2-part Desk, Box Camera, Happy Maps & SloppyPasta
#79 of 10+1 Things | Kerala, India
🌴 So Green.
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I’m writing this from Kerala, where I’m originally from, on the south west coast of India.
Monsoon was supposed to hit by May 26th but it’s been slightly delayed. The signs are all here though.
I’m drafting this a few days early, and this morning I woke up to the craziest thunder. So loud it jolted me right out of sleep. I’ve grown up with this stuff, but hearing it again after being away for so long hit different.
I came home to take a small break while working from a different setting. I haven’t stayed home in a long time and honestly, everything feels a little different from the version of home you carry around in your head.
Still getting settled in, and I’m heading to Chennai in a couple of days so there’s a bit of travel ahead too.
Oh and the ceiling fan in my room broke. I’m not a great fan of AC either in this weather. I wrote about the same fan around the same time last year: I hate my fan regulator!
Without further ado, here are 10+1 Things worth sharing:
💻 Shipping a Laptop: Lex writes about sending an old MacBook to Django, a Congolese refugee in Uganda doing a CS degree on solar power. What should've been a quick post office trip turned into a 42-day journey across 12 countries with rejections, bribe requests, and customs seizures. I won't spoil the ending but this is an incredible read.
📷 Boxx Camera: This handcrafted wooden camera on Kickstarter lets you shoot like a film camera and has a built-in pocket darkroom. You can develop and print black and white photos all inside the camera itself. It comes with interchangeable lenses, a ground glass viewfinder, and brass fittings on a hardwood body.
🍝 Stop Sloppypasta: A simple site that puts a name to something we’ve all seen. You know when someone dumps raw ChatGPT output into a Slack thread or email without even reading it? That’s sloppypasta. It shifts all the effort to the person receiving it. Worth a read.
🎧 AudioMass: This is a free, open source audio editor that runs entirely in your browser. No plugins, no backend, no sign ups. You can cut, trim, fade, and apply effects right in your browser. There's even a sample file to play around with if you just want to try it out.
✍️ Judson’s Last Ride: Sean Trende writes about his son Judson’s last day of school. Judson has profound autism, and this piece about the bus rides, the teachers, and what comes next is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a while. I won’t say much more, just read it.
🖥️ 2-Part Desk: An interesting take on desk setups by Fatih. He split one long desk into two: a digital side for work and an analog side for reading, writing, and building LEGO with his kids. Simple idea but I love the mental boundary it creates. Perfect timing since I've been looking for a new desk myself.
🔤 Greek Alphabet Cards: Theo, a Greek professor of computational art, made a set of cards to teach his kids the Greek alphabet where each object is drawn to actually look like the letter it represents. So the lion looks like a lambda, the snake looks like a phi! He used a Greek dictionary, ChatGPT, and some hand sketching to pull it off. Such a clever project.
👶 Baby on the Subway: Danny was rushing through a New York subway station in 2000 when he found a newborn in a corner. In this heartwarming Guardian piece, he and his partner Pete, a gay couple who never planned on becoming parents, share how that moment changed everything. 26 years later, they've turned the whole journey into a children's book.
🗺️ Happy Maps: Alvin Chang mapped over 100,000 happy moments from a research project where 10,000 people tracked what made them happy. Each moment is placed on a map based on how much agency it involved and whether it was immediate or long term joy. The little hand drawn people illustrations are so beautiful.
📸 Sheep Drive: These beautiful photographs by Maurice Wolf show the annual sheep migration through the mountains of Georgia. Every fall, shepherds trek their flocks from the highlands down to warmer pastures, a tradition that’s been going on for thousands of years. The black and white shots are stunning.
📹 Screwdriver Handle: I had so much fun watching this video by Rex Krueger tracing how the modern screwdriver handle evolved from 19th century woodworking chisels. Turns out every curve and groove on your Craftsman screwdriver goes back over 150 years.
That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
Which one was your favourite this week?
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With Love,
Rishi
“Sometimes maybe you need an experience. The experience can be a person or it can be a drug. The experience opens a door that was there all the time but you never saw it. Or maybe it blasts you into outer space.”