Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 30

Scale

A few years back, Jessica got a ceiling fan for our living room. This might seem like a strange decision, considering we live in England. Most of the time, the problem in this country is that it���s too cold.

But then you get situations like this week, when the country experienced the hottest temperatures ever recorded. I was very, very grateful for that ceiling fan. It may not get used for most of the year, but on the occasions when it���s needed, it���s a godsend. And it���s going to get used more and more often, given the inexorable momentum of the climate emergency.

Even with the ceiling fan, it was still very hot in the living room. I keep my musical instruments in that room, and they all responded to the changing temperature. The strings on my mandolin, bouzouki, and guitar went looser in the heat. The tuning dropped by at least a semitone.

I tuned them back up, but then I had to be careful when the extreme heat ended and the temperature began to drop. The strings began to tighten accordingly. My instruments went up a semitone.

I was thinking about this connection between sound and temperature when I was tuning the instruments back down again.

The electronic tuner I use shows the current tone in relation to the desired note: G, D, A, E. If the string is currently producing a tone that���s lower than, say, A, the tuner displays the difference on its little screen as lines behind the ideal A position. If the string is producing a tone higher than A, the lines appear in front of the desired note.

What if we thought about temperature like this? Instead of weather apps showing the absolute temperature in degrees, what if they showed the relative distance from a predefined ideal? Then you could see at a glance whether it���s a little cooler than you���d like, or a little hotter than you���d like.

Perhaps an interface like that would let you see at a glance how out of the tune the current temperature is.

Subscribing to newsletters

I like reading RSS feeds. I���ve written before about how my feed reader feels different to my email client:

When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I���m subscribed to, it doesn���t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed���a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar���but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That���s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.

Giles put it far better when described what using RSS feeds feels like:

To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I���m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn���t feel like a burden, it doesn���t feel like I���m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn���t feel like I���m just another number in the ads game.

To me, it feels good. It���s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn���t trying to constantly sell me things.

That���s why I feel somewhat conflicted about email newsletters. On the one hand, people are publishing some really interesting things in newsletters. On the hand, the delivery mechanism is email, which feels burdensome. Add tracking into the mix, and they can feel downright icky.

But never fear! My feed reader came to the rescue. Many newsletter providers also provide RSS feeds. NetNewsWire���my feed reader of choice���will try to find the RSS feed that corresponds to the newsletter. Hurrah!

I get to read newsletters without being tracked, which is nice for me. But I also think it would be nice to let the authors of those newsletters know that I���m reading. So here���s a list of some of the newsletters I���m currently subscribed to in my feed reader:

The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:

A newsletter for the terminally curious.

Sentiers by Patrick Tanguay:

A carefully curated selection of articles with thoughtful commentary on technology, society, culture, and potential futures.

The Fitzwilliam:

Policy, ethics and applied rationality with an Irish slant.

The Science Of Fiction:

How science shapes stories about the future and how stories about the future shape science.

Adjacent Possible by Steven Johnson:

Exploring where good ideas come from���and how to keep them from turning against us.

Faster, Please! by James Pethokoukis:

Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture.

undefended / undefeated by Sara Hendren:

Ideas at the heart of material culture���the everyday stuff in all our lives

Today in Tabs by Rusty Foster:

Your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletter.

The line-up for dConstruct 2022

The line-up for dConstruct 2022 is complete!

If you haven���t yet got your ticket, it���s not too late.

Now here���s the thing���

When I announced the event back in May, I said:

I���m currently putting the line-up together. I���m not revealing anything just yet, but trust me, you will want to be there.

I still haven���t revealed anything, and I���m kind of tempted to keep it that way. Imagine showing up at an event and not knowing who���s going to be speaking. Is this is the best idea or the worst idea?

I suspect I���m going to have to announce the line-up at some point, but today is not that day. I���m going to string it out a bit longer.

But I am going to describe the line-up. And I���m going to throw in a challenge. The first person to figure out the complete line-up gets a free ticket. Send a tweet to the @dConstruct Twitter account with your deductions.

