Van Paugam has been putting out these awesome mixtapes of 1980s Japanese City Pop, and now there’s a 24/7 streaming channel. It’s hard to argue with that pitch:
Travel back in time through the haze of memories that aren’t your own, and melodies frozen in a particular place in history.
An excellent collection for your Tuesday blues. Ray sez:
After seeing them all together, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this could have been the Dribbble popular page about 5-6 years ago.
I totally see it, yeah.
Turns out: No, because they’re already working.
Calls to increase work requirements among those receiving government assistance should recognize that most poor adults are already working, looking for work, or are disabled or ill. Increasing work among the poor may require addressing barriers to work including work-limiting disability or illness.
The Awl and The Hairpin were the Good Blogs. Sad to see them go, excited to see what replaces them.
The FCC, and it’s vile Head Liar Ajit Pai, withheld even more information from the American people than we already knew:
Internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request show that the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General—acting on orders from Congressional Republicans—investigated the claim that Obama interfered with the FCC’s net neutrality process and found it was nonsense. This Republican narrative of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the internet, then, was wholly refuted by an independent investigation and its findings were not made public prior to Thursday’s vote.
The longer this goes on the more obvious it becomes that Ajit Pai is a plant from Verizon, whose job is to torpedo Net Neutrality before he’s fired for incompetence. Congress can still stop the Verizon/FCC power grab by letting Congress know. We have to stop this asshole and the assholes that he works for. Join the Battle for Net Neutrality.
I did the voiceover for this video from our friends at Paracosm. It’s about Velodyne’s VLP-16 sensor and how it’s used in Paracosm’s PX-80 handheld scanner.
I’m back in the wiki game, this time it’s The Pro Wrestling Wiki. We’re going to become the one-stop shop for independent pro wrestling events, wrestlers, and history, without an agenda toward becoming advertising partners with some megacorp. Right now that means it’s me entering stuff in by hand and spinning up discrete linode servers.
Yee-haw.
A new project, using the blockchain to generate bail money for nonviolent offenders, who are often victims of racist policing and sentencing.
Here’s how it works: When you download the app, a small part of your computer’s unused processing power is redirected toward mining a popular cryptocurrency called Monero, which is secure, private, and untraceable. At the end of every month, we exchange the Monero for US dollars and donate the earnings to the Bronx Freedom Fund and through them, a new nation-wide initiative, The Bail Project.
Can’t speak highly enough of The New Inquiry, Bronx Freedom, and The Bail Project for running this. This is the kind of “technology changes lives” shit we need here in 2017. Save the “smart” shower curtain.
Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook:
“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Gosh, I bet he’s keeping the millions of dollars he personally made off of all this, though, isn’t he?
Friend of the site and genuinely decent human being Josh Millard gave this talk at DonutJS, October 2017. Mefi remains one of the vital communities on the web, and there’s nobody better in the world to run it than Josh.
A twitter thread from @gravislizard. Start here.
Gunpei Yokoi’s legacy is one of sensible choices and thoughtful compromise. I admire him greatly as a professional. Jeremy Parish has a retrospective on Retronauts.com:
Yokoi liked to create gadgets. More than that, he liked to come up with clever hacks. He had a keen eye for simple but unexpected ideas that would translate into fun toys, along with an unerring sense of how to make those products affordable for the widest audience possible. Rather than saving costs by using cheap materials, Yokoi preferred to match low prices to premium quality production by making cuts at the conceptual level.
Same, Gunpei. Same.
Had the good fortune of seeing a rare 70mm edition of this classic film last week, this is an excellent follow-up.
The announced it by way of a little microsite. The KORG apps for DS are a ton of fun, I have a feeling this one will be even better.
The app is now available for Windows, macOS, Debian-based linux distros. You should be using Signal if you ever talk about anything to anyone.
Ed Fries tracks down the first ever ROM programmed for a video game, older than previously-found chips. What a find.
Apparently, keyboard latency has gotten measurably worse over time– computers in the 1970s had faster keyboard input that we do today. The post does a good job of debunking several of the most common BS claims made by “gaming” keyboard manufacturers, too. They aren’t any faster than regular ‘ol consumer-grade keyboards, and in some cases slower!
Most keyboards add enough latency to make the user experience noticeably worse, and keyboards that advertise speed aren’t necessarily faster. The two gaming keyboards we measured weren’t faster than non-gaming keyboards, and the fastest keyboard measured was a minimalist keyboard from Apple that’s marketed more on design than speed.
RIP, Brain. He’s arguing with a gorilla in a suit right now if there’s any justice in the universe.
ALA was instrumental to my start in this business. I both bless and curse them for this. Here’s the Patreon. It’s a move I am fully in favor of. Death to ads.
We’re getting rid of advertisers and digging back to our roots: community-based, community-built, and determinedly non-commercial. If you want to highlight local events or innovations, expand your skills, give back, or explore any other goal or idea, we’re here to support you with networking and backing from the community.
I’ve never wanted any single object more than this one? If there is any decency left in the world this will get dumped and I will get to play it.
I can barely make words about this.
Phil Nelson