Technique
Andrew Batson shares a story from Steve Reich’s new book Conversations, about his teacher Hall Overton, “one of the first musicians to engage seriously and on equal terms with both jazz and the European tradition.”
Code, Camera, Action blog
Notes from the cloud by Eric Johnson
Who needs anonymous exposure notifications?
Nick Heer reminded me that shortly after Apple and Google announced their Exposure Notification System, the Washington Post ran a story criticizing the plan, quoting public health officials concerned that the EN system wouldn’t provide location data and other information that would enable contact tracing.
How to use Jekyll Picture Tag or any Jekyll plugin with GitHub Pages
Host your website with GitHub Pages. Use whatever Jekyll plugins you like — even fancy ones that Pages doesn’t support. The secret: build and deploy your Jekyll website with GitHub Actions. Here’s how.
Turps
I made a ground of Payne’s gray, Vandyke brown, and Naples yellow by squeezing these colors onto my canvases. I then tipped on Sansodor, an odorless paint thinner that I’d begun to use as a replacement for turps. Until a few years ago, when I opened the door to my flat the smell of turps was overpowering. Everyone commented on it. I loved the smell. All my clothes and my hair were saturated with its pungency. I wore the scent with pride, like a saint reveling in her hair shirt. If I lit candles in my front room in the evening, their flames would shoot up toward the ceiling, fueled by the gaseous fumes. But gradually, I found it harder to tolerate and it became difficult to breathe. I had constant sinus pain and headaches. I had to give it up.
— Celia Paul, Against Any Intrusion: Writing to Gwen John
Writing to learn
I came across David Perell’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Online the other day. It’s packed with tips for building readership and connecting with people who share your interests. The way Perell sees it, writing online is a way of thinking out loud, of finding collaborators to that thinking, and of building reputation. What an enticing, paralyzing idea.
Decentralization and resilience
Dan Wang writes in his 2021 letter from China about the situation on the ground. He’s lived in China for years, and his annual letters have been a window into the country from his perspective traveling around the country, following manufacturing and engineering developments for his day job as an analyst.