Back in 2013, I was making graphics for a project run mostly by volunteers. Being a designer, I wanted to use all the nice professional fonts I was accustomed to, but I immediately hit a roadblock — there was no budget to pay for other volunteers to use those fonts.

So I decided that if the good-looking, freely-distributable fonts I wanted didn’t exist (the free font scene was especially bleak in 2013), I was gonna have to make them myself.

If you’re an activist, an academic, or anyone just trying to make this world a better place for humans to live out our lives, please take these fonts and use them for whatever you need. They’re for you.

I like creative people taking the time not just to contribute to public commons, but articulate their thoughts in such a way. The footer and FAQ too.

My Netlify builds were failing for the past few days and I couldn’t figure out why because everything looked right to me! It built locally too! This was the error:

11:16:48 PM: [imagetools] Could not load /opt/build/repo/src/content/blog/images/2025-snippets-from-the-new-york-walk-book/img-20251012220719179.png?enhanced (imported by src/content/blog/2025-snippets-from-the-new-york-walk-book.md): Input file is missing: /opt/build/repo/src/content/blog/images/2025-snippets-from-the-new-york-walk-book/img-20251012220719179.png

But that image is there, I swear it is! If it wasn’t there, why is my Mac just letting it work? I looked through my filesystem and saw that it was saved as IMG-..., not img-....

Apparently, the MacOS filesystem is case insensitive.. That would have been nice to know a week ago but ok.

Robert Simmon’s slides from NACIS 2025. He regularly posts on his bluesky account, it is worth following: https://bsky.app/profile/rsimmon.bsky.social

In this course, we will use geospatial tools, theory, and methods to explore “the humanities,” broadly conceived. How can concepts like space, place, and landscape inform humanistic inquiry? What kinds of data exist for engaging computationally with topics like art, history, literature, and archaeology? And what tools can be used to geographically analyze the complicated relationships between people, the places they live, and the fruits of their creative endeavors?

Good readings and a great course site for this course taught by Ian Spangler, whose work I enjoy in general.

HOLC’s infamous residential security maps usefully highlight the relationships between race and value that were articulated in the landscape through projects like the Newtown Pike extension project. It is often tempting to correlate redlining with a great many modern social problems. Doing so, however, risks ignoring the many other histories and geographies that have accumulated in the margins of those striking splashes of red—lives lived, neighborhoods changed, and roads that leave a mark even before they are built.

Some time after a new type of interface is introduced, a handful of concepts tend to “win” and become a standard way of interacting with the interface. Keyboard shortcuts and right click contextual menus aren’t tied to a specific OS, they’re part of the standard toolset you get by using a keyboard and mouse. The iPhone popularized pinch-to-zoom, swipe, long tap, and many other useful multitouch interactions. With Garageband, Apple explored uncharted waters in user interaction and I’m going to talk about one simple control that has a few surprises in both use and implementation: the virtual knob.

These controls should make their way back onto the web. I implemented a button-knob for my podcast tracking component on the homepage, but it can be made more realistic and better to use.

Transitioning to orthographic view is so trippy! Orthographic view from the top gives you the standard isometric feel, but try panning and rotating the viewer to view cities like New York from the sides; completely new perspectives and feel.

It is pretty cool that you can do this outside of the Google Earth interface now, even if the Google logo remains.

If you can’t produce a comprehensive answer with confidence and on the whim the second you read the question, you don’t have the sufficient background knowledge.
“I just ask ChatGPT for that, too!”, the AI generation might ask. Ok, and then what? How can you assess the answers to those three questions (which represent only a fraction of needed knowledge!)? What is going wrong? You are taking on an impossible task, because you can’t use enough of your brain for your cognitive operations.

As I use Claude Code more, I have a deeper appreciation for the time I spent learning R and code without it between 2019-2022. I know those things super well because of the time spent struggling with them. Things are easier now but maybe only on the surface. You can’t know what you don’t know, and having a rubber duck affirm your every belief with sycophancy that is built in, I think it is better in the long run for me to minimize the percentage of code generated and that which is written. I need to remember.

