July 09, 2017

CSS: Out with the Old, in with the Grid

https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2017/07/01/you-do-not-need-a-css-grid-based-grid-system/

Frontend developers have witnessed such a monumental shift in the past few years. A year ago, I would have designed using a grid framework^1 built with floats. One for each width, another set of classes to define margins before and another set still to define margins after. If you wanted a different grid at a different breakpoint, then you would repeat the process.

^1: Anyone, remember 960.gs(https://960.gs)? Good times.

Using a preprocessor, like SASS(http://sass-lang.com), made this process less of a problem by being able to programatically churn out these repetitive classes using basic logic. Preprocessors, however, couldn’t fix the ultimate problem of needing to define those classes in the first place. Creating a grid system in code for a simple site nearly guaranteed that you will have a giant pile of unused classes that you would force your users to bear, OR you would use a build chain tool to remove, OR you would prune by hand.^2

^2: I can think of a litany of other possibilities but I think I've made my point clear enough.

Thankfully, including prebuilt frameworks or building your own from scratch can be considered an anti-pattern.

From the expert herself, Rachel Andrew(https://rachelandrew.co.uk):

You don’t need a tool that helps you make it look like you have a grid, you actually have a grid!

Embrace the future. Break those once trusty habits and use the Grid standard first, then hack backwards where necessary.

I have so much to unlearn 😬

June 04, 2017

TRST_Blog on Instagram

I've started posting on Instagram. You can follow me at [@trst_blog](https://www.instagram.com/trst_blog/ “@TRST_Blog on Instagram”) and keep up with a few of the behind the scenes moments I post every other day. Honestly, I've broken my long absence from the platform due to a recent growth spurt: I've realised that it's far more important to enjoy oneself, even as a metaphorical digital flaming eyeball, than to live in some state of form of undesired stoicism. (Obviously, I have sympathies regarding stoicism, just not everywhere, all the time... which may not be very stoic, but I digress.) subscribe—if that's something you're into—for a load of behind the scenes for my video process and general hijinx from a person-thing whose life goal is to retire by forty-five... or earlier.

June 04, 2017

Regret and the Connected Meet Up

Such a clever sticker from Relay.FM that makes a set of Apple’s AirPods look like floss. Note: I do not enjoy sticking things onto my devices, this was an honest mistake and must serve as a signpost against the dangers of drink.

Two in a row. That's how many Relay.FM Connected meet-up events I've attended in London, perhaps a leading record among Canadians. At both I've managed to have a very, very good time.

It's a real trip to be in a room with a people who are just like you in nearly every way. How many pubs around the world are filled with dorks jostling to pay with their watches. I had a quick chat with the bartender and they’d never seen anything quite like it.

I went with my good pal, Lorenzo and met a good variety of lovely people: all friendly, personable and, again, following the same vector of interests as I do. Where in most other situations you might have to talk about the weather, at the Connected meet-up you can wax lyrically about Apple rumours and digital technologies. (My apologies to the young man I spent most of the night speaking with, beer gets the best of me and I've never been good with names—just too many to remember.)

Anyways, I had a decent start to the evening but as the drinks piled up and the night wore on, I managed to make a fool of myself. Go figure.

The first time I met Myke and Federico, a year ago, I was cordial and generally out of sight, there's no way they'd have any recollection of me at all. The second time, with the power of drink swelling inside me, I was set to make a different impression.

I was shooting-the-shit when Federico (@viticci for mere mortals) sat down beside us. A normal person would have started with, "How are you?" However, no one has ever been able to accuse me of going with the flow, so my opening line—to a human being with whom I have nothing but admiration and respect—was, “Well, that's a bit racist of you, isn't it?”[1]

[screechingTurntable] It wasn’t by the way, I just couldn’t help being cheeky.[/screechingTurntable]

Friendly and good spirited, Ferderico laughed it off and managed to enjoy what meagre company I could be afforded. (He’s an absolute legend.) Honestly, I was having too much fun and the poor people around me were helpless to save me from myself. Myke faired better, I think I was beginning to feel the pangs of shame by that point in the evening.

