Some links don’t call for a full blog post, but sometimes I still want to share some of the good stuff I encounter on the web.
Has Search Become Just a Feature?・“The traditional web — with its banners, pop-ups, and paywalls — increasingly feels like a relic from a less sophisticated era.” If you aren’t already aware of the potential consequences of A.I. for the web, Om Malik’s post is a great — if a little optimistic — way to catch up. I wonder if websites, as we know them today, i.e. public-facing, are doomed to become mainly source material for A.I. apps or, worse, purely confidential points of reference in their databases.
A young Sam Altman in The Alienist, 2018・Speaking of A.I., this Bluesky post from old internet acquaintance Daniel Benneworth-Gray is just chef’s kiss.
QuickGPT・While we are on the topic if A.I., do you know this very simple yet very useful Mac app by Sindre Sorhus? I use ChatGPT for various tasks at work, and I find QuickGPT to be, yes, quicker to use than OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, more stable than MacGPT, and better integrated into the system.
Sigma BF・You’ve probably seen this camera everywhere already, but I had to include it in this month’s list. Sometimes an object is so beautiful that its primary function becomes secondary. I don’t care if the pictures this device takes are good or not; I just want to hold it.
ChangeTheHeaders・“ChangeTheHeaders is a Safari extension for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS that allows you to customize HTTP request headers such as Accept, Accept-Language, Cookie, and User-Agent.”
Valesuchi & Matias Aguayo – Nasty Woman・An eight-year-old brilliant remix that I really enjoyed then, which feels even more essential today. From the article on Remezcla: “The track samples a speech from actress Ashley Judd, who recites 19-year-old Tennessee poet Nina Donovan’s spoken word missilery launched at ‘a man whose words are a distraction to America.’”
Train bien: a collection of Tokyo transit tickets from the 80s・My train tickets have never looked this good, and it’s not even close. For print, I can hear and understand the excuses, but for digital tickets? Why isn’t there more art around the plain QR codes?
The New Swiss Passport・Obviously, there is some Helvetica involved. (via Kottke)
Teen Warned Not To Accept Group Chat Invites From National Security Advisors She Doesn’t Know・I also laughed to tears reading this one.
More “Blend of links” posts here
For a few weeks, I’ve been trying out new things on the design of this blog. Every day, I visited my site and used the “Inspect Element” option on Safari to tweak a few things, to see if I could refresh its visual style without having to put in too much work.1
Until today, I’ve always ended these 5-minute experiments with a thought along the lines of “Nah, let it go, it looks good enough already.” But the seed was planted: it was already too late. So there it is, live. I’ll reuse Jason Kottke’s formula if you want to see it for yourself:
RSS reader folk, you’re going to have to click through to the actual WWW to see these…don’t be scared, you can do it.
I’ve always avoided serif fonts because to me they looked too serious for what I write on this blog. But recently, I’ve warmed to Charter, and even Times New Roman, which somehow doesn’t look like the boring legacy default font it used to be. I’m sure the now ubiquitous presence of Calibri, Segoe UI, San Francisco, Roboto, and even Inter, have something to do with my new perspective on it.
A nice bonus of this new CSS, falling back to serif instead of sans-serif, is that readers without Helvetica Neue on their machines — aka Windows users — won’t risk seeing Arial anymore. You’re welcome.
I also got rid of the meta name="color-scheme" which turned on a “dark mode,” depending on the reader’s display settings. Texts don’t look as good when printed white on black using serif fonts, and I guess most of you read this via your RSS reader anyway, so this extra line of code in the header felt a little overkill.
Another good reason for this spring update is that I now live in a new home with my wife, so I figured that celebrating a new home with a new look for my home on the internet was a good idea.
Moving to our freshly built flat, which we bought 18 months ago, is also the main reason why I’ve been posting so little these last few weeks. Between work — which has been crazy on its own — and the million things to do when moving out, my energy levels were too low to even think about writing something in my spare time.2 The last four weeks were very intense, but from now on, everything should slowly go back to normal.
