#12: Thirteen links and one picture
I don’t usually share many links so I thought for this issue, I’d share thirteen of them and one picture. After all, link-sharing is the true spirit of email newsletters. Here’s hoping, a human-curated link list will be a welcoming break from our mighty algorithm overlords.
Google Experiments website is a treasure trove of so many well-made projects in collaboration with independent creators. One of which is this beautifully designed interactive tutorial on learning morse code. During the first lockdown, I learned morse code with this and even though I’ve forgotten most of it now, it was genuinely a lot of fun to do this.
https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/
I love StackExchange. I get to discover many interesting things from their Q&A sites. For instance, on English StackExchange, someone requested a phrase for “a small, legitimate fix for part of a system so broken the fix is unimportant”. The page is full of really great answers.
Bonus: Here is another great one from the Aviation StackExchange. Is this plane landing or departing?
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/34586/is-this-plane-landing-or-departing
Minecraft’s creator, Notch created a text-based incremental game. I love this little game so much, even though it is a little morbid. If you have 15-20 minutes to spare, do play this.
http://game.notch.net/drowning/
I found this archive of The Indian Express newspaper going all the way back to the 1950s. It’s fun (not always) to go back to a random date in time and read the headlines.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=P9oYG7HA76QC&dat=19511202&printsec=frontpage&hl=en
In a similar vein, there is also an archive of the Amul girl ads going back to the year 1982 if you can tolerate all the bad butter puns.
https://www.amul.com/m/amul-hits?s=1982&l=0
If you use Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, you can review and delete all the voice recordings on the Amazon website. Amazon tends to bury all the important privacy options behind the labyrinth of their settings and makes it very hard for you to see them (as do most big tech apps too tbf)
https://www.amazon.in/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh
You can also request and download all the data that Amazon has on you from the link below. I did this recently, it took them about three weeks to prepare all the files. There were a lot of files.
https://www.amazon.in/gp/privacycentral/dsar/preview.html
This video of Vincent Van Gogh visiting a present-day (2010) Paris art gallery from Doctor Who is my all-time favourite video. Every so often I watch this, and it always makes me so emotional.
(This is a link, substack won’t allow me to write yt links in plain text ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
A couple of months back, there was a security vulnerability reported in Log4j, an open-source logging framework in Java - that’s probably used by most companies in the world who’ve built anything on Java - from Apple to your local software company.
XKCD did a brilliant comic, as they usually do, on how so much of our digital infrastructure is reliant on small-time independent open-source maintainers. We need to take better care of them and give them more support than we do.
Some years ago, I watched a Natalie Portman starring Netflix movie called ‘Annihilation’. The movie is based on a book and I was casually checking its Goodreads when I found the most brilliant answer to a question on the website. Also an accurate description of hanging out with me IRL.
Jay Foreman’s YT is one of my favourite YouTube channels. He does a series of educational videos on maps called Map Men. Whenever he releases a new video, watching it is my most fun day of that week/month. I like this channel so much that I used a coupon code from one of their sponsored videos to buy a VPN subscription.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbbQalJ4OaC0oQ0AqRaOJ9g
In what could possibly be the worst headline I’ve ever read, and there were quite a few in the past couple of years, but this one wins the prize for me:
“Is unvaccinated sperm really the next Bitcoin?”
Make sure you have your unsee eye-drop handy before you click this.
https://protos.com/unvaccinated-sperm-the-next-bitcoin-crypto-antivax-covid-vaccine/
And finally, here is a picture of a bench from my local park that is now inaccessible after they built a fence around it. A perfectly good bench with a lovely view is now totally abandoned. Barred from enjoying another nice thing. Feels like just another day in the life in this country.
If you think you know someone who may enjoy this newsletter, why not forward this email to them? Or will it be weird for you to forward a random email out of the blue to a friend in this day and age? I don’t know, it could be a bit awkward. In any case, as always, thank you for reading and indulging me.