Links, August 16, 2024

plugdata: A visual programming environment for audio experimentation, prototyping and education

plugdata is a free/open-source visual programming environment based on pure-data. It is available for a wide range of operating systems, and can be used both as a standalone app, or as a VST3, LV2, CLAP or AU plugin.

I took this for a spin recently, it’s good. This is what open source software can be if it takes user interface design seriously.

Okay, I really like WezTerm

I tried it again with a bit more patience and I’m glad I did. My terminal is prettier than it’s ever been, more functional, and I can finally justify my mechanical keyboard purchase with all the keybindings I’ve configured.

WezTerm by Wez Furlong is an example of the above point about user interface design in open source software, and the lead of this article makes this point well: First impressions matter. WezTerm is extremely powerful and customizable, but the first-run experience is bad, and because it’s configured with Lua instead of a static config format, there’s a bit more friction in making it feel nice.

I’ve been using WezTerm for a few months now. This article does a great job of describing one way of making it feel nice.

Process Zero: The Anti-Intelligent Camera

As cameras make more and more creative choices on your behalf, we think the photographer should retain the agency to cast aside algorithms and do their own thing. Just as a photographer expresses themselves in their choice of lens, exposure settings, and film stock, Halide now lets you choose the process that works for you.

I’ve been making photographs for 40 years. I learned the technical aspects of the craft on an Olympus OM-1, a classic camera that is entirely manual. Thanks to Computational Photography, I can forget most of that when using my phone’s camera and focus on the essentials: framing and content. But a lot of times the “smart” camera in my phone is too smart for it’s own good.

I haven’t taken this mode of Halide out for a spin yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

selfhst

A wonderful resource for self-hosting your own server applications, including an extensive list of software you can self-host.

Automating Against Linkrot

With the Google URL Shortener joining the Google Graveyard, it’s a really good time to think about the longevity of links. I haven’t setup anything like this on this website, but I’ve thought about it, and it’s nice to see I’m not the only one.

Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock: Development without constraints isn’t engineering.

Not only are teams paying unexpectedly large premiums to keep the lights on, a decade of increasing JavaScript complexity hasn’t even delivered the better user experiences we were promised.

I have a lot to say about when there’s a good justification for making a javascript-driven webpage versus not — there are plenty of valid reasons for using javascript, but very few for doing so pervasively in the manner described by this article, and I say this as someone whose bread-and-butter work is javascript single-page-apps for internal tooling, but these things don’t make sense as either server-rendered pages or desktop applications.

Just as many websites could be static html and do without dynamic rendering, many websites could also be server-rendered and progressively enhanced.