Week 78: RSS, Build, and other small bits

7 Aug, 2022

This week was a bit sporadic because of work taking up a lot of time and headspace, but I did find time to think about newspapers, work a bit more on blender lessons, and read.

RSS Newspaper

I spent my holidays reflecting a bit about my use of time on social media, and how to stay up to date with “the industry” and people whose work I like.

Twitter has brought me so much joy, allowing me to digest an incredible amount of news and work from a wide range of organizations and people. But the product has devolved into so much suggested content that I didn’t ask for yet hits all the right brain chemicals to keep me scrolling. Same story for instagram.

At the same time, RSS feeds are seeing a resurgence, and I have now switched the same setup as Matt, combining NetNewsWire and Feedbin. Feedbin even allows for twitter integration, so now I can get the tweets I’m interested in without any of the garbage and NetNewsWire has a “star” functionality that functions like a archive, a great replacement for twitter’s bookmarks.

NetNewsWire is efficient, but not exciting. I miss beautiful typography as graphic elements, layout and images from traditional media. Feedbin has an API, so I’m wondering if I should try and sketch an “RSS newspaper”, a more visceral, scrolling that would allow me to consume more news in a visually enticing way.

I’m still experimenting with my setup and building it out. Still check twitter and instagram, but through the web-versions rather than the apps.

Blender lesson progress

The lessons continue, now on Bruno Simon’s lesson on unwrapping and baking a scene in Blender.

I’m at the stage of doing UV unwrapping of all objects, which is fun and frustrating. Since the whole idea was to create a 3D world including LEGO elements for a portfolio, I’m not looking forward to unwrap those.

Reading

I’m reading Build by Tony Fadell together with colleagues. It’s curious, because it’s the kind of book I would have been ecstatic to read 5 years ago. I have a lot of respect for Tony Fadell and what he has accomplished in his career, but coming into this book I have to admit I thought didn’t need to read it. My manager kept pushing it though, so now I am, and learning a lot from it.

Also a hat tip to Linus’ article on designing with materials. It features work by Tyler who I met while I worked at MIT Media Lab, and it’s the kind of material that makes me happy and hopeful for the future of software. It made me think of a lecture Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose gave on A Tinkerer’s Guide to the AI Galaxy. They also talk about technologies as materials. So did BERG when they were around.