The Santa Barbara News-Press was born in 1868 and died in 2023 at age 155. Its glory years ran from 1932 until 2000, when the New York Times sold it to Wendy McCaw, who rode it to hell. That ride began with the Santa Barbara News Press Controversy in 2006 and ended when Amper…
Journalism as we knew it is washing away. But the story is bigger than journalism alone, and bigger than a story alone can tell. (Image borrowed from the brilliant Despair.com.) We who care about journalism are asked to join the Save Journalism Project, and its fight against…
Designer/creative Connell McCarthy: “I got married and over-engineered everything.” He obviously designed everything — invites, website (using AWS!), signage — but also made custom candles and an iPad jukebox app using the Spotify API. 💬 Join the discussion on kottk…
In the spirit of recommending things I truly love, I wanted to highlight the pottery of Northern California artist Naja Tepe. I’ve ordered from her twice now, and her work is fabulous. I love her strawberry-themed items, but the crescent moon on the plate in her most recent…
Okay, here’s a toy car for actually cleaning floors. You load it up with paper towels and set the kids loose. It’s probably not something I need, but the reviews are strangely compelling. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
If you're an amateur or a professional photographer, you can get your gear covered, and it starts with a free quote! The Phoblographer is giving away two Sony lenses. Not one, but TWO! One lucky winner will receive the Sony 35mm f1.8 FE and 85mm f1.8 FE lenses in our latest give…
Music for Programming, a collection of “the most compelling music for sustained concentration”. I love the interface. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Fascinated by this “WTF Notebook” post because 1) it’s a really good listening/note-taking idea for new team members 2) applied for weirdly Machiavellian ends, e.g. wanting ppl to think they’re helpful rather than wanting to be helpful. 💬 Join the discussion on kott…
"With the unfortunate position to speak to art and commerce simultaneously, I will say that blending the two is always a challenge but this one takes the cake for me," says photographer Ryan Schaude to the Phoblographer in an interview. "It might take a separate thread to discus…
Ok mountain bike nerds, I need your advice. Here’s my situation: I’ve been riding for 3.5 years now on a Kona Honzo hardtail (which I really love) and am pondering a full-suspension bike purchase. They are $$$, but I want to do more riding this summer & fall — including…
Scientists have repurposed a 50-year-old drug to revolutionize bone marrow transplants. “Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past” and “the drug cut rates of acute and severe complications by upwards of 80%”. 💬 Join the discussio…
Happy to announce that thanks to folks buying The Process Tee, we’ve donated a total of more than $4,700 to the National Network of Abortion Funds to aid them in their goal of “abortion access for all”. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
nikitonsky: You better explain yourself! Thanks @sobersolar for the picture #GoogleMaps #ANALytics #Survey
UX London is just two months away! The best way to enjoy the event is to go for all three days but if that’s not doable for you, each individual day is kind of like a mini-conference with its own theme. The theme on day one, Tuesday, June 18th is design research. In the mor…
Sharks: “the scary triangles of the sea”. (What are the scary triangles of other places?) 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
The NY Times Style Magazine recently published an entire issue dedicated to “what it means start an artistic life”. I have only scratched the surface of this multi-article package, but I locked into this one immediately: We asked 80 artists and other creative people to tell…
Why earthquakes on the East Coast are felt farther away than ones on the West Coast. It’s the age of the rock and the faults. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Adobe Firefly is powering several of the new advancements that are being announced by the company at MAX today. Quite honestly, they're insanely dystopian yet also pretty exciting for the future of photography if ethics and regulations are put into place. Daido Moriyama says tha…
For years, portrait photographers adhered to a simple three-color rule. This was in an effort to their images simple and the heroes of their images as the most important part. It prevented distractions, for sure. For example, someone might be framed in green field while they're…
Letterboxd asked Dune director Denis Villeneuve what his four favorite films were and he cheated and listed five (including 2001 and Blade Runner). First of all, who knows how long Blade Runner has been on his top 5 (or even 10 or 20 list) but getting to do a remake of one of…
They fixed it: NASA is able to talk to Voyager I again. “For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Hey there everyone. As I quickly touched on over the weekend, I launched a few new tweaks/features for the comments here on kottke.org: 1. Ability to edit comments. After you post a new comment, you’ve got 10 minutes to edit it — to fix any typos, formatting slip-ups, or qu…
You’ve seen the bokeh and sharpness this thing can make, right? In the month of April 2024, the Phoblographer is giving away vintage gold! We’ve got a Contax 45mm f2 converted to Leica M Mount — and we’re giving it away to one lucky subscriber in our giveaway that’s av…
A database of useful biological numbers, including the duration of an eye blink, the surface area of human skin, the diameter of a water molecule, and the mass of a male fruit fly. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Hold the Line is a “piece of sound art generated by data from Canada’s 2023 wildfire season”, an data sonification if you will. Clicks represent fires (Zippo “tings” for human-started fires) and rumbles for forest area burned. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org �…
Professional photographers, semi-professional photographers, and passionate hobbyist photographers can all be covered with the Photography Care Program. The Phoblographer is giving away two Sony lenses. Not one, but TWO! One lucky winner will receive the Sony 35mm f1.8 FE and 85…
For All Mankind has been renewed for a fifth season and the show is getting a Apple TV+ spin-off called Star City, which will follow the same alt-timeline as FAM but from the Soviet perspective. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
This weekend I was doing some programming work (comments, another small project) and listening to some old-school electronica (DJ-Kicks by Kruder & Dorfmeister anyone?). When I write, I tend to listen to chill stuff so I can concentrate — classical, vaporwave, soundtracks, Jon…
This had me cackling in laughter this morning: Kevin Del Aguila hamming it up in the wings off-stage while the show, Some Like It Hot, goes on. How on Earth did the actors not completely break during all of that? 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
A bot that pairs the clichéd “I hope this email finds you” with snippets from books beginning with “finds you…” E.g.: “I hope this email finds you wherever you go, and lands right in the center of your brain.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
If there was ever an iconic tripod design, it's the ones from the early 2000s and late 90s. That's where the new Promoster Epoch tripod is taking inspiration from. Every college video department had some sort of aluminum tripod with a ball head of some sort and they all looked l…
This looks promising: an RNA-based vaccine effective against any strain of a virus and works for those with weakened immune system (babies, immunocompromised). “This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Once again, it is cheaper to decarbonize our world now than to pay for the costs of climate damage in the future. “Climate damages by 2050 will be 6 times the cost of limiting warming to 2°.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →