The Goods by vox.com

You may or may not have heard that this summer, Vox Media shuttered Racked.com, which has always been a fascinating site but as it shifted a year or two ago to focusing on consumer fashion and the things we buy in general, became essential reading. While it was sad to see the site go, the good news is that a lot of its writers actually joined up with Vox.com, the general news site, to create a new section called “The Goods”. In the month since it launched, they’ve reaffirmed that they’re going to keep featuring really good stuff that relates specifically to our every day lives– buying things, spending times with friends, getting advertised to, and so on. I don’t always subject myself to the full news firehose these days—I try to figure out how to stay aware of the news while not letting it crush me—I do read The Goods every day and consider its RSS feed an essential addition to my OPML file.

Self-driving music

This essay by Rob Horning for his newsletter is a great followup to Liz Pelly’s latest Baffler article about Spotify (all of which are required reading!!) that thinks about the product and marketing of Spotify and how we relate to music in 2018.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

Low-tech Magazine outlines their plan to operate a fully static website powered by a battery-free solar energy source out of Barcelona, Spain. (I suppose this is naive, but I had not considered that the environmental cost of batteries was potentially worse than the energy-storing that they provided? Does that really hold up over time? I suppose they have a certain shelf-life.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about what “availability” online means recently because of a couple things that have been happening both at home and at work, although more the human cost than the environmental one, so this was an interesting thing to layer on top of what I was already thinking. I might try to write some more about that separately later. In the meantime, I wonder what it would take to see a large-scale “reset” on the expectations we have for the web in 2018 as we’ve allowed those to evolve over 20+ years of being online.

Archive.org + Webamp

All audio files on archive.org now have a llama icon on the player. If you click on it, you can listen to the audio file in the Webamp player, a web-based clone of Winamp’s UI. You can even choose a skin from a collection of over 5000 skins, and it’ll remember your skin across files. This is pretty beautiful.

Rob Dubbin, Belvis, and the Voices at Night

This happened weeks ago, but I’ve been traveling and moving back into my house and trying not to spend time on Twitter, so I get a pass, okay? If you’re like me and hadn’t seen this yet, you should read all about Rob’s attempts to score some peaches from his own dang peach tree.

What Life in New York City Looks Like with a Great Dane

This is just plain delightful.