Weekender #113: Bye Bye Baby Myna Birbs

• Birb watch: As I mentioned last week, Handsome and Matey mynah - had been attempting to shoo away their offspring. At the start of the week, I saw both fledgling mynahs; by Friday, neither was around. And just as quickