Weekly Notes #6

This is the first Weekly TIL also shared via my newsletter! The newsletter contains:

Meta

Reminder: this site is an iterative experiment, so let's put on the janitor hat:

This week's summary

Balancing experimentation, daily writing, finishing my job interviews and (slowly but surely) turning sonnet.io into a sustainable business is tough. No shit, Sherlock!

As much as I'm learning to be impatient when it comes to sharing my work, I'm also trying to get better at exercising patience when it comes to reaping the results. Luckily, this became much easier this week as we moved the needle a little bit on all fronts.

Night Reader is available on TestFlight. Check it out here. The feedback I've received so far is positive and more importantly—very actionable.

In two days we almost reached the initial limit of 100 testers, which is surprising given how niche it is and how little effort I put into spreading the word about it. I mean, the main job of this app is reduce the number of photons leaving the screen.

The thing is, although I'm significantly busier and more tired than when I worked full-time, I feel like it's so much easier to carry on. Having something useful to share with others every single day keeps me just as anchored as writing every morning. Thank you.

Next week:

Favourite project(s)

bitsy — Bitsy is a tiny engine for tiny games. I love creative tools that feel like toys and this one is particularly fun to use.

I remembered it when messing with Pulp — the web based editor for Playdate

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines — my favourite bitsy game, created by Laura Hunt. Give it a go, especially if you like murder ballads.
I used this soundtrack during my second play-through. During my third one I'd go with Black Soul Choir.

Favourite site

Pink Trombone — bare-handed speech synthesis. Pink Trombone is a UI/sound generator inspired by the human vocal apparatus. If you have any interest in music or linguistics (esp. phonetics), use it with headphones, because you might spend a non insignificant amount of time trying to reproduce the state of the UI with your own mouth (and likely get a bit sore, as I did.)

Arwes — Arwes is a futuristic Sci-Fi UI web framework, inspired by Halo, Tron, Synthwave. It looks, feels, and sounds Cyberpunk. True 10x developers know that Tailwind + React is just a distraction from the only feasible way: a UI framework that makes a plomk! sound when the UI updates.


Before you continue, remember to take an egg break!

Favourite piece of tech

Flexatone — "The flexatone or fleximetal is a modern percussion instrument (an indirectly struck idiophone) consisting of a small flexible metal sheet suspended in a wire frame ending in a handle."

I had to re-read the definition twice, so here's mine: imagine a musical saw and a ball gag had a baby and that baby became a minor celebrity on "That 70s (Fusion) Show".

Here's an example recording.

Cuíca — a musical instrument in spite of the name, which I mistook as belonging to a wild animal species. I was partially correct as cuíca is named after the gray four-eyed opossum.

Interesting articles

Sound — an interactive explanation of what is sound, how it's created and propagated. Bartosz Ciechanowski's articles have the admirable quality of being both incredibly comprehensive and hard to set aside due to how beautifully he manages to explain the subject matter.

If you like coding, check out the sources of his articles.

Y2K — Recently I saw an article about Frutiger Aero which brought back the memory nightmare I had a few years back: I was hit by a tram and I died. My spirit woke up 20 years later in a world where everyone was using Windows Vista. The attached fandom link describes the visual aesthetic of a period between the late 90s and early 00s. If I had to describe it with one link: WINDOWS93.

Things I wrote last week that people liked

Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!

Peace, love and pixels,
R.

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.