Detailed photo essay of making the table for the G7 summit – nice details about the challenges with the oak veneer and the design for hidden power and data ports that can be updated as technology evolves.
I am unspeakably bad at Hued. I have bad intuition for how hue and saturation change a color, and for guessing what the hint text is referring to. Turning on fine-tune mode with the crosshairs in the lower left helps a bit.
This got covered all over, but here’s Soundslice’s accounting of their decision to add a feature to their software because ChatGPT kept falsely claiming it existed. The conclusion: “My feelings on this are conflicted. I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?”
This short video generating interest in the (now closed) playtest of Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts is intriguing. A perusal of the game’s Steam page suggests that you can take on assignments for manuscript illuminations, with the game providing a suite of prefab illumination elements for you to use and adjust to meet those tasks. Looks entertaining and relaxing.
I’ve been pretty happy using feedly as my RSS reader but saw some good reviews recently for Inoreader and played with it a bit. Looks like a fine option as well, but nothing different enough in it to make me switch at this point. Tapestry gets good reviews, including for its incorporation of social media feeds alongside RSS feeds, but I’m not in the iOS ecosystem.
Good books from July: Finally got around to reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, recommended years ago by a friend. I’m really glad I forgot which other books I enjoyed led to the recommendation (I’m guessing it was from talking about how much I enjoyed Connie Willis) and went in with absolutely no clue what it would be about – probably going to be one of my favorites of the year.
Byte magazine August 1983: throwback to when print buffers were an exciting productivity tool you could buy, not just how the world works. Having a microbuffer means you also get to have a full turkey for dinner on a random work day.
