Linked List: March 14, 2023

Tuesday, 14 March 2023

Kottke.org Is 25 Years Old Today and Jason Wrote About It ★

Jason Kottke:

My love for the web has ebbed and flowed in the years since, but mainly it’s persisted — so much so that as of today, I’ve been writing kottke.org for 25 years. A little context for just how long that is: kottke.org is older than Google. 25 years is more than half of my life , spanning four decades (the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s) and around 40,000 posts — almost cartoonishly long for a medium optimized for impermanence. What follows is my (relatively brief) attempt to explain where kottke.org came from and why it’s still going.

A thought that occurred to me when Jason was on my podcast this month (you should listen! — it’s one of my favorite episodes ever): at 25, Kottke.org is over one-quarter as old as The New Yorker magazine, which was founded in 1925. I’ve grown up thinking The New Yorker had been around “forever”. That makes Kottke.org ... one-quarter of “forever” old? My mind boggles.

Congratulations, my friend. Here’s to 25 more.

Meanwhile, Over in PC Laptop Land ★

Monica Chin, reviewing a $2,000 configuration of the Dell Latitude 7330:

For one, I only averaged three hours and 35 minutes of battery life, which would be a big problem even if everything else about this device was incredible. But even while on power, I could feel the thing chugging toward the higher end of my workload. For example, while I was operating a second screen over Thunderbolt, loading some files from external drives, running a few downloads, and trying to work over that in 20-ish Chrome tabs, the Latitude had visible slowdown. I don’t see this as an unrealistic office workload, so that’s concerning.

A $2,000 laptop that gets under 4 hours of battery life and slows down under nominal use. Jiminy.

Facebook on NFTs: Never Mind ★

Molly White:

In a Twitter thread, Meta (formerly Facebook) Head of Commerce and Fintech Stephane Kasriel announced that they would be “down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses”. Meta had only launched its support for NFTs in Facebook and Instagram partway through last year — a bit late to the NFT craze, which had largely cooled by that point.

Mark Zuckerberg had once talked about eventually using NFTs for Meta’s metaverse projects, suggesting that eventually “the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, [could] be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places”. It sounds like that plan may no longer be on the table now.