The Now page has also been updated accordingly, but I wanted this spring update to have its own entry in the archive.
As I am launching BBEdit to start this new post, there is a sense of pointlessness raining on me. World news, with the U.S. at the epicentre, seriously stinks these days. Whatever topic I choose to ramble on about today, I already know that it won’t make the bitter taste in my mouth go away. This is why I wonder if I should even bother writing about it, in the face of all the fascism, oligarchies, racism, billionaires, hatred, lies, imperialism, and imminent doom running around.
But if writing, as a meditative activity, can help me feel more hopeful and joyful for at least a few minutes, I’ll take it. If reading what I have to say about software features, app updates, or a new internet service manages to lift the spirit of someone for the three minutes it will take to read this, I’ll take it too. If this post somehow manages to trigger somebody else to do the same, in turn motivating someone else and so on, we are talking about a non-negligible amount of time spent not thinking: “The world is going to hell with itself.”
This is why today I decided to share my thoughts on a seemingly underrated feature of technology: delayed actions. I’m talking about the “delayed start” option of washing machines and the “send later” feature of Slack, Apple Messages, and some email clients. This feature, in the middle of others, may be unremarkable, but the more I think about it, the more I realise it is a wonderful thing, perfectly suited to our times and busy lives.
For example, when I wake up early in the morning and read something funny or interesting, I immediately want to share it. But at six o’clock in the morning, I know the people I want to send it to would either be sleeping or thinking “what the hell does Nicolas want at this hour” and therefore not fully appreciate my little gem of a link, my digital present, my thoughtful message.
That’s when I use the Send Later feature. At six o’clock, I schedule the message for around 9:30 in the morning, a time of the day I know they will pay attention, when it won’t bother them, when they will take the time to answer and say something, I believe, along the lines of: “Thank you Nicolas. As always, your links are the height of my days, and I don’t know how you manage to always deliver such quality. You must have a special talent; I’m so glad to know you and to have you in my life.”
In short, it lets me take care of things in the moment, so I don’t have to think about them later or risk forgetting, all while ensuring the timing works for when it actually happens, for maximum convenience.
I also use this Send Later feature all the time at work. I like to work early in the day, sending emails and catching up with Slack messages from the previous day. What I do is schedule most of these messages and replies to be sent from 9 am, so that my colleagues, in the case where they check their messages on their phones while commuting, don’t feel pressured by a morning person like myself, already bothering them at 7:30 am or something.
This feature has become such a big part of my daily habits that I miss it when it is not available (this is how you know a feature is good). On WhatsApp for example, what I do instead is let messages remain unsent as drafts, but it’s not as clean as the Send Later functionality.
Not only do I miss the feature when I expect it and it’s not there, like on a messaging app, but I also wish it was available on other devices and appliances. Our Roomba vacuum cleaner is frustrating for this reason. It can be scheduled via the app, sure, but there is not a proper “Start Later” option. You either “Start Now” or create a regular schedule. I would love a quicker-to-use “Start Later” button and a second screen asking me if I want to start in 10, 30, 60, 120 minutes or something. My basic washing machine offers this feature, but not a robot vacuum cleaner. Call me unimpressed.
This feature is not the same as procrastinating or a read-it-later tool. When I add an article to my read-it-later app of choice, GoodLinks, I still have to read the article later; I just postpone the actual action. At work, when I decide to work on a task the next day, I may clear my day, but the work still needs to be done.
The joy of using a “Send or Start Later” feature comes from the fact that your share of the task is done instantly. The rest of the action is the device’s, the app’s, or the machine’s problem. You click on “Send Later”, and you’re done. When I delay the start of my washing machine cycle until the moment I leave the flat, I’m done: the laundry detergent and the dirty clothes are already in the machine. It’s just as good as launching the washing cycle immediately, but without the annoyance of the washing machine noise while I’m still there.
You’d think this simple feature would be more common, but, for instance, we had to wait for iOS 18 to get this feature on Apple Messages. I don’t know when it appeared on Slack, but it should have been one of the app features right from the start.
More apps and more devices supporting this option, please.