I hope you’re hanging in there and staying home if you can. I’ve been hacking on some projects in the evenings.

Links

• Britain’s orbital space flight program is a classic story. They named the only satellite they put in orbit after Shakespeare’s magician who renounced magic. (Thanks, Cynthia, for rec-ing this link.)
• A ten year old blog post came up in the discussion on Ethan Marcotte’s essay on design systems. Venkatesh Rao’s post describes the problem of legibility in which authorities render a system in ways that simplify the functions of authority, which, in turn, doesn’t go well for the subjects of that authority. The post serves as an introduction to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, a book in my pile of things to read. And it’s cautionary reading for me, because, after all, bug handling systems are a way to render the state of a software project visible to stakeholders and leadership.
• I have a Pimoroni pHat HD LED matrix which runs some fun demo displays. It’s set up in the background when I’m on video calls. Logging into the Pi to run scripts and shut it down at night was a pain, so I wrote a Flask app to make it a web service that I can control through my Things Hub.

The music

Questlove of the Roots, #QuestosWreckaStow (YouTube) - This is a gift: Questlove of the Roots DJing 4-FOUR!-nights of Prince’s music, superfans Miss TLC and Anil Dash annotated each night’s set lists, Questlove breaking down Prince’s design and musical choices on tracks. It is music geeky bliss.