Bruce Lawson's personal site

A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.

• How A Screen Reader User Accesses The Web: A Smashing Video – I commissioned and hosted a webinar with Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user), showing how she uses big-name sites (and this one!) and how the HTML helps or hinders her.
• Firefox CSS survey – Your chums at Firefox seek your input on the most time-consuming CSS bugs you’ve faced in the last 3 months (to help them make devtools better, not just to make fun of you)
• The Dark Side of the Grid (Part 1) – part 1 of 3 in a series of articles about CSS Grid layout and accessibility
• CSS Scroll Snap������How It Really Works
• Building a modern carousel with CSS scroll snap, smooth scrolling, and pinch-zoom – by my nephew who doesn’t have a local area network
• Midi City 2000 – an interactive art experiment where midi songs become cities. Each row of buildings is an instrument in the song; each building is a note
• Machine Ethics podcast – That nice Cennydd Bowles talking about collective action in the tech industry, the role of design fiction & ‘provocatypes�� in stimulating moral imagination
• Google partially backtracks on Chrome changes that would break ad blockers
• Google admits error over hidden microphone – Google forgot to disclose that that Nest Guard (a home alarm product available since 2017) contained a microphone.
• Smart feature phones to generate $28 bn revenues in 3 years: Report – “The global smart feature phone demand grew 252 per cent year-on-year in 2018 – albeit from a low base, contributing roughly 16 per cent of the total feature phone volumes”
• A New Tool Protects Videos From Deepfakes and Tampering – finally, a use-case for blockchain! (That’s not for libertarians, conspiracy theorists or drug dealers)
• WinRAR versions released in the last 19 years impacted by severe security flaw that can be abused to hijack users’ systems just by tricking a WinRAR user into opening a malicious archive. “Over 500 million WinRAR users at risk”

A Swing/ Big Band song! Many thanks to Chris Taylor – a Big Band scholar – for advice on what’s authentic and what was out of place. Produced by Shez

Leave these stupid people.
The time’s exactly right.
I have got a sailing ship,
let’s sail away tonight.

You can be the captain
I will be the crew.
I have got a sailing ship
so I can sail away with you.

Help me weigh the anchor
I’ll look out while you steer.
Come aboard my sailing ship
Let’s sail away from here.

We’ll sing along with mermaids
who will help us chart our course.
be guided by dolphins
from these weary, dreary shores.

The map says “here be dragons��
but perhaps it’s Shangri-La.
Let’s go and see what lies beyond
this half-life where we are.

Through the doldrums, ice and tempests
we’ll cross the oceans deep.
We’ll make all pirates walk the plank
and croon the Kraken back to sleep.

My ship is called “Clarita��,
her sails are big and bright.
The wind is up and the tide is high
let’s sail away tonight.

Words and music © Bruce Lawson 2018, all rights reserved.

Here’s a talk I did at a lovely inclusive, anarchic, friendly conference last month called Monki Gras. It was great; a low ticket-price, proper food, craft beers and melted cheese snacks, a diverse group of speakers and a diverse audience. I made loads of new friends and heard loads of new perspectives.

A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.

• Link o’ the Week: Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS – “The calamity of complexity that the current industry direction on JavaScript is unleashing upon designers is of human choice and design.”
• The Legacy of Firefox OS a really interesting article by Ben Francis. Did you know that KaiOS, a fork of FFOS, is second biggest mobile OS in India, beating iOS?
• WebExtensions v3 considered harmful by Daniel Glazman (ex-co chair, CSS WG)
• Léonie Watson on HTML5 landmark regions – short video in which Léonie uses her screen reader on this very site, showing how HTML5 regions make her experience more accesssible
• HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points – “what I will never do is help you build a world that someone like me would have never been able to enter.” By Rachel Andrew
• Financial Inclusion Technology – “How technology can affect Financial Inclusion in the developing world” by Nir Benita (and old Wix colleague)
• How to publish your PWA onto the Google Play Store
• Design patterns for mental health – “a pattern library for digital mental-health services”
• 10 Year Challenge: How Popular Websites Have Changed
• What the JAMstack means for marketing – “Here’s everything I learnt from doing content and SEO for a site that was built using the JAMstack, with a headless CMS and a static front end.”
• Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway – “let’s get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s what everyone else does! Or do they? The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible.”
• Net neutrality activist ��throttles’ street traffic outside FCC building – then cycled slowly up and down the remaining lane with a sign offering drivers “priority access” to his “fast lane” for $5/month.
• Crypto Exchange Says It Can’t Repay $190 Million to Clients After Founder Dies With Only Password
• Pornhub 2018 Year in Review – “In 2018, we transferred 4403 Petabytes of data, which equates to 147 Gigabytes per second. That’s more bandwidth than the entire internet consumed in 2002!”

(Last Updated on 22 February 2019)