Link Dump
This is a living document where I collect links to various interesting or useful things. It’s like the public version of my browser bookmarks, because I believe the web should have more personal recommendation resources that aren’t driven by statistical systems.
Everything on this list is stuff I think is good in some way. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or the best of its kind. It’s just what fit into my life, and maybe it can fit into yours too.
I try to keep this list somewhat timeless, so there’s not going to be much on current events unless they reflect a longer standing issue.
Contents
Learning
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Butterick’s Practical Typography
A free web-based book about all things typography and text layout.
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An pretty detailed introduction to procedural/generative art in R.
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A deep introduction into the theory side of signal processing, how frequencies and waves work.
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A series of videos about the Mandelbrot set and its weird properties. It’s sort of advanced math but understandable without much prior knowledge.
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Building an 8-bit breadboard computer
A pretty long video series about building a computer from scratch. It’s great for learning the low level things that make pretty much all modern computers work.
Culture
Media analysis, criticism, and other things around modern culture
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The Conceptual Failure of Orbital Lasers
A video essay about the symbolism of orbital lasers, the inevitable failure of military might.
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How video game soundtracks form a new set of jazz standards in the 21st century.
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Music Theory and White Supremacy
“Music theory” actually means “the harmonic style of 18th century european musicians” and its full of racism.
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A pretty old Youtube channel that did an excellent series of film analysis videos back in 2015/16.
Philosophy and Politics
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A collection of articles about responsible computing with an environmental and community oriented focus.
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Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight
Why far-right ideology and violence can’t be defeated by talking to/about it.
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Aamer Rahman: Is it really ok to punch nazis?
Classic. Short and to the point.
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A powerful short interview with Kimberly Jones during the 202 BLM protests about how the social contract has been broken.
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How people can get sucked into far-right ideology online and how some of them might get out. Part of the longer series The Alt Right Playbook
Tools
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A free online tool for drawing various charts, e.g flowcharts, in a cute but still legible style.
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A free, federated, and privacy-first platform for scheduling events.
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Some website or app not working for you? Check here whether it’s a more wide-spread problem. Maybe it’s just your home internet connection being weird.
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Lets you build commands for the
ffmpegmedia transcoder in a graphical way. -
A way to quickly generate a one-off bibliography from literature identifiers such as DOIs.
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A collaborative list of open-source apps on iOS organized by their purpose.
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Makes a web font out of TTF or OTF font files.
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A extensive color picker that support several color models and can convert between them.
Medical / Mental Health
I am not a medical or mental health professional, I just collect links!
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A large collection of resources about trans-feminine hormone therapy and related topics.
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How to Navigate and Manage an Autistic Meltdown, From an Autistic Psychologist
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Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response
This video essay goes in-depth about the modern anti-vaccine movement, the extremely bad science it was founded on and the motives behind it (mostly money).
Reference Materials
Resources to look up stuff that I can’t be bothered to remember perfectly.
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A reference for many common paper formats and their measurements, available in multiple languages
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A list of equivalent focal length for different photographic formats. Useful for composing shots on cameras with different sensor/film sizes.
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What Unicode Character is this?
Paste any text character and it’ll tell you its Unicide code point and name. Really useful if you want to use special character in contexts where they need to be represented that way.
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All the options and commands for the
tmuxterminal multiplexer you probably ever need. -
All those weird little things in Ruby: Special variables, regex syntax and options, operators, etc.
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Because I sure won’t remember all those string substitutions.
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Music Dictionary: Musical Symbols
A hopefully exhaustive list of symbols in western music notation and their meaning and function