God I hope there's enough engagement on this tweet that they actually do it.
I don’t really understand why or how it’s happening, but my HP LaserJet printer connects to Wi-Fi less and less reliably every year. I want to upgrade to a color laser, but: (1) Wirecutter's current rec is for another HP, and (2) it's $750.
The HP inkjet I got in 1997 was far more reliable, even before we switched from parallel to USB. And it could print banners!
These are really interesting to read in order. The LLM output at the end of each shows how they've gotten better and stayed the same. Output is all formulaic just following slightly different formulas. I shall excitedly wait another year to see what is possible in 2026 and if everyone is right by 2027 the LLM will be the author of the piece including human written content for padding at the end.
(Also yes my Brother printer has worked great over the past 10 years. I even had to buy new toner and have replaced it with a third party toner twice so far.)
The jury is still out on whether Brother has also jumped the shark. Their PR made a lot of hot noise about the accusations being "false" but if you read carefully they never say that they didn't make some color calibration things work only with their own cartridges.
Can vouch. I have a Brother B/W double-sided laser printer from 2011 that just keeps on going. The maintenance manuals are detailed down to each gear and lever, which let me fix a paper feed issue (gear slid out of place) and keep it going for probably many more decades. No DRM chips in sight - third party toner works just fine, and the Ethernet connectivity is rock solid.
If you think the $750 price tag is bad wait until you have to buy replacement toner cartridges. I have an older HP CP1518ni which produces decent looking prints but man, each of the four replacement cartridges are like $75 each. A full set is slightly cheaper at $275 last time I bought them.
Until today, my only awareness of the term “gutta percha” was as a type of golf ball, as noted in the article. I’ve always assumed it was someone’s name, or else a nickname for a design. What a cool material!
When I first built my current site, it was fully unstyled like Chris', but as I started making little tweaks, they snowballed into a proper design. I couldn't help but add more of my personality to it.
Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.
Over a decade of commitment to the task itself, diligent blogging of the whole experience, and a website design that brings me back to my favorite time on the web. Beautiful.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Yep! I'm guilty of continuing to use the double-colon separators to this very day. Just shipped an internal app for my company a few months ago that utilizes them in page titles.
> IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
I generate the Bookmarks [1] section of my static site from the public bookmarks in my Pinboard account.
Since I host with Netlify, I've written a lightweight Netlify function that looks at my Pinboard account for changes. If there are changes, it simply re-runs the static site build. During the build, Lektor, the static site generator, runs a custom plugin I've written that generates the link blog page from the Pinboard API.
Definitely more work than it was "worth", but as a person who doesn't get to write lots of code every day, it was a blast putting it all together.
2. updating some pages on a static site (by incorporating the changes from step 1) and rebuilding it
is incredibly powerful. It allows us to make a static site behave almost like a read-only dynamic one. There needs to be a name for this—it’s hard to discuss it without one.
This pattern is used all over the place, and for good reason (especially when people get their minds on combining CI/CD and static deployments).
Simon Willison groked the name « Baked Data »: even though it was in the context of Datasette (which requires a backend to run but the SQLite db is embedded and read-only), it is pretty safe the term can be applied for static websites also!
One name for it is PESOS[1] ("Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site"), although that doesn't necessitate it be static, but requiring it be static is mixing the implementation with the user experience anyway.
Except a special-case of transclusion: high latency and compile-time only. As opposed to doing it with JS dynamically; if Pinboard had an API, or even simply doesn't block frames with HTTP headers, you could simply dynamically call from the static site page to the other site, load the relevant HTML, and present it transcluded into the static site page. (This is how Gwern.net does a lot of stuff: everything from the Wikipedia/Github popups to transcluding other pages.)
“Another challenge in conventional storage media is their unsuitability for long-term storage, with optical discs, solid-state drives, and hard-disk drives having lifespans of 25 years, 12 years, and 10 years, respectively […] Moreover, the stability of DNA was proved by the successful recovery of ancient DNA under burial conditions. The studies have shown that preservation of DNA does not require additional energy for data storage.“ [1]
No, DNA is terrible. Microsoft's Project Silica seems to be the contender for indefinite, maintenance free, storage. But, there's the whole "It's Glass" issue.
Yes, you can chuck your SSD into a freezer. Data retention time increases exponentially in lower temperatures, so keeping it in a regular +4C fridge is enough to extend retention by decades.
Just remember to heat up the disk before writing and after storage.
If my three year old 350€ fridge has a no frost option that never failed or had hiccups in all that time, I assume the industrial one bought to store drives in that hypothetical situation would do to.
There are multiple problems. Storing stems or a rendered mix can be fully durable with some care to replicate it sufficiently. But what of for instance the session files, which are likely tied to custom hardware which eventually becomes scarce.
Object storage is a fine proposition for long term retention but it does nothing for the organizational problem that someone needs to continuously pay the bill and ensure the provider didn't lose anything, and that can easily get lost in M&A, estate liquidation, etc.
The bottom line is, if something is worth saving, you need someone to take on the role of archivist that will balance the technical and economic changes that go with preservation. There is nothing passive about it unless hope is the strategy.
There are high density binary microfilm optical formats on archival grade film stock that should be stable for several hundred years. Although tbh I'm an M-DISC guy.
Object storage in the cloud is likely to succeed there, but then cost and security issues arise.
If data are encrypted, then managing keys is another pain/cost dimension.
At the several decade point, keeping copies at multiple vendors becomes a discussion point, since even Google and Amazon are not likely to be immortal, and that Ukrainian data center might experience physical security challenges.
The reader is an ordinary DVD or Bluray drive. It's safe to assume these will continue to be manufactured for 20 more years and if they have solid state components, a shelf life of 100 years afterwards.
It doesn't seem very reasonable to draw conclusions about longevity from any comparison of a rather complex machine like a Betamax deck (that cost a huge amount of money to buy) to something rather simple like a modern Blu-Ray drive ($100, ish).
It seems much more reasonable to assume that Blu-Ray hardware will continue to be produced until something else (what?) actually supplants it for cold, off-line data storage.
(Also, too: The compact cassette is dead as fuck and has been for decades, even with the niche resurgence in recent years. Yet new machines are still being produced, and so is new tape stock. The format is 61 years old.)
You have a point, but considering Betamax tapes only stopped production in 2016, (the recorders in 2002) and the proliferation of dvd / Blu-ray, etc is much higher I think 20 years is safe. 30 however…
But is there any format you can promise every part of it will be in production in 20 years ?
Amazon still lists some refurbished vhs players but…
I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.
I dunno, I look back on the <table>-based layout days with fondness, probably because I was young and the Web was nothing but rolling green fields and endless potential. I didn't see the limitations, only the opportunities for inventiveness. I'll never feel the same satisfaction as I did when those first few website designs came together.
In games you had to do this 9 piece slice, one slice for each of the 4 corners, all 4 straight sides that can be repeated as a pattern and the middle background piece
Nine-patch image scaling[0] is still a thing, and is only orthogonally related to setting a border radius (it's a hell of lot more versatile than that).
I don’t really understand why or how it’s happening, but my HP LaserJet printer connects to Wi-Fi less and less reliably every year. I want to upgrade to a color laser, but: (1) Wirecutter's current rec is for another HP, and (2) it's $750.
The HP inkjet I got in 1997 was far more reliable, even before we switched from parallel to USB. And it could print banners!