Stuff I’ve found around the web that I think others might enjoy.

People

People or groups who I think are doing interesting things.

Walking the World (Chris Arnade)

A newsletter/blog of a man documenting his long walks, many of which are in cities most would find unwalkable in the United States. He’ll also occasionally travel abroad and document interesting on-the-ground findings elsewhere in the world (he was in Kyiv just before the war started).

J. Kenji López-Alt

Kenji has helped inspire me to invest more time and energy into cooking better food for myself. His YouTube channel is particularly great. I keep a copy of The Food Lab in my kitchen as a sort of textbook reference to refer to as I cook.

Hundred Rabbits

The wiki of a two people who make art, software, videos, and catalog their knowledge and experience while living aboard a small sailboat. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from their work as of late and would highly recommend getting lost in their wiki, and especially their vegan recipe website.

Brr

A blog from an IT worker living on a research base in Antarctica, documenting the nuances of infrastructure and everyday life in an extreme climate. The articles are pretty timeless, so it’s well worth browsing around the archive.

Projects

Various software/real life projects that I’ve found interesting to use or keep an eye on their development.

Marginalia

Viktor is single-handedly building a search engine that focuses on the non-commercial parts of the web. The blog is a fantastic glimpse into the day-to-day challenges of taking on such an enormous task, but also has some great commentary on the current state of the web and how we can make it better.

Mastodon

I’ve mostly abandoned commercial social media platforms in favor of the fediverse. I’ve found the communities on Mastodon to be much more wholesome and significantly less toxic to my brain, but your mileage may vary. I’m particularly fond of the people I’ve met through the community on merveilles.town. Lots of interesting people at the intersection of technology, art, veganism, and a general distaste for capitalism.

Kagi

Google’s monopoly on internet search has gone on for too long and resulted in a reversal of progress in finding information online. Kagi is the most promising replacement I’ve seen thus far. Yes, you have to pay for a subscription, but I’ve found their results to be substantially better than DuckDuckGo or Google’s. On top of that, they’re a bootstrapped company (ie not VC-backed), which has me rooting for them to see success all the more.

SourceHut

I’ve recently realized the irony in hosting my free/open source projects on a platform run by a megacorp (Github/Microsoft). SourceHut is the exact polar opposite and is run by Drew DeVault, someone who vehemently rejects the current domination of the internet by giant tech companies. I’m slowly but surely working on migrating my projects over to SourceHut, even though there are some design decisions that I’m not 100% sure about (namely the choice to use email patches over pull requests).

Kill The Newsletter

A simple and free service for converting email newsletters to RSS feeds. Also mentioned in this blog post.

Urbanism

I love learning about cities, and especially how we can make them more sustainable and liveable for humans rather than cars. There seems to be a growing community of YouTube channels and discussion boards around these ideas which I am very fond of for their work in spreading the good word.

Not Just Bikes

A YouTube channel that does a much better job than I can in explaining why North American cities are sorry horribly designed and what good urban design looks like. I particularly enjoyed this video which explains why city design is so important (unfortunately at the expense of Houston).

RMTransit

This YouTube channel is for people who can’t consume enough information about trains and transit systems.

Pedestrian Observations

Alon Levy’s blog is filled with ridiculous well done analysis/insights into mass transit, especially in the successes/failures of different systems around the world. Their series on construction costs is interesting for anyone wondering why large infrastructure projects are so difficult in the US.

Jon Worth

Jon is doing some very cool research and activism around improving cross-border rail around Europe. His Mastodon feed is a must-follow if you’re interested in rail. He’s also a candidate for the Grün party in Berlin!

One of the many things I love about his work is that he’s been adamant about avoiding most commercial social networks for promoting his campaign. He’s one of the few creators I know who only publishes videos on his PeerTube channel!