Layoutit Terra - CSS Terrain Generator
It’s wild what you can do with CSS these days!
Link tags: play
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Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes — Smashing Magazine
There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.
Cold Album Drumming - full-album drum covers by Brad Frost
This is a great new musical project from Brad:
Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?
I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.
MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:
I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.
daviddarnes/play-button: A Web Component to play audio or video with a button
Isn’t this a lovely little HTML web component? All it does is hook up a button element with an audio or video element: exactly the kind of discrete drudge work that’s good to automate away.
Introducing Enhance Music — Begin Blog
I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.
This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole
Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.
Begging for Treats - blog.lmorchard.com
As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.
Spotify – dConstruct 2022
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com
The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern:
selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.
PlymouthPress – A Letterpress Image Font
An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.
Grungy!
The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.
Words To Avoid in Educational Writing | CSS-Tricks
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
Merch Table
Feel bad because your favourite artists aren’t getting any income from Spotify? Here’s a handy tool from Hype Machine that allows you to import Sportify playlists and see where you can support those artists on Bandcamp.
Pausing a GIF with details/summary | CSS-Tricks
This is such a clever and useful technique! It’s HTML+CSS only, and it’s a far less annoying way to display animated GIFs.
(Does anybody even qualify the word GIF with the adjective “animated” anymore? Does anyone know that there used to be such a thing as non-animated GIFs and that they were everywhere?)
Et In Silicon Valley Ego – Dr Beth Singler
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
What Does `playsinline` Mean in Web Video? | CSS-Tricks
I have to admit, I don’t think I even knew of the existence of the playsinline attribute on the video element. Here, Chris runs through all the attributes you can put in there.
AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.
After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:
A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
Breaking the physical limits of fonts
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
The Bit Player
Ooh! A documentary on Claude Shannon—exciting!
I just finished reading A Mind At Play, the (very good) biography of Claude Shannon, so this film feels very timely.
Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.