I didn't come across a whole lot of interesting links this month. Or maybe I did and just forgot to make a note of them? That's probably more likely. Either way, here are a few things I discovered and liked.

• As time passes, the larger our collection of digital stuff grows. Maybe whoami.wiki can help? "Your personal encyclopedia, written by agents". It's inevitable, but I'm not quite ready to hand it all over just yet.
• I visited New Orleans with work in 2023. I loved it and I want to go back and see it properly. I should probably do this soon because In paleo-climate terms, New Orleans is gone; the question is how long it has.
• P.T. Barnum wrote “The Art of Money Getting: The Golden Rules for Making Money” in 1880 at the age of 70. His advice is still on point today.
• As a photographer, I am literally obsessed with the Grainydays YouTube channel.
• Tapbots are launching Phoenix this summer, their Bluesky client. A tiny company worth supporting. They also make the wonderful Ivory for the Mastodon-inclined.
• I enjoyed this Radio 4 Americast episode with Scott Galloway – The political fight for American men. An important topic (not just for Americans).
• I thought I knew a lot about HTML but You don't know HTML Lists quite rightly makes me feel like an amateur. Fascinating.
• 37signals launched Basecamp 5 and it looks brilliant. If I was still running a multi-employee business, I would use Basecamp, 100%. I'm just a one-man band, so I use the wonderful (and free!) Fizzy, which is also by 37signals. They're on 🔥 these days.
• California seems to be way ahead with self-driving taxis, and upstart Zoox looks brilliant. The design is polarising, but I'm a fan – they seem very practical. I feel bad for taxi drivers because the writing's on the wall, yet I'd love to see these on the streets of Edinburgh one day.
• Bubbles is like Hacker News but for independent blogs. I'm probably late to the party, but I love it – what a great idea.
• Is AI profitable yet? 😬
• If you’re feeling creative, make your own 8-page zine at home with the awesome Dirty Little Zine.
• Thank you John Gruber for calling out the veritable scourge of incessant popovers, or “dickovers” as he has christened them.

• There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate. Cal Newport teaches us how to avoid ultra-processed digital content (short-form social media, basically) in the same way we've learned to avoid Frankenfoods. "Our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains." One answer? Read.
• The bot situation on the internet is actually worse than you could imagine. Here's why. Even at Pagecord’s minuscule scale bots are a significant problem. Articles like this area great. Onwards! 🤺
• A brief history of domains is great for internet history nerds like myself.
• I was pretty obsessed with the Artemis II mission and this video of the launch from the ISS is amazing.
• How to end your extremely online era is an excellent essay from Tommy Dixon. We should all think long and hard about this.
• The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind. Companies know how much they spend on software developers, but do they know what they get for their money?
• We hear a lot about the future of software engineering in the age of AI. Christopher Meiklejohn argues that Software Engineering Is Becoming Civil Engineering.
• Tiny Start is a minimal launcher for macOS – a simpler Spotlight replacement than Alfred or Raycast. I like the idea but I don't think it can replace Raycast for me just yet.
• Umarell are men of retirement age who spend their time watching construction sites, offering unrequested advice to the workers.
• Austin Bell photographed all 2,549 outdoor basketball courts in Hong Kong. A wonderful photo project.
• I absolutely need a side quest to north Wales 🦈
• Noah Hawley wrote a fascinating article in The Atlantic, What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat. "I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.”

Links of note, unearthed from web surfing over the last few weeks.

• 🛰 Check out what the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes are looking at, in real time. https://spacetelescopelive.org
• 🖌️ A collection of beautiful web user interface designs, components and pages. Wonderful! https://detail.design
• 👩‍🎨 See how to write modern CSS vs the old way with this collection of snippets. Quaint, given that typing code into a text editor is quickly becoming a dying art. https://modern-css.com
• 🌱 Oat is an ultra-lightweight, semantic UI library with zero dependencies. I love stuff like this.
• 💻 Uh oh. The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored is an excellent long read.
• ❎ Charli XCX has a blog (on Substack tho', boooo)
• 🗣️ Phanpy (don't like the name, soz) is a very nice minimalist theme for Mastodon
• 🌐 Flickr’s URLs scheme is the subject on the excellent Unsung heroes blog
• 🎵 The Bandcamp Bluesky feed is an excellent source of new music recommendations
• 🤖 Chinese humanoid robots are very impressive. They're the H2 model from Unitree I think.
• 🤖🤖 The Guardian published an excellent long read about this. Inside China’s robotics revolution
•  I liked this documentary from WSJ. Inside Apple’s Multibillion-Dollar Push to Make Chips in the U.S.
• 🧑‍🎨 Another excellent resource of UI components. https://component.gallery
• 🔒 Pagecord uses Cloudflare Turnstile but perhaps Friendly Captcha is a better alternative? It promises "Truly Invisible CAPTCHA".

Rather than post individually about interesting articles, sites, apps and so on, I thought I'd collate them into a single post over a given week. To kick this series off, here are a few things I found interesting over the past week while wandering the web.

• It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. An absolutely brilliant article on the user interface design mess in MacOS Tahoe, and how it breaks long-standing design guidelines. The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe is another hatchet job. I ain’t upgrading!

• Microsoft have renamed Office to "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app". This isn't a parody. Maybe I'm getting old but I think this is the most numbnuts product decision I've ever heard of.

• I came across yet another Chromium-based browser, Helium – a “private, fast, and honest web browser” according to GitHub (it's open source).
  
  I've been trying to use Safari for the past year or two and I've now pretty much given up on the Mac because of bugs and performance issues (and this is without upgrading to Tahoe which, I’m told, makes it even worse). I tried Orion but it felt like a worse Safari. I've always liked the experience of Chrome, but the Google spyware version gives me the heebies. I've tried Arc (⚰️), Brave and others, but the minimalism of Helium is more what I'm after. First impressions are great, I'll see how it goes.
• MTV Rewind is simply wonderful. A retro time machine of over 30,000 videos across the MTV decades. Strong Poolsuite vibes.
• Mole is a terminal-based, open source app for cleaning up your Mac. Handy and seems effective.
• Inside the sub-zero lair of the world's most powerful computer. Google‘s Willow looks like something from the 1960s but it‘s a Nobel prize winning quantum computer. Read this to learn about the future.
• Just Cancel allows you to upload a couple of months of bank statements and it will tell you how much dough you’re dropping on subscriptions each month that you probably forgot about. You can run it locally as a Claude Code skill for utmost privacy.
• Google AI + Boston Dynamics robotics "to Bring Foundational Intelligence to Humanoid Robots". Terrifying and exciting at the same time. I'm increasingly confident that I'll have my own C3PO before I pop my clogs.

Until next time.