill his problem space.

Vegan health

A site to discuss different benefits and nutrition information related to a vegan diet. I’m not sure how impartial it is, but a lot of the information seems insightful.

Open Cantonese

A free online textbook teaching Cantonese. The pronunciation guide is pretty nice, but i haven’t spent much time going through the lessons yet. Will check it out when i spend some more time studying the language.

I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Page I Visit

One guy found that when he made websites take a long time to load, they suddenly became a lot less appealing. We reach for outrage on social media as an impulse, but if we have to meditate for a few seconds before we get to be outraged, we realise that actually that doesn’t sound so appealing after all.

One program to rule them all

Unsurprisingly, this article is about living in emacs; that is, doing everything in emacs. John can’t think of any other programs that support living in them to the extent emacs does. That’s kind of quaint and reminds me that the article was written in 2008, because as he mentions briefly, firefox might be “becoming the emacs of a new generation”. It wasn’t firefox in the end, but i guess he was pretty right about that.

Yves Klein, Anthropometries

A short interview with one of the women who took part in Yves Klein’s performances, where women acted as “human paintbrushes”, making shapes on large canvases by covering themselves with klein blue paint.

Fennel reference

Fennel is a little clojure-like programming language that compiles to lua, so that all the advantages of lua can be used alongside all the advantages of a lisp. This page lists out all of the built-in forms and how to use them.

in praise of writing on the internet

A long post about the tangible benefits the author has noticed after starting to write. Some of these are benefits from choosing a platform like substack and also having a further social media presence, but others are intrinsic to writing essays or posts.

Graded watching for advanced Chinese learners

This website lists films and tv shows in chinese, and allows them to be sorted based on how many words they use, how frequently words are introduced, and other useful measures.

The egg laptop

A laptop built from scratch, with a really cute form factor. I dream of a day when my primary computing device is a laptop that i built myself, that ticks all my boxes. That day is not here yet, but i’m really happy to see someone else building something that suits them. In particular, i like the very focused goal that the next thing he builds should be able to be designed on this computer.

Two hundred and fifty things a punkist should know

This site acts as a list of bookmarks and search terms for a particular aesthetic, which could perhaps be defined as simple living, anarchist, minimalist computing, or something. I’m not sure if it’s still being updated, but the number of items has been increasing over time.