by Matthew Lyon  • 

What is your work now?

Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this in the wake of the collapse of my previous employer; in figuring out what’s next for me and how I can go about doing what I do in a structure that’s not going to lead to a cycle of burnout and seeking to escape the environment that led to it. It’s been illuminating, to say the least.

I can’t recommend Mandy’s blog enough.

Helping Protect Kids Online (pdf link)

A whitepaper from Apple about plans to improve parental controls with regard to creating child accounts and app stores. This is long overdue: of all the devices we deal with parental controls for, our Apple ones are by far and away the worst in that regard. The best? Surprisingly, Microsoft.

How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets

Brian Krebs provides a thorough and fascinating overview of a new type of proliferating fraud:

These messages are being sent through sophisticated phishing kits sold by several cybercriminals based in mainland China. And they are not traditional SMS phishing or “smishing” messages, as they bypass the mobile networks entirely. Rather, the missives are sent through the Apple iMessage service and through RCS, the functionally equivalent technology on Google phones.

As I’ve been saying in the Login Bingo series: you shouldn’t trust links in emails, but this goes doubly-so for text/instant messages from unknown senders. Or really, in general.

I’ve been getting an incessant and increasingly desperate chain of emails from some identity verification company over the last week, pleading me to “complete my identity verification”; the email looks legitimate, the company looks legitimate, but I did not and to my knowledge have not willingly started a process involving verifying my identity with this company. They have provided zero context for this request, the email is from noreply@, and a request for more info from their public support channels has been ignored. Meanwhile, they’ve provided no way to opt out or otherwise stop this process. To me, the link in that email is radioactive until I know what it’s for, and when you understand the process Brian outlines in the linked post, you’ll understand why.

”A calculator app? Anyone could make that.” / The Graphing Calculator Story

Stories about making calculators, at Google & Apple, respectively

A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That’s much, much harder than it sounds. What I’m about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.

 I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.

both via Paul Cantrell, who said

I love how each story epitomizes the old-school ethos of each company

The Racist History of BMI

I’ve been aware of pieces of this, and it should be obvious after thinking about it for more than a minute why BMI is bad, but this is a very thorough debunking of it:

When this system was designed with white men in mind (literally like everything else), it’s no wonder marginalized groups are misdiagnosed, discriminated against and shamed for their BMI, when the index was never created with their bodies in mind. Black women are especially demonized by the BMI scale, being the largest at-risk group based on the index—no shock there.

Don’t Fuck With Scroll

Momentum scrolling plugins are the web equivalent of turning a functional bike into a unicycle because it “looks cool”. It adds unnecessary complexity, degrades usability, and frustrates users. Instead of reinventing scrolling, stick to what works: native, predictable, fast scrolling behavior.

I’ve been saying for a while that interaction design is primarily about feel and perhaps nothing epitomizes that better than scrolling, and the controversy about Natural Srcolling. Something feeling off induces a visceral, physical reaction of wrongness, and one should be attuned to that.

Personally, I love Natural Scrolling, but I’ve used a Magic Trackpad since the first iteration of them came out in 2009 or so; poor trackpad controls on Windows & Linux have been one the main deterrents for me adopting them, and while better drivers exist, they aren’t good enough.

Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever

Personal websites matter - now, more than ever - because we can see, clearly, with our own eyes, what happens when a handful of companies control and own the medium and the message.

Amen.