Ready? Here���s who���s speaking at dConstruct 2022 on Friday, September 9th in The Duke Of Yorks in Brighton���

A technologist, product designer, and writer who defies categorisation. They���ve headed up a design studio, co-founded a start-up, and now consult on super-clever machine learning stuff. Their blog is brilliant.An award-winning author from South Africa whose work has recently been adapted for television. Some of their work is kind of sci-fi, some of it is kind of horror, some of it is kind of magical realism, and all of it is great.An artist and designer who has created logos and illustrations for NASA, Apple, and Intel as well as custom typefaces for British Airways and Waitrose. A lover of letterforms, they are now one of the world���s highest-profile calligraphers posting their mesmerising work on Instagram.A Canadian digital designer who has previously worked in the agency world, at Silicon Valley startups, and even venture capital. But now they���re doing truly meaningful work, designing for busy healthcare workers in low-income countries.A multi-instrumentalist musician, producer and robotic artist who composes for film, theatre and the concert stage. They play a mean theremin.An Australian designer and entrepreneur. They work in the cultural heritage sector and they���re an expert on digital archives. Their latest challenge is working out how to make an online photography archive last for 100 years.A tireless defender of web standards and co-author of the Inclusive Design Principles. They���re a member of the W3C Advisory Board and of the BIMA Inclusive Design Council. Expect some thoughtful takes on the intersection of accessibility and emerging technologies.A professor of neuroscience who is also a bestselling author. They conduct experiments on people���s brains and then talk about it afterwards. Their talks have been known to be mind-altering.

Sounds pretty freaking great, right?

Some further clues���

Many of these people have spoken at dConstruct in the past. After all, this year���s one-off event is going to be a kind of ���best of.��� So you might want to have a nose around the dConstruct archive.

Also, I���ve mentioned some nationalities like Australian, Canadian, and South African, but my self-imposed carbon footprint policy for this event forbids me from flying anyone in. So that���s a clue too.

The game is afoot! Tweet your deductions to the @dConstruct Twitter account or, even better, write a blog post and tweet the link, mentioning @dConstruct. The first correct answer gets a free ticket.

For everyone else, you can still get a ticket.

Negative

I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.

Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that���s okay���by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would���ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.

I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I���ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.

I���m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.

Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking ���I���m definitely coming back next year!���

Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it���s back for real, I wouldn���t miss it for the world.

My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!

Two books

I���ve mentioned before that I like to read a mixture of fiction of non-fiction. In fact, I try to alternate between the two. If I���ve just read some non-fiction, then I���ll follow it with a novel and I���ve just read some fiction, then I���ll follow it with some non-fiction.

But those categorisations can be slippery. I recently read two books that were ostensibly fiction but were strongly autobiographical and didn���t have the usual narrative structure of a novel.

Just to clarify, I���m not complaining! Quite the opposite. I enjoy the discomfort of not being able to pigeonhole a piece of writing so easily.

Also, both books were excellent.

The first one was A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann N�� Ghr��ofa. It���s sort of about the narrator���s obsessive quest to translate the Caoineadh Airt U�� Laoghaire. But it���s also about the translator���s life, which mirrors the author���s. And it���s about all life���life in its bodily, milky, bloody, crungey reality. The writing is astonishing, creating an earthy musky atmosphere. It feels vibrant and new but somehow ancient and eternal at the same time.

By contrast, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is rooted in technology. Reading the book feels like scrolling through Twitter, complete with nervous anxiety. Again, the narrator���s life mirrors that of the author, but this time the style has more of the arch detachment of the modern networked world.

It took me a little while at first, but then I settled into the book���s cadence and vibe. Then, once I felt like I had a handle on the kind of book I was reading, it began to subtly change. I won���t reveal how, because I want you to experience that change for yourself. It���s like a slow-building sucker punch.

When I started reading No One Is Talking About This, I thought it might end up being the kind of book where I would admire the writing, but it didn���t seem like a work that invited emotional connection.

I couldn���t have been more wrong. I can���t remember the last time a book had such an emotional impact on me. Maybe that���s because it so deliberately lowered my defences, but damn, when I finished reading the book, I was in pieces.

I���m still not quite sure how to classify A Ghost In The Throat or No One Is Talking About This but I don���t care. They���re both just great books.

UX FOMO

Today is the first day of UX London 2022 …and I���m not there. Stoopid Covid.

I���m still testing positive although I���m almost certainly near the end of my infection. But I don���t want to take any chances. Much as I hate to miss out on UX London, I would hate passing this on even more. So my isolation continues.

Chris jumped in at the last minute to do the hosting duties���thanks, Chris!

