For many children, fire is a harmless, pleasant addition to their lives. But for some it can become an all-consuming passion. If your child seems to be growing unhealthily attached to the fire, don’t wait to talk to him about it. Source: Limiting Your Child’s Fire Time: A Guide for Concerned Paleolithic Parents | The New Yorker

WinterCharm (reddit): Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker. I love how the HomePod sounds, but I have no way to quantify it. I’ll just link to this instead. About the automatic room correction: To have this sort of thing be a built in feature of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) inside the speaker that is, for all intents and purposes omnidirectional, allowing it to adapt to any room, no matter how imperfect, is just beyond impressive.

The first draft of my earlier rant about images on blog posts used the following screenshot as an example: The screenshot is of a Medium post by Andy Sparks about his new service, Holloway, (which looks awesome, by the way). Poking around the Holloway site, I found the About page, on which was the photograph from the Medium post, with the following caption: A holloway is an old English term for a sunken lane arising from centuries of use.

Allow me a brief rant about the trend of putting ginormous, unnecessary images at the top of every single blog post or article. Here it is: Please don’t always include ginormous, unnecessary images at the top of every single blog post or article. That would be great, thanks. I haven’t read the entire Terms of Service for Medium.com, but I assume there must be a clause that says “You must place an image of at least 1800×1300 pixels above any useful article text, no matter the length of the article itself.

Frank Chimero: If you go talk to a senior software developer, you’ll probably hear them complain about spaghetti code. This is when code is overwrought, unorganized, opaque, and snarled with dependencies. I perked up when I heard the term used for the first time, because, while I can’t identify spaghetti code as a designer, I sure as hell know about spaghetti workflows and spaghetti toolchains. It feels like we’re there now on the web.

John Herrman (NYT Mag): I wouldn’t say my old electronics always aged gracefully, but their obsolescence wasn’t a death sentence. My old digital camera doesn’t do what some new cameras do — but it’s still a camera. My iPad, by contrast, feels as though it has been abandoned from on high, cut loose from the cloud on which it depends. … Above all, my old iPad has revealed itself as a cursed object of a modern sort.

Once in a while Emacs and/or Org mode throws me a curveball. Today’s example is that suddenly I couldn’t run anything using Org-babel. Trying to do so would result in something like… evaluation of this R code block is disabled I noticed the following error during startup… Invalid function: org-babel-header-args-safe-fn Based on a recommendation in this Github issue I ran spacemacs/recompile-elpa, relaunched Emacs, and all is well.

My electric kettle stopped working recently, so I decided to make a large format photograph of it before throwing it away. Electric Kettle. Crown Graphic, HP5+, FF Monobath I’ve used this kettle for a couple of years, but we never got along well. I liked the very controlled pour it allows, but all those buttons just to make some water hot? I had to pull my tea kettle out of storage, so I made a photo of that, too.

After spending a few days with Ubuntu and Gnome (see My Linux Experience Day Two) I wanted a chance to finally try a “tiling” window manager. I’ve heard that they’re difficult at first but awesome once you’ve gotten the hang of it. Sounds right up my alley, so I installed xmonad, rebooted, logged in, and… Nothing. The login area faded away and the screen stayed exactly the same, but empty. I had expected a blank screen because that’s what xmonad starts with, so thought maybe this was it.

I’ve updated the “Stuff I Use” page and renamed it “Life Stack” because that seems to be the thing now. It’s kind of crazy and a little embarrassing that I have and actually use so much stuff. My Life Stack.

That was wonderfully uncomfortable. Via Letterboxd

Lindsey West (NYT): I no longer feel like my brain is trapped in a centrifuge filled with swastikas and Alex Jones’s spittle. Time is finite, and now I have more of it. And also… Quitting Twitter is just a thing that you can do. I mention it only because there was a time when I didn’t think it was a thing that I could do, and then I did it, and now my life is better.