Chris Hannah

Brent Simmons:

You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.

A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.

I agree, all you have to do is join in.

Laura Staugaitis at Colossal:

The photographer tells Colossal that his work centers around the topic of the Anthropocene (the era of human influence on Earth’s biological, geological, and atmospheric processes). “In my photography, I explore the origin and scale of that idea in an effort to understand the dimensions of man’s intervention in natural spaces and to direct attention toward how humans can take responsibility.” Hegen explains that aerial photography in particular helps convey the Anthropocene because it shows the dimensions and scale of human impact more effectively.

It’s fascinating subject to focus on, and the photography is stunning.

Tom Hegen also created a short video containing some aerial shorts of the greenhouses.

I will be definitely following him on Instagram, and keeping an eye on his work.

David Thompson:

I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.

This commit is from my time at the Government Digital Service, working on GOV.UK. It’s from a developer by the name of Dan Carley, and it has the rather unassuming name of “Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error”.

This is a rather funny bug fix, but at the same time there’s a lot of good points you can take from the level of detail that was put in.

BBC News:

A flaw that means any fingerprint can unlock a Galaxy S10 phone has been acknowledged by Samsung.

It promised a software patch that would fix the problem.

The issue was spotted by a British woman whose husband was able to unlock her phone with his thumbprint just by adding a cheap screen protector.

When the S10 was launched, in March, Samsung described the fingerprint authentication system as “revolutionary”.

All I can do is laugh.

Elina Sundqvist, on Swedes in the States:

The world’s oldest tree, Old Tjikko, is a 9,500-year-old Norwegian Spruce tree that was discovered in 2004 by Professor Leif Kullman, and to this day remains the world’s oldest tree. The tree is located on Fulufjället, in the province of Dalarna.

For the world’s oldest tree, I thought it would have been a bit more impressive.

It’s time for me to announce a little project I’m going to start doing alongside this blog. From this Friday, I’ll be starting a weekly newsletter called “Interesting Links”, and as the name suggests, it will be a short list of (around 5) links to interesting things I’ve found all across the internet.

This is because there are tons of interesting things I find, but I don’t necessarily want to turn all of them into linked posts here on the blog. So this gives me a chance to share even more of them.

I’ll keep it very minimal, because otherwise I know it won’t be pleasant to read, and it won’t be that interesting to write either!

So you can subscribe now, and the first issue will arrive in your inboxes on Friday!

Whenever I want to add a table to a blog post, I always wonder if an app can do it for me. As I find writing Markdown tables to be rather tedious. The only problem is, I never actually looked. However, I’ve now been using an aptly named app “Markdown Tables” and it’s just perfect.

It features a really clean interface, that lets you focus solely on the table content. You have all the necessary tools at the top, there’s one to create a new table with a certain size or from the clipboard, inserting and deleting rows/columns, alignment, whether to include the header row, and the export button! It looks simple, however, it has all the functionality that you’ll need. It handles large tables quite well, as you can scroll around the content, and then simply tap on the field you want to edit, and it snaps it into place.

Exporting is maybe the most important feature of the app, and it couldn’t get any easier. All you need to do is tap the export button above the table, and the formatted table will be copied. Markdown Tables actually supports Markdown and HTML exporting, each with their own options for customising the format. Such as compact mode for Markdown, and also whether to pretty print the HTML.

It’s a fantastic utility, and I recommend it to anyone writing Markdown on iOS.

Find Markdown Tables on the App Store.

I feel like I post more updates to Text Case here than real blog posts. Oh well, this one I’m blaming Jason Snell. We exchanged a few tweets about Text Case, and he suggested a feature where Text Case could have a list of manually capitalised nouns that would be used when converting text. I immediately saw the benefit of this idea, and started mapping it out in my head.

In just over a day, the update has been developed, and worked its way through Apple’s review process.

It contains what I’m calling the “Custom Dictionary”, and it lets you store words capitalised in a specific way. So that whenever you use Title Case or Sentence Case, these capitalisations have the highest precedence. It’s perfect for brand and product names, and that’s also why I’ve included a few common nouns in the app to start off.

The words themselves are stored in a .json file, which you can find in the Text Case folder in iCloud Drive. This can be edited manually outside Text Case (I would recommend an app called Jayson), and the changes will then be picked up when Text Case is next used.

One more thing, I also added a new dark theme. Previously the dark option had pure black as a main colour, but this is a bit too dark for some people. I’ve renamed that theme to “Black”, and added an option that is a dark grey.

You can find Text Case on the App Store.

It’s time for another update to Text Case! This time it brings another 5 formats, all relating to Markdown.

There’s support for creating Blockquotes, which supports multiple paragraphs (which I personally wanted a lot), Code Blocks, and also ordered and unordered lists. You can also convert any Markdown to HTML!

All of these formats are, of course, available to use via the app, the Action Extension, and also in the Shortcuts app. And with these new additions, Text Case now has 32 different formats! Including four variants of Title Case.

You can find Text Case on the App Store.

Cody Delistraty, writing for The Paris Review, about the capabilities of plants:

A few years ago, Monica Gagliano, an associate professor in evolutionary ecology at the University of Western Australia, began dropping potted Mimosa pudicas. She used a sliding steel rail that guided them to six inches above a cushioned surface, then let them fall. The plant, which is leafy and green with pink-purple flower heads, is commonly known as a “shameplant” or a “touch-me-not” because its leaves fold inward when it’s disturbed. In theory, it would defend itself against any attack, indiscriminately perceiving any touch or drop as an offense and closing itself up.

The first time Gagliano dropped the plants—fifty-six of them—from the measured height, they responded as expected. But after several more drops, fewer of them closed. She dropped each of them sixty times, in five-second intervals. Eventually, all of them stopped closing. She continued like this for twenty-eight days, but none of them ever closed up again. It was only when she bothered them differently—such as by grabbing them—that they reverted to their usual defense mechanism.

It’s a fascinating read, and it’s not just a clickbait headline with minimal information. Rather he mentions research that has been done regarding how trees can share nutrients and information via fungal networks, how they react to damage and animals attempting to eat parts of them.

I’ve read about the ways that trees can communicate between each other, to notify others of possible intruders, and how a forest can provide the nutrients to an unhealthy tree to sustain it, in the book “The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben. But, the idea that a plant could learn, or even just have a form of memory, would certainly alter the way we think about plants in general.

Possibly my favourite part of this article would be:

Even the slightest possibility of a proven plant intelligence would have massive scientific and existential implications. If plants can “learn” and “remember,” as Gagliano believes, then humans may have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history. The common understanding of “intelligence” would have to be reimagined; and we’d have missed an entire universe of thought happening all around us.