Notes from Jeremy Keith on starting out in front-end circa 2019. Really useful for [Longridge], because I never have a good answer to where to start any more, and lots of these resources look great.

Love this live demo of an Enigma Machine that follows the passage of each letter's encryption through the circuits of rotors, reflector and pegboard. It's a visual abstraction, but it makes it entirely clear what's going on, from key to lamp.

And: it's an Observable notebook, so it's editable and interactive! Ace.

"Fetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on September 1, 1989 I can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel and Photoshop) that are still sold today. Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall; DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth; at this point it might as well be a stone tablet."

I always love reading about properly long-lived tools. I remember using Fetch in the late 90s at school, I think.

Via Phil: a few years' old (though not _much_ has changed in web audio land). Excellent tutorial, though: would love to have time to work through some of these (and perhaps port a few things, notably that Music-For-Airports pastiche, to MIDI.)

A pretty, pretty piano sample library. Filed away for if/when I get a grown-up version of Kontakt.

"It’s not very hard for me to find fiction that’s ‘relatable’, that mirrors my own assumptions and experience of the world, because people like me write books and publish them. I find that fiction and I read it, often with pleasure and sometimes with admiration, but I look for books of all kinds that are not ‘relatable’ to me, books that are windows more than mirrors. If fiction has a moral purpose – it doesn’t have to have a moral purpose – it’s in letting us see our shared world from places other than our own and through eyes other than our own, giving us versions of human experience and history and geography that are not at all ‘relatable.’"

Great, technical article about building music hardware. Empress really aren't messing around: Blackfin chips, smart board design and circuit architecture, and TDD for embedded code all in the mix. It's great that ZOIA is such a success for them.

"If you look carefully at that montage in The Parallax View — the “screen test” where they show Warren Beatty a montage of images with titles like MOTHER, LOVE, ENEMY, GOD, HOME to see if he’s got what it takes to be an all-star psychopath assassin — you’re going to find an image of me, cuddling naked with an up-and-coming-soon-to-be-B-list TV star named Ben Murphy."

And so begins a heck of a flow of prose, in HILOWBROW's excellent round-up of 70s thrillers. The whole piece just keeps accelerating to its inevitable conclusion. "It only looks like a conspiracy if you're a detective".

Excellent. Also contains excellent 'Hereditary' burn.