Black:

A wallpaper series using shapes and lights. High resolution rendered using Cinema 4D, for your phone and desktop

A series of black wallpapers. These are right in my wheelhouse.

Scott Alexander:

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.

I worry that people don’t appreciate how weird this is. I didn’t appreciate it for a long time. I guess I just figured that Grandpa used to talk about how back in his day movie tickets only cost a nickel; that was just the way of the world. But all of the numbers above are inflation-adjusted. These things have dectupled in cost even after you adjust for movies costing a nickel in Grandpa’s day. They have really, genuinely dectupled in cost, no economic trickery involved.

This entire post is fascinating.

Linode, which is where this website is hosted, has launched a new $5 per month plan:

We’re also introducing the Linode 1GB, our lowest priced instance ever at only $5 per month. We believe this will add a great deal of utility to our service.

I have one of these that I use for testing and to run a few basic maintenance tasks (reports, stat checking, things like that), and it’s great. If you’re at all interested in learning about servers, Linux, and basic web administration, I highly recommend Linode. You can jump in, try things out, and it’s a simple and inexpensive way to learn (they also have good tutorials). If you mess something up, it’s easy to restore and reset and keep playing around. I’m a big “learn by doing” person, and if you’re like me, take the plunge and give it a shot!

As Marco Arment once wrote:

Modern Linux server administration is much easier than you think. If you can write a halfway decent app, you can manage a Linux VPS in your sleep.

You don’t need to compile kernels, build anything from source code, partition any disks, or deal with iptables in most cases. The defaults of good distributions and packages are almost always very secure. And once you set everything up, you can leave it running largely untouched indefinitely. You’ll probably never be woken up at 3 AM to reboot anything or delete log files.

This is one of the funniest things I’ve read all year.

I really love the Skala color picker for macOS, it’s a great way to grab colors from the screen and find the correct code to use in web development or other design work. I like it so much that sometimes I want to just launch the color picker outside of an app that has it built in. The best way I’ve found to do this is to create a simple AppleScript application (this app apparently does the same thing, but writing your own is fun).

I use this icon with it.