If your concept of “progress” doesn’t put people at the center of it, is it even progress?

Source: I’m a Ludite (and so can you!)

Webring. A list of hand-crafted wikis and portfolios.

What I learned from taking a train across the US. “Here’s how US train travel went from excellent to mediocre.” A Vox video.

Multi-layered calendars. “Notes are just emails to your future self. Emails are just tasks. And tasks are just calendar events.”

How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?, a podcast episode about how “a normal person can find new stuff when they feel like their ears have rusted.”

Give it the Craigslist test. “If you’re designing a new product or service, give it the Craigslist test — start with low-fidelity options that see if people would love it even if it looked like Craigslist.”

Taken at the Natural History Museum.

I love that my Grandpa Norm told me to put a $10 in my coat pocket when I put it away for the season: ‘You’ll give yourself a surprise treat when it gets cold again!’ He’s been gone for over five years, but I still think of him when swapping coats.

Source: Have a Restorative Weekend - Cup of Jo

Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel, they’ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go. Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people with color vision deficiencies.

It me!

Source: Designing for colorblindness - The Verge

Moe Lauchert’s photography is pretty amazing.

Lynne Carty’s site is fun!

I think that if you want to know how something is made, you should look for the grids. They are the ever-present, behind-the-scenes structure of our cities, our machines, our homes, and our lives. You’ll find the grid in the artist’s studio, in the patterns of the textile weaver’s pattern book, in the architect’s floor plan sketches, in the engineer’s CAD software; even the monospaced fonts that programmers use fit to the grid.

Source: GRID WORLD by Alexander Miller

To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).

Source: Treat your to-read pile like a river

AllttA - Savages featuring an AI Jay-Z.

Palette of a beach sunrise by Slater

A TODO “App”

Podfriend. A “friendly podcast player app for mobile & desktop” (and in browser).

good personal blogs an Are.na channel. Fill thy feeds!

This Audio-Cassette-Shaped Object Lets You Stream to an Analog Boombox. “It’s essentially a Bluetooth receiver shaped like a cassette, and through some technical sorcery it can deliver audio through analog tape heads.” It’s like the modern version of this!

When my dad was sick, I started Googling grief. Then I couldn’t escape it. “There’s an assumption the industry makes that personalization is a positive thing.”

Northern lights over Virginia by Peter Forister.

principles.design is an “open source collection of Design Principles and methods.” Great looking site, content, and URL.

Some things:

• Pitchfork on the band 100 gecs: “Theirs is the sound of a zillion infostreams from the depths of your social feeds shooting into your eyes at once, both poisoned by irony and aware that if you follow irony into its own ouroboros, you will discover the antidote.” I’m in!
• Reading fiction can make you a better person: “Research suggests that fictional books may effectively be empathy-building tools, offering us the closest we can get to first-hand knowledge of someone else’s experience.”
• Meta Rediscovers the Cubicle: “To be fair, the company takes pains to argue that their solution is not cubicles, because, well, the walls are curved, and they are made out of fancier, sound-absorbing materials. Sure. Okay…” Solving a problem they made. The ultimate fireman/arsonist.
• Everything else!

Receiving the cash is also empowering. “There’s a wide body of research that if you give someone a larger sum of cash it triggers long-term thinking,” says Williams. Or as Ray puts it, ”that energy of believing in myself again.” The effect is: “These people trusted me. Let me prove to them that I can be successful,” Ray says. 

Source: Vancouver Gave Homeless People $5,800. It Changed Their Lives. /via Keeping it Integer

See also: What happened when people in this upstate New York town started getting monthly $500 checks and The mathematical case against blaming people for their misfortune