The kickers always win
Kickers are athletes that still have the ability to sprint at the end of an endurance race.
Source: https://www.eddiedale.com/blog/the-kickers-always-win
The album that was 30 years in the making
This debut (and only) album by German actress and singer-songwriter Sibylle Baier was released in 2006 but recorded over 30 years prior in her own home. Here's the album on Spotify: Colour Green – Sibylle Baier
Want to write better copy?
3 questions to ask yourself when writing copy (by Harry Dry, creator of Marketing Examples):
- Can I visualize it?
- Can I falsify it?
- Can nobody else say this?
Source: https://youtu.be/TUMjnmfsPeM
Emotional Labour
Emotional labour is a form of labour that represents the effort required to manage and control one’s emotions in order to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Think about a waitress that pretends that your joke was funny. It is a concept that was first introduced by sociologist Arlie Hochschild.
Source: https://youtu.be/XiwUDzyACWY
Blue Zones
“Blue Zones” are regions of the world where people live significantly longer than the average. The common denominator for the lifestyle of the people living there is a natural diet (low-processed food), a lot of physical activity (walking, gardening, etc.), and generally a pre-modern way of living without the problems of the modern world (like stress). Some places in the Blue Zone are Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Ikaria (Greece), and Loma Linda (California).
Source: https://www.srf.ch/news/gesellschaft/hohe-lebenserwartung-blue-zones-der-schluessel-zum-langen-leben
Exophony
I now finally have a word for what I do on this website: Exophony – writing in a language that is not my mother tongue. Wikipedia also has a list of exophonic writers (that are way more famous than I am).
Rivers of Babylon
The famous song by is based on psalms (19 & 137) from the Hebrew Bible.
Source: https://pca.st/8ypfdts9
You have a Jennifer Aniston neuron
This hypothetical neuron is officially called a “grandmother cell”, but I like the other name more. Research has shown, that when presented with a concept you already know, the same very specific set of neurons fires in your brain (no matter if you see Jennifer Aniston in an Episode of Friends or on a gala photo). It’s like a little detector in your brain.
Memories are essentially replays of neural firing patterns
That’s also how déjà vus work. Your brain plays a similar pattern to one it’s played earlier, and you feel like you’ve experienced it before (I’m not sure though if that’s really based on the newest scientific findings, so don’t quote me on it).
Source: https://pca.st/episode/d8d186e1-afef-4080-8c5f-0e896b59163d
Switzerland is the second oldest democracy in the world
It's been one since 1848. The United States is the oldest democracy in the world (1789), third place goes to New Zealand (1857).
Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies/
Landlocked countries
A landlocked country is a country that does not have a coastline. Worldwide, there are 44 of them. Kazakhstan is the world’s largest, while Ethiopia is the most populous one.
A double-landlocked country, on the other hand, is a landlocked country that is entirely surrounded by other landlocked countries. There are only two double-landlocked countries in the world (Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan).
What3Words Algorithm
There is a geocoding system that divides the world into 3×3m squares and assigns three words to each of them. Need an example? The best place to get pizza in Bern is at this location: ///cuts.deserved.cave.
Source: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/what3words-the-algorithm/
A key principle of test-driven development…
…is making the error message change. That sounds so simple yet so effective.
Source: https://laracasts.com/series/30-days-to-learn-laravel-11/episodes/29
Time Billionaire
If you are in your 20s, you are a Time Billionaire – twice. A Time Billionaire is someone who has (statistically speaking) more than one billion seconds left to live.
Source: https://www.sahilbloom.com/newsletter/the-time-billionaire-a-concept-that-changed-my-life
Calculator Spelling
There are a ton of words you can spell with your calculator. Way more than I thought.
Source: https://paperlined.org/apps/wikipedia/offsite_content/Calculator_spelling.txt
The Philosophy Game
Apparently, always clicking the first link of a Wikipedia article will send you to the same page in the end: Philosophy (at least in 97.3% of cases)
Source: https://youtu.be/-llumS2rA8I
I’ve been diving into the indie web world these past few days.