From the buzz I���m seeing on Twitter, it sounds like everything is going just great without me, which is great to see. Still, I���m experiencing plenty of FOMO���even more than the usual levels of FOMO I���d have when there���s a great conference happening that I���m not at.

To be honest, nearly all of my work on UX London was completed before the event. My number one task was putting the line-up together, and I have to say, I think I nailed it.

If I were there to host the event, it would mostly be for selfish reasons. I���d get a real kick out of introducing each one of the superb speakers. I���d probably get very tedious, repeatedly saying ���Oh, you���re going to love this next one!��� followed by ���Wasn���t that great������

But UX London isn���t about me. It���s about the inspiring talks and practical workshops.

I wish I were there to experience it in person but I can still bask in the glow of a job well done, hearing how much people are enjoying the event.

On reading

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder is a very short book. Most of the time, this is a feature, not a bug.

There are plenty of non-fiction books I���ve read that definitely could���ve been much, much shorter. Books that have a good sensible idea, but one that could���ve been written on the back of a napkin instead of being expanded into an arbitrarily long form.

In the world of fiction, there���s the short story. I guess the equivelent in the non-fiction world is the essay. But On Tyranny isn���t an essay. It���s got chapters. They���re just really, really short.

Sometimes that brevity means that nuance goes out the window. What might���ve been a subtle argument that required paragraphs of pros and cons in another book gets reduced to a single sentence here. Mostly that���s okay.

The premise of the book is that Trump���s America is comparable to Europe in the 1930s:

We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

But in making the comparison, Synder goes all in. There���s very little accounting for the differences between the world of the early 20th century and the world of the early 21st century.

This becomes really apparent when it comes to technology. One piece of advice offered is:

Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

Wait. He���s not actually saying that words on screens are in some way inherently worse than words on paper, is he? Surely that���s just the nuance getting lost in the brevity, right?

Alas, no:

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. … So get screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

I mean, I���m all for reading books. But books are about what���s in them, not what they���re made of. To value words on a page more than the same words on a screen is like judging a book by its cover; its judging a book by its atoms.

For a book that���s about defending liberty and progress, On Tyranny is puzzingly conservative at times.

Talking about style

I���ve published a transcription of the talk I gave at CSS Day:

In And Out Of Style.

The title is intended to have double meaning. The obvious reference is that CSS is about styling web pages. But the talk also covers some long-term trends looking at ideas that have appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Hence, style as in trends and fashion.

There are some hyperlinks in the transcript but I also published a list of links if you���re interested in diving deeper into some of the topics mentioned in the talk.

I also published the slides but, as usual, they don���t make much sense out of context. They���re on Noti.st too.

I made an audio recording for your huffduffing pleasure.

There are two videos of this talk. On Vimeo, there���s the version I pre-recorded for An Event Apart online. On YouTube, there���s the recording from CSS Day.

It���s kind of interesting to compare the two (well, interesting to me, anyway). The pre-recorded version feels like a documentary. The live version has more a different vibe and it obviously has more audience interaction. I think my style of delivery suits a live audience best.

I invite you to read, watch, or listen to In And Out Of Style, whichever you prefer.

Positive

That event in Berlin last week was by far the largest gathering of humans I���ve been with in over two years. If I was going to finally succumb to the ���rona, this was likely to be the place and time.

Sure enough, on my last day in Berlin I had a bit of a scratchy throat. I remained masked for the rest of the day for the travel back to England. Once I was back home I immediately tested and …nothing.

I guess it was just a regular sore throat after all.

Over the weekend the sore throat was accompanied by some sniffles. Just your typical cold symptoms. But I decided to be prudent and test again yesterday.

This time a very clear result was revealed. It was Covid-19 after all.

Today I was supposed to be travelling to Lille on the Eurostar to speak at a private event. Instead I���m isolating at home. My symptoms are quite mild. I feel worse about letting down the event organisers.

Still, better to finally get the novel coronavirus now rather than later in the month. I would hate to miss UX London. But I���m confident I���ll be recovered and testing negative by then.

For now I���ll be taking it easy and letting those magnificent vaccines do their work.

Backup

I���m standing on a huge stage in a giant hangar-like room already filled with at least a thousand people. More are arriving. I���m due to start speaking in a few minutes. But there���s a problem with my laptop. It connects to the external screen, then disconnects, then connects, then disconnects. The technicians are on the stage with me, quickly swapping out adaptors and cables as they try to figure out a fix.

