6 Lessons, Attention Button, Ribbon Maps & Subpixel Snake
#61 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi
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I had a fun weekend! On Friday, my wife and I went to 421 Arts Campus in Abu Dhabi for a block party. To be honest, I didn’t even know what a block party was—I just saw a random poster in one of the expat groups and decided to go for it!
421 is an arts campus where artists explore and create through residencies, fellowships, and internships. As part of the block party, there were a few workshops, and we decided to join the zine-making session by Sarah Ahmed. I knew about zines thanks to Austin Kleon, but I had never made one before. It was a fun and interesting experience—I just scribbled and pasted random things into mine. Even though it didn’t look great, the process was meditative and calming. My wife, on the other hand, loved the activity so much that she spent three hours crafting her zine! I don’t even want to share mine since it looks so bad, but she did a wonderful job. The picture above is of her zine, and you can read more about her experience on her blog!
I also attended a small natural dyeing workshop, where we dyed cotton bags using natural colors made from turmeric, hibiscus, and red cabbage. Apparently, if you sprinkle baking soda on hibiscus dye, the red shade turns blue—that was fun to try!
Living in a city full of immigrants, many temporarily caught up in the grind for survival, it can sometimes be hard to find experiences like these, so I’m grateful and happy that I went for it.
Without further ado, here are 10+1 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
💡 6 Lessons
I stumbled upon this interesting piece by Henrik Karlsson, where he reflects on his time working at an art gallery. He started with a low-paying job but transformed it by taking initiative and learning how the place actually worked. He shares lessons on career growth, like how the best opportunities come to those who take responsibility beyond their job title. He also talks about how the best artists are like startup founders—dedicated, disciplined, and always improving their work. Another key idea is that financial sustainability is crucial for creating and preserving art, even in non-profits. In the end, he realized that just being proactive and thoughtful can make a huge impact, no matter where you work.
⌨ Full Body Keyboard
I found this full-body keyboard project quite interesting! It’s called Semaphore, and it lets you type using body movements instead of a regular keyboard. It’s based on semaphore signals, which were traditionally used by sailors and signalers to communicate using flags held at different angles. In this keyboard, you move your arms in specific positions to type letters, numbers, and symbols, and other gestures—like squatting or lifting a leg—control things like Shift, Backspace, and arrow keys. You can even jump to repeat the last typed symbol, making it more fluid to use. It’s a fun and creative way to control a computer using just your body! The code is open-source, and you can even watch a video demonstration of how it works.
🧾 Ribbon Maps
I found this really interesting map called the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters. It’s a pocket-sized map from 1866, showing the entire Mississippi River. It’s 11 feet long but only about 3 inches wide, wrapped around a spool so you can roll it up and carry it easily. It was made for tourists to track their journey along the river, spotting towns, railroads, and landmarks as they went. Instead of a regular folded map, this one followed a single route, kind of like how Google Maps guides you turn by turn today. Though it wasn’t very practical, it captured the excitement of river travel at the time and reflected how people experienced long journeys in the 19th century.
👴 Obituary for a Quiet Life
I read this beautiful essay by Jeremy B. Jones about his grandfather, Ray Harrell, who lived a quiet but deeply meaningful life in North Carolina. Ray preferred to stay in the background—raising a family, working at a textile mill, and helping others—yet his presence shaped those around him. When he passed away without a funeral or headstone, Jones struggled to capture his essence in a standard obituary, realizing that quiet lives often leave the deepest impact. Through small acts of kindness and steadfastness, Ray built a legacy that won’t make headlines but remains profoundly felt.
“The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.”
💬 Skills in 2025
I had bookmarked this HN discussion around New Year's where people shared the skills they want to develop in 2025. Since HN is tech-focused, there was the usual talk about self-hosting, learning functional programming, and diving into Rust or Kubernetes. But there were also some fascinating ones—a husband-wife duo who are musicians learning to tailor and fabricate clothes for their own costumes, someone improving their writing because they believe true writing will become more valuable in the age of LLMs, and another trying to build their second stand-up paddleboard from wood. Others had unique physical goals like mastering a one-arm handstand or solving a Rubik’s cube in under 30 seconds. Great to see the wide variety of skills people are trying to improve upon!
I loved this one the most:
I want to learn how to properly build a habit/routine that isn't dopamine driven.
🏷 Attention Button
I found this awesome product called The Attention Button. A cool IoT gadget (when was the last time you heard the word IoT with all the AI buzz!) that lets you send a quick nudge to someone special, just to let them know you’re thinking of them. It’s a small desk toy with a knob—you rotate it to select an icon and press it to send a signal to a paired device, which then lights up and plays a sound. Works over Wi-Fi, so distance doesn’t matter! You can even customize it since the design and code are open-source. Feels like a modern-day telegraph for emotions! It’s developed by an indie developer and ships internationally!
📚 How to Blow Up a Pipeline
This week, I picked up an interesting book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline after a friend suggested it, and I was intrigued by the name. It argues that peaceful climate protests haven’t worked and explores the idea of sabotage as a form of activism. While I don’t agree with extreme climate activism (and I have to be mindful of where I’m currently based!), the book raises important questions about how social movements create change. It also looks at past movements where property destruction played a role. The author, Andreas Malm, presents a bold argument, though the ideas are quite controversial. Given the state of the world, it’s definitely a thought-provoking read.
An interesting quote from the book:
“If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.”
~ As always, resurfaced by Readwise. If you’re interested, read my review of Readwise.
Last Week’s Read: Art Thief
🎹 DIY Pipe Organ
I read this interesting story about how Matthias Wandel started building a pipe organ himself in the fall of 1992. With no musical background, he took a university music course and became fascinated with sound. Instead of buying an instrument, he decided to build one using his father’s woodworking shop. He goes through how he started with a vacuum cleaner motor for air, experimented with different pipe designs, and tuned the wooden pipes for perfect pitch. Through trial and error, he created a fully functional organ with handmade wooden pipes, a custom wind chest, and a pressure regulator. The organ remains in his living room, occasionally played by visitors and serving as a great conversation piece.
📖 Be Curious
So this month’s IndieWeb Carnival is on Affirmations. I struggled with the idea for the good part of the last couple of weeks, but finally, it clicked. Read my reflections on curiosity—how I lost it, found it again, and embraced it as my guiding force. As a kid, I was endlessly curious, always taking things apart and exploring ideas. But over time, practicality took over, and I stopped questioning things. A career shift and life changes made me realize I had lost that spark. Rediscovering curiosity has reshaped my journey, and now, I embrace it fully—Be curious, always!
👨🏻🏫 Chalkboards
This week, I came across a fascinating photography project called Momentum by Alejandro Guijarro. He traveled to top universities like Cambridge, Oxford, and Stanford to photograph blackboards filled with quantum mechanics equations. His photos turn these complex equations into abstract art, making them look like paintings. One cool moment was when he captured a partially erased blackboard that looked like a Cy Twombly or Jackson Pollock artwork. His work shows how scientific ideas are written, erased, and built upon over time. He also plays with perception by making his photos the exact size of real blackboards, so they feel almost real.
🎬 Subpixel Snake
I was fascinated seeing this interesting video of a Snake game—but at the subpixel level, where you’d need a microscope to see it! Patrick modified an old JavaScript Snake game to run on the tiny red, green, and blue subpixels inside each pixel. The result is a mind-blowingly small game where the snake moves across individual subpixels, creating a unique and creative twist on the classic!
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That’s 10+1 Things for the week!
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With Love,
Rishi
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
~ Warren Bennis