By SekhmetDesign
Finally March…!
Finally! February is behind us, and that long cold month is over! Spring is coming in just 2 weeks, and with it, a little more heat and sunshine outside! It will be so good for the mood, which has been down a bit for the last 5-6 weeks… This winter has been particularly rough.
En parlant de choses plus joyeuses, a friend and I are on a mission to try tea rooms in Montreal that offer a proper Tea service. Our first stop was at the Gryphon D’Or tearoom in NDG (on Monkland), and it was simply amazing. Those scones were to die for 🤤 We’re now looking forward to trying another spot, Lady Porcelaine, so I’ll report back once I’ve visited. Ça devrait être amusant!
St. Patrick’s Day is also approaching, and I’m quite excited about it. I’ll have my daughter with me on St. Patty’s, so no pub night for me that day. But I’ll definitely hit up the pub on the days before when I’m “parentless.” I miss that ambiance so much!
Welcome to another edition of Links I’d share in private, a (bi-)weekly blog post about all the things and content I come across the Internet during my intense web binging, worthy of being shared to you all (instead of in all of my private group chats 🤣).
Now on with the Links I’d share in private part!
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Keywords: This week’s Links I’d share in private touches on various topics, including:
TO READ
- Tech continues to be political: Starting strong with this text that I can relate a lot “Based on every conference I’ve attended over the last year, I can absolutely say we’re a fringe minority. A tond it’s wearing me out. I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind? This is your opportunity to get in at the ground floor! I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me. That feels so absurd to say. I don’t have any interest in trying to reverse-engineer use-cases for it, or improve the flaws to make it “better”, or help sell it by bending it to new uses.”
- How to build a village
- Making space for a handmade web : There’s a resurgence of small, handcrafted sites challenging the current trajectory of the internet. Joining the movement is as simple as making your own.
- AI is Stifling Tech Adoption: ohhhh I really loved this article. Kinda goes with the same observations I came to have on code shown in AI results, always being the same technologies/frameworks, and forcing the usage of JavaScript frameworks into web development. These tests show both Claude and ChatGPT have a strong preference for React and Tailwind, that Gemini has a preference for HTML/CSS/JS but will recommend React and that DeepSeek is much more flexible and varied with its technological choices, though requires more prompting to produce an actual output.
- What We’re Fighting For: another excellent Ed Zitron text. The business of making our shit worse to increase revenue growth year-over-year is booming. The products you use every day are more confusing and frustrating to use because everything must grow, which means that product decisions are now driven, in many cases, by companies trying to make you do something rather than do something for you, which in turn means that basic product quality — things like “usability” or “functionality” — are secondary considerations.
- The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI [It] feels like we’re surrounded by content that doesn’t feel authentic and human. Lots of this content is authored by bots, marketing automation, and growth hackers pumping out generic clickbait with ulterior motives.
- This page is under construction: beautiful ode to the personal website
TO SEE
- Explore the Maya Temples at Copán Ruinas. Discover the ancient Maya site at Copán and climb the legendary hieroglyphic stairway in a 3D view like if you were in Street view on Google Maps.
- Very interesting video about The (Very) Black History of Punk, Hardcore and Skins
TO FOLLOW
- Your LOLWTF to keep an eye on: this subreddit channel r/insanefbmarketplace
TO HEAR
- this week mixcloud playlist Blue Notice Jazz
- This week’s SoundCloud: Rage Peace Mixtape #7
- And another MixCloud, Sad Eagle vs The Unshockable Truth of a Broken Heart
RECIPES
DESIGN
- Colossal: Join more than 200,000 subscribers and get the best of art and visual culture from Colossal.
- The hardest working font in Manhattan: Fascinating history behind the creation and usage of the font Gorton
- Public Domain Image Archive : Explore the hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
CYBERSECURITY & INFOSEC
- Kagi: Tired of the shit appearing in your Google Search? Tired of all the AI overviews, ads and all? Well, there are tons of search engines available to replace Google Search, but my favorite these days is Kagi, a privacy-focused, no ad search engine that does a good job to show your results in the first page. It’s a breath of fresh air in all those overcrowded BigTech search engines. And Kagi has a fonctionality, called Small Web, that randomly shows you a recent post from their extensive list of bloggers and independant websites to follow and read. Kinda like StumbleUpon used to do 2 decades ago…! (Fuck I feel old now!)
- If you’re on Chrome, you have this neat little extension, uBlacklist, that does the job of making it easy to block websites from appearing in your Google Search results. Very useful if you are tired of seeing well-written-for-SEO articles from websites that are just there for the clicks. And if you’re searching for a list of websites to block from those results, here’s a list that propose all the websites from the main 16 companies that dominate the search results
- if, like me, you’re in the mindset of eliminating as much BigTech services as possible from your life, then this article How to delete the data Google has on you will be for you
WEB & TECH
- Pure CSS Halftone Effect in 3 Declarations
- You’re a web developer in search of inspiration for your online website or portfolio? Discover Developer Portfolios
- Looking for new original fonts to use in your digital projects? Future Fonts is the place for you.
- Taking RWD To The Extreme: A nice article about how responsive the Responsive Web Design (RWD) can be push beyond its limits to a better web design By having this kind of dialogue with the browser, exchanging information (it gives us data on the user, and we give it hints on how to display our content), we empower the user in the result. The content would be displayed in the way they want. That makes our website far more inclusive and accessible
- This is funny: the game Doom as a captcha on your website. See the demo here
- google-webfonts-helper: A Hassle-Free Way to Self-Host Google Fonts
- awesome-selfhoster: This is a list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own server(s).
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