This is a pretty standard stress dream for me. Except this wasn���t a dream. This was happening for real at the giant We Are Developers World Congress in Berlin last week.

In the run-up to the event, the organisers had sent out emails about providing my slide deck ahead of time so it could go on a shared machine. I understand why this makes life easier for the people running the event, but it can be a red flag for speakers. It���s never quite the same as presenting from your own laptop with its familiar layout of the presentation display in Keynote.

Fortunately the organisers also said that I could present from my own laptop if I wanted to so that���s what I opted for.

One week before the talk in Berlin I was in Amsterdam for CSS Day. During a break between talks I was catching up with Michelle. We ended up swapping conference horror stories around technical issues (prompted by some of our fellow speakers having issues with Keynote on the brand new M1 laptops).

Michelle told me about a situation where she was supposed to be presenting from her own laptop, but because of last-minute technical issues, all the talks were being transferred to a single computer via USB sticks.

���But the fonts!��� I said. ���Yes���, Michelle responded. Even though she had put the fonts on the USB stick, things got muddled in the rush. If you open the Keynote file before installing the fonts, Keynote will perform font substitution and then it���s too late. This is exactly what happened with Michelle���s code examples, messing them up.

���You know���, I said, ���I was thinking about having a back-up version of my talks that���s made entirely out of images���export every slide as an image, then make a new deck by importing all those images.���

���I���ve done that���, said Michelle. ���But there isn���t a quick way to do it.���

I was still thinking about our conversation when I was on the Eurostar train back to England. I had plenty of time to kill with spotty internet connectivity. And that huge Berlin event was less than a week away.

I opened up the Keynote file of the Berlin presentation. I selected File, Export to, Images.

Then I created a new blank deck ready for the painstaking work that Michelle had warned me about. I figured I���d have to drag in each image individually. The presentation had 89 slides.

But I thought it was worth trying a shortcut first. I selected all of the images in Finder. Then I dragged them over to the far left column in Keynote, the one that shows the thumbnails of all the slides.

It worked!

Each image was now its own slide. I selected all 89 slides and applied my standard transition: a one second dissolve.

That was pretty much it. I now had a version of my talk that had no fonts whatsoever.

If you���re going to try this, it works best if don���t have too many transitions within slides. Like, let���s say you���ve got three words that you introduce���by clicking���one by one. You could have one slide with all three words, each one with its own build effect. But the other option is to have three slides: each one like the previous slide but with one more word added. If you use that second technique, then the exporting and importing will work smoothly.

Oh, and if you have lots and lots of notes, you���ll have to manually copy them over. My notes tend to be fairly minimal���a few prompts and the occasional time check (notes that say ���5 minutes��� or ���10 minutes��� so I can guage how my pacing is going).

Back to that stage in Berlin. The clock is ticking. My laptop is misbehaving.

One of the other speakers who will be on later in the day was hoping to test his laptop too. It���s H��kon. His presentation includes in-browser demos that won���t work on a shared machine. But he doesn���t get a chance to test his laptop just yet���my little emergency has taken precedent.

���Luckily���, I tell him, ���I���ve got a backup of my presentation that���s just images to avoid any font issues.��� He points out the irony: we spent years battling against the practice of text-as-images on the web and now here we are using that technique once again.

My laptop continues to misbehave. It connects, it disconnects, connects, disconnects. We���re going to have to run the presentation from the house machine. I���m handed a USB stick. I put my images-only version of the talk on there. I���m handed a clicker (I can���t use my own clicker with the house machine). I���m quickly ushered backstage while the MC announces my talk, a few minutes behind schedule.

It works. It feels a little strange not being able to look at my own laptop, but the on-stage monitors have the presentation display including my notes. The unfamiliar clicker feels awkward but hopefully nobody notices. I deliver my talk and it seems to go over well.

I think I���ll be making image-only versions of all my talks from now on. Hopefully I won���t ever need them, but just knowing that the backup is there is reassuring.

Mind you, if you���re the kind of person who likes to fiddle with your slides right up until the moment of presenting, then this technique won���t be very useful for you. But for me, not being able to fiddle with my slides after a certain point is a feature, not a bug.