Xeno.graphics is a collection of unusual charts and maps, managed by Maarten Lambrechts. Its objective is to create a repository of novel, innovative and experimental visualizations to inspire you, to fight xenographphobia and popularize new chart types.

Good inspiration pile for when you’re looking for something non-standard. Although, simple charts are also nice.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzlehunt competition that takes place on the MIT campus every year during the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend. The hunt challenges each participating team to solve a large number of puzzles which lead to an object (called a “coin”) hidden somewhere on campus. The winning team gets to write the subsequent year’s hunt.

Cool site, cool idea, cooler resources page. I’m a sucker for treasure/puzzle hunts. And probably too dumb for any of these.

Over the last three years, as a part of the Sustainable Mobility Network, Sensing Local, along with other partners, developed the Urban Revamp Design Challenge (https://sensinglocal.wixsite.com/urbanrevamp), which invited design proposals from Architects to re-imagine under-utilised public spaces in Bengaluru, supported by active citizen groups in the neighbourhood. Two successive competitions resulted in 70 design proposals for 4 sites.

Great map of public spaces in Bangalore by Sensing Local. Categorized under labels such as food streets, places under metro lines and flyovers, walker streets and so on, I think it would be neat to have a Slow Routes type routing map that optimizes for pedestrian friendly features on OSM and takes you through some of these POIs. At a high-level I understand that this is an orienteering problem.

h/t Vonter for sharing.

NYT paywalled it’s Mini crossword earlier this week. An absolutely stupid move. I got introduced to it through my friend Manas in 2022 and it has become a staple of mine and Rhea’s routine ever since. I wait eagerly for 7:30 AM when the new crossword is supposed to come out and it had this nice social aspect of looking at what time your friends finished in (so you could insult them). Both of us have also been logging our scores for the last 1.5 years (you can see the charts on my homepage for how badly I’ve been faring) so it was important to think of how we could continue doing this.

Crosshare is an open-source crossword platform with user-contributed puzzles. It has a nice ‘Daily Mini’ flavor which is what we’re switching to.

So long and thanks for all the fish NYT. I will be with you as long as Wordle and Connections remain free, but who knows how long that might be for.

Related: LA Times also has a Mini flavor

I love this. Crowd-sourced ‘slow’ walking routes for places around England, added by people who walked them and not an algorithm. I would love to recreate even a smaller version of this for our walking routes around Bangalore.

Blown away by the search capabilities and how smoothly large datasets rendered here in my quick trials. Comes with React and Svelte packages (rare to find a package that does both). Magic of DuckDB and WASM.

Definitely putting this to use in a future project. h/t Vonter for the share.

Lotssssss of free OSM basemap servers with previews to show how they look, most of which are free. This is for the contextily python library but all of them come with details for the XYZ tiles, for example:

url:	https://data.geopf.fr/wmts?SERVICE=WMTS&VERSION=1.0.0&REQUEST=GetTile&STYLE={style}&TILEMATRIXSET={TileMatrixSet}&FORMAT={format}&LAYER={variant}&TILEMATRIX={z}&TILEROW={y}&TILECOL={x}

Related: https://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

Storing images in the static folder is usually the go-to solution especially if it is dynamic (loaded from a CMS or something), but this means you lose out on Vite’s image optimizations. I always have to come back to this answer to figure out how to load them from inside the lib or src folders.

Rebuilding the site gives me a chance to get things done better. I wanted to add a small sparklines section for the various micronotes I’ll be adding, like the one Aaron Parecki has on his site, and my initial attempt was the tried and tested way I was using for everything else: go through the files and folder structure at build time, count files and parse dates and create a json data structure with the summary (how many bookmarks, notes, etc.). This is fine for a couple of hundred files but the build and processing time will probably grow linearly with it too. I want to keep this lean.

Since I’m already using a server which is hosting getindiekit.org, I thought of making it work within that set-up. IndieKit uses MongoDB for some state-management (files and actual content are stored in my repo), and it provides a very nice way to add more endpoints/routes for whatever you want: https://getindiekit.com/api/add-endpoint

I got Claude to write a small script that would access the DB, create the summary data and return it on a stats endpoint. Problem solved.

TIL about Texas stacks

Love how informal this feels.

