Hacking the Prime Minister #

Alex's "Do not get arrested challenge 2020" is the best thing I've read all week.

Somewhere around:

I called at least 30 phone numbers, to say nothing of The Emails. If you laid all the people I contacted end to end along the equator, they would die, and you would be arrested.

I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my chair.

Talking About Time

I understand that dealing with time is hard, but it would be nice to be able to include a time in a message and have it automatically convert from my local time to the local time of the person I'm sending the message to.

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Whisper & Explosion & Subtitles

Panel 1: A TV set shows the title screen for

"Whisper and Explosion" is an excellent comic by J. L. Westover that I'm reminded of just about every time I watch an action movie or TV show without subtitles.

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James Hong - Great Big Story #

I've seen James Hong's performances many times, but they only account for a tiny portion of his extraordinary number of roles.

I first started recognizing him after his voice acting for Covetous Shen in Diablo III. He really leaned into the rich texture of his voice for Shen, which made Shen stand out as particularly memorable to me. Every time James appears in a TV show or movie I'm watching, I think to myself "It's Covetous Shen!"

Leading Trim #

This will be a great tool if it gets standardized and implemented. I've had a few projects where heading and paragraph spacing were important for their design systems, and this would have come in handy rather than needing to rely on a handful of work-arounds and approximations.

Duration Notation

One of the things that comes up pretty frequently in JavaScript are time spans. Animations, request timeouts, debounce delays, and throttles all need time spans to be specified. They come up quite frequently, but are—almost as often—inscrutable.

Don't believe me?

How long is 360000?

How about 3600000?

Did you have to count the number of zeros?

...and then do some mental math to try to figure out how much time is meant?

It's exactly these sorts of issues that lead to buggy behavior, where a 30 second timeout could turn into 3 seconds as easily as 5 minutes.

Fortunately there are a few techniques that can make time spans much easier to work with.

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Oh shit, git! #

I've been using Git for years, but I've never been great with Git CLI or really understood the inner workings.

Julia Evans does good work, so I'm definitely going to check this out.

Looking Both Ways

2020 is like looking both ways before crossing the street, and then being hit by a plane.

Cleaning Your Desktop and Downloads

I don't like having a messy desktop.

I know many people who use their desktop as temporary storage for random files, but seeing lots of files all over a desktop gives me anxiety.

Instead, I prefer to use the downloads folder for temp storage. I have my browser settings set to download files directly to the downloads folder without asking, and I can quickly manage files from there.

I don't like having a messy downloads folder either, but I only ever see it when I'm moving files in or out of it so it's not so bad.

Regardless of what folder you use for temporary storage, over time there is a tendency for files to start to collect.

I'm usually pretty good about deleting old downloads, particularly if they're just installers, or copies of files that I've got stored elsewhere, like email attachments or cloud storage.

Even still, every now and then there are files that linger. Files that I've either downloaded or created that don't really belong in any of my existing folders. Sometimes they're text files with notes. Sometimes they're PDFs that I want to read and delete that I just never seem to get around to dealing with.

If any of this sounds familiar, there's a simple system I use to keep my downloads folder tidy and my files organized. It's easy to remember, and it doesn't take much time or energy.

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Invert, Always Invert #

I read this post last week and it resonated with me.

I particularly liked the quote by Charlie Munger at the end:

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Multi-Colored SVG Symbol Icons with CSS Variables #

This is a great read on setting up themable icon packs.

The technique requires CSS custom properties, but at this point it's reasonably safe to drop IE11 support (for most projects) in favor of the better security, performance, and tooling offered by modern evergreen browsers.