Ryan DeBeasi @ryan@mastodon.xyz

okay so you might have heard that a lot of games on itch.io are generously being put on sale or going completely free to download/claim to help keep people busy during self-isolation. to make things a bit easier for poor folks like me who cant really afford to buy video games, i've made an (almost) complete list of the games that are completely free https://itch.io/c/759545/self-isolation-on-a-budget

Korg and Moog made their software synths free: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/16/korg-and-moog-have-made-their.html

complete reverse-engineered source code of ZZT (an important DOS-era game creation tool): https://github.com/asiekierka/reconstruction-of-zzt

"The growth of command line options, 1979-Present":

https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/

Over the past few years I've noticed myself stopping to do custom tweaks on my own system, and instead working to fix the underlying issue for everyone.

I finally wrote my thoughts about this down in a more coherent form https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/01/17/doing-things-that-scale

#DesignSystems
"There Is No Design System" Move away from thinking of design systems as an actual thing and more as a way of working better, more efficiently, and more creatively so that we can build great experiences for our users. https://24ways.org/2019/there-is-no-design-system/

#UX
This is amazing: a comics that explains a user centric process by using the redesign of the Batman's outfit as an example.
No more excuses to say "yeah but I don't understand what you people do" now!

http://batux.design/

For those interested, these are the CSS media queries I mentioned:

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme

Because of these, a website can automatically infer whether a user prefers fewer animations (e.g. due to vestibular disorders) or whether they prefer dark mode, based on an OS-wide setting. The "reduced motion" one is especially impressive, as it works across a wide variety of OSes – Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, even Ubuntu! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion#User_Preferences

Just occurred to me today that you younger folks who have the benefit of awesome tools like #blender might not even know that POV-RAY exists.

Pretty amazing what people are doing with this stately old piece of code these days. Check out the hall of fame, I think you'll find an image or two to be impressed by!

Many years ago, when computers were crawling, embryonic half formed things compared to what we use today, this thing was AMAZING and let anyone ray trace. It was *empowering*.
http://hof.povray.org/

New blog post: "What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs" https://nolanlawson.com/2019/11/05/what-ive-learned-about-accessibility-in-spas/

Since learning more about #accessibility, I've had some fun tabbing around different websites just to see what the experience is like. Sometimes it's actually more comfortable than using a mouse.

Slack has a neat feature: if you start tabbing around, it pops up an info message telling you about the keyboard shortcuts.