Here are a few stories, posts, and resources I’ve read and enjoyed over the past month.
Hope you enjoy them, too!
What I Found Interesting
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Like many other folks, I’ve been a fan for years of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips by Bill Watterson.
The comic strip follows the adventures of six-year-old boy Calvin and his best friend, a tiger named Hobbes. Which is real to Calvin, but appears as a stuffed animal to everyone else.
I was excited to learn the entire archive of Calvin and Hobbes is available online.
For free!
And the comic strips are searchable.
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Five years after an April 2019 fire threatened to destroy the 800+ year old structure, the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral were heard once again on November 8, 2024.
The official celebrations and reopening of the Cathedral is planned to begin December 7, 2024.
Rebuilding Notre Dame required help from skilled craftsmen from around the globe and the use of tools — created on-site — that match those used by the original workers who built the cathedral centuries ago.
It also required 2,000 Oak trees from forests across Europe that dried for 12 to 19 months before the wood was used in the rebuild
I visited Notre Dame years ago when I traveled to Paris for work, when I managed a software localization project.
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I remember when the first announcement about Let’s Encrypt was released. Now they’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the release.
Let’s Encrypt represented a huge step for folks creating, building, and publishing on websites. It offered a free, automated, and open certificate authority, making HTTPS available to everyone for free.
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When the side-effects of surgery left his mom with permanent anterograde amnesia (she can’t form new long-term memories), Jan Miksovsky used their technology skills to create a web-based tool to help.
Miksovsky’s mom lived on her own, but her amnesia caused her anxiety about her children. Messages and notes from her children would quickly be forgotten.
Enter MomBoard, the web-based e-ink display Miksovsky developed which displays short messages from Miksovsky and his siblings to his mom.
I loved reading the design goals of the display, including “was large enough and easy enough to read without glasses” and “required no interaction to wake or read and was relatively foolproof (touching it wouldn’t disrupt it).”
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Makes sense to me. Trees don’t like to breathe wildfire smoke, either and they’ll hold their breath to avoid it.
We can stay inside (as we did in summer 2023) when there’s wildfire smoke. But trees don’t have that option to escape the smoke.
Instead, trees shut down their exchange with outside air, which is what Delphine Farmer and MJ Riches at the University of Colorado discovered with their accidental research during a Colorado Rocky Mountains wildfire in 2020.