Listening to this episode again because I’m craving some FoC.

Essentials in starting any project these days:

• Create project with the npx sv create command. Select netlify/static adapter depending on if I need server functions, select Tailwind, MDSVEX, eslint and prettier.
• Install shadcn-svelte. It is a much better way of organizing UI components, I will never be touching another UI library like flowbite or daisyui again.
• Edit app.css with project specific CSS variables that will be picked up by shadcn as well. Theming inspiration from places like tweakcn.com help; being able to centrally change the feel of a site is great.
• For code assistance, Claude Code is good. I am on the $20 Pro plan.

Started today on refactoring the personal site. There is too much bloat in terms of packages, my stupidities and versions of crucial things are lagging behind. svelte changed from 4 to 5, Tailwind lost its config.js file, components are all over the place and the list goes on. I might regret saying this but I don’t think it will take as long, since it is a matter of copying and cleaning up existing code. I have some new things as well. I have set up micropub and other new areas of ‘quantified self’, as well as teaching material that needs to be discoverable, and older things like a dedicated tidytuesday section (although the UI is nice) that don’t need as much prominence.

Everything about this thread is wonderful. Rasagy Sharma and Arun Ganesh run a digital cartography module at National Institute of Design, Bangalore and this repository contains all their course materials and resources. What is even better is that student discussions and assignments are also public! You can see progress being made and iterations happen. The other 'Issues' on the repo are also worth strolling through.

As someone who restricts themselves to 'available' shapefiles for work and doesn't really map from scratch, this is really educational for me too.

By far the coolest classroom I can imagine.

The Milestones Project is a comprehensive, visual compendium of significant events in the histories of data visualization, statistical graphics and thematic cartography. This new version features an interactive timeline, an interactive map of authors' birthplaces, and a calendar of significant events in this history.

Amazing timeline tool. When did the first line chart or network diagram appear? How did we get from Edmund Halley's contour map in 1701 to ggplot2?

Michael Friendly, the author of this project, also posts regularly on Bluesky in form of 'Today in History' posts, like this one.

Being able to recognize which parts of a data visualization produce barriers for people with disabilities can be tough. But Chartability has compiled existing standards, research, and community best practices into a comprehensive set of things to look out for. Ideally, it can help folks who create visualizations really think deeply about accessibility when they design.

I'd like to get better at accessibility this year, for my websites and especially visualizations. I don't think I can ever definitely arrive at a point where I can claim to do it perfectly but getting exposure to such ideas and incorporating them slowly is a start. Chartability is a set of heuristics to help do an audit for your visualizations, and comes with a ton of resources including a full example audit to help you understand how you can use it too.

A collection of concise write-ups on small things I learn day to day across a variety of languages and technologies. These are things that don't really warrant a full blog post.

I've never been much of a tutorial guy, and the best way for me to learn something is either by encountering a problem on my own and working through it on a need-to-know basis, or watching someone else describe their own process of tackling specific problems. This repo is doing the latter very nicely.

I recently discovered the David Rumsey map archives and spent an hour or two looking through all the various tags and keywords. These maps and charts by Survey of India, mostly from 1895, are fascinating. The visualizations are clear, the maps are well-designed, and it is a pleasure to browse through. Not to be one to hark back to the supposed greatness of the past, but this is clearly leagues better than the kind of work we see come out of government publications today.

They have a habit to ask conductor about bus timings, and my map did not mention the timings- Instead of asking "does this bus goes to XYZ stand?" people ask "What bus is this?" followed by various questions. Most of the time the driver and conductor answered but when they are busy or tensed they tell people to ask their queries at the enquiry window.

We've been discussing making schematized, London-style spider-maps for BMTC bus routes over on the Bengwalk discord (which I definitely recommend joining if you live in Bangalore and are interested in public transportation) and that has sent me into a rabbit-hole of learning about octilinear, hexilinear and all those other kinds of transit maps. Professor Mundar Rane's (IDC) blog is quite a nice find for me, and this particular post discusses their process and observations on making such a bus map for Pune. It's easy to get caught up in the tech and design of things while missing things like the questions above because we take that for granted. Good read.