Really like it so far, so I’ve decided to be more active on Mastodon (and probably less active on here – at least for now).
Feel free to join me :D
https://mastodon.design/@dominik
Every time OpenAI announces something new is an opportunity to clean your feed from these “this changes everything” compilation-thread-accounts, who all post the exact same examples.
Not sure if I should be grateful for that or not…
RSS feeds are one of the best inventions of the internet age.
My problem with it is that many popular readers are very cluttered and not that great to use.
One day, I’ll build a clean and minimal RSS feed reader myself.
Great example of an interesting post that has just an equally wholesome and informative reply section 🙌 https://xcancel.com/neuranne/status/1756602062865932429
The floating notes in @raycastapp are becoming my favorite feature of this otherwise already great app.
Map it to a shortcut (⌥ + ⇧ + Q for me) and you can write things down and forget about them without losing focus.
Feels like a better braindump.txt
Seeing this also makes me more confident in my decision of learning @laravelphp.
For years, my TL was full of praisings for JS metaframeworks but in the last couple of months, I've definitely seen a shift.
- with @inertiajs, I can still use my fav js frameworks on the FE :) https://xcancel.com/Shpigford/status/1753188910304301260
First non-fiction read of 2024 ☑️
Reading about a more utopian vision of the future definitely makes me more optimistic that humanity can solve some of its biggest challenges in the near(ish) future.
English title is “Utopia for Realists”.
Been enjoying tinkering with @laravelphp lately, feels like a breath of fresh air coming from js-metaframework-land.
TIL – seems like a great CSS property to solve z-index hell. https://xcancel.com/devongovett/status/1749858152072249823
Currently helping @cedric_design with some advanced code overrides for the new Dark platform.
Working with custom code in @framer always makes me better at understanding the nitty-gritty details of React that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
Love it!
Show thread (2 posts)
Since everyone is currently sharing their @code setups, here's mine.
Always a wip and heavily inspired by some of the setups I saw earlier this week.
Might create my own theme on day though 🤔
Handy @webflow tip to apply custom CSS only on the published site, not in the editor.
Place this attribute selector before the regular one: [data-wf-domain].
Useful if you have elements, that are moved out of view/blurred/… per default.
TIL, that there is a vector-effect property for SVGs.
It allows you to specify whether or not the stroke width is dependent on transformations applied to the SVG.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/vector-effect
Show thread (2 posts)
Minimal apps ftw! https://xcancel.com/raffichill/status/1726284792478761335
CS50 015
Started with lecture 3 – Algorithms
Back from Seoul, which means I have time to continue with CS50 🥳
Really enjoying learning about the more theoretical aspects of cs. E.g. I've heard of “Big O notation” before, but now I know what it actually means.
I think I just found the fluid typo tool of my dreams. This kind of thing was always on my “want-to-build”-list, but apparently, it already exists 🙌
https://www.fluid-type-scale.com
Show thread (2 posts)
CS50 014
Problem set 2 done.
After a little break, I finally completed pset 2.
After Readability, I chose Wordle and it was pretty challenging. I'd say not as much as last week's problem due to the boilerplate code, but nonetheless very tricky.
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“We already need more ephemerality within our digital lives… and we certainly don’t need more permanence seeping into our physical lives”
Couldn't have said it better! https://xcancel.com/julesterpak/status/1708960769885295076
“The best things asymptote to zero dollars per use over their lifetime.” https://xcancel.com/kepano/status/1708499101778923647
CS50 013
Finished lecture 2 – Arrays
Things are ramping up a bit, but still very comprehensible and interesting. It was really satisfying to see, how the puzzle pieces began to click together towards the end of the lecture.
Curious, what the problem sets are about 👀
Show thread (3 posts)
CS50 012
Continued with lecture 2 – Arrays
Most disappointing thing was to learn that arrays in C don't have a length property like in essentially every other language.
Well… I guess this makes me modern languages even more – once again 🙃