Overall, the Connected meet-up was a blast. I suppose it goes without saying, what happens at the Connected meet-up stays at the Connected meet-up… until you blog publicly about it 😂

  1. I know that on a good day I'm off-white, so racially ambiguous would be a fair assessment of my appearance. What I also know, very well in fact, is how uncomfortable the social construction of race is among all polite conversation. I find this a hilarious screw to twist. Normally, however, I wait until at least midway into a conversation to get cheeky. ↩︎

An Optical Poem (1938)

What an absolute trip. I can only think about how many hand positioned frames this took to create and how much effort would have gone into assembling this film in the late 1930s.

A Collection of Len Lye’s Films

From the video‘s description:

Len Lye (05-07-1901 — 15-05-1980) was an artist from New Zealand who made experimental films and kinetic sculptures. In the early 1920s Lye travelled widely in the South Pacific and was influenced by the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, He was once expelled from Samoa by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community.

In London he reinvented the technique of drawing directly on film. "A Colour Box" was the first direct film screened to a general audience. Most of his animations are abstract, sometimes with stenciled messages to promote the services of British General Post Office or other employers. The two small vertical bars in this video (part of "Kaleidoscope" refer to cigarettes,as the film was sponsored as a prestige advertisement for Churchman's Cigarettes. For the first screening of the film, Lye cut the cigarette shapes out of the print, so that the light would project directly through them onto the screen.

An artist I had never seen before but now can't get enough of in my feeds. Amazing and inventive visual work.

(H/T Benedict Evans)

How to Opt Out of Twitter's New Privacy Settings

Twitter’s recent privacy changes are pretty greasy. If you’d like to opt out of more invasive tracking from a company that doesn’t really seem like it has a good plan for that data AND you have the power to follow simple instructions, then you are in luck my friend. The EFF has you covered.

Also, consider making a small donation to the EFF, they do great work to keep the internet, well, the Internet.

May 31, 2017

Did Lightning Hit the Antenna?

This is a post-mortem. Not a happy-go-lucky post-mortem, but a post-mortem all the same.

I screwed up this blog in a strange way last night. From what I can tell, while shifting—oh god, I’m boring myself!— my content into its own GIT repository, separate from theme, plugins, etc., a script I had setup to automatically pull changes from the previous repository went nuts. Thankfully, most of this stuff is just text files, so there was no data loss and resetting was easy enough.

Here’s where things get a bit squirrelly: the CMS I use allows for publish dates to be set in the future and from what I now gather, does not adhere to the future publish date if you set a created date (probably a bug, I’ve opened a Github issue if you’re one of those). Instead, it relies on the file’s modified metadata. Having restored last night, that is what each file’s modified date is set to, thus messing up all of my post ordering 😨

I have since manually fixed the dates on those posts, no biggie, but damage to your RSS/Atom feeds has already been done. I’d offer a sincere apology, however, the mechanism powering my CMS’ feed has also decided to roll over and die. Who knows when that’ll be up. I was a good flaming eyeball, and filed another issue. The team behind Grav is very responsive, so I imagine it’ll be fixed in short order.

For now, I wait. You probably don’t care, yet I will update this page as more happens anyways.

Update 2017-06-03: The feeds are working again and there's a new JSON feed if you're into that sort of thing. Read the details here: Shiny New JSON Feed

NextDraft with Dave Pell

Strange days we find ourselves in lately, without a guide the news would be nearly impenetrable to the normal human. The amount of signal coming from even reputable sources is difficult to parse and make sense of, honestly. Thank goodness for the internet’s own managing editor Dave Pell and his newsletter.

If you haven't subscribed, you're missing out.

What is this Place?

This is the weblog of the strangely disembodied TRST. Here it attempts to write somewhat intelligibly on, well, anything really. Overall, it may be less than enticing.

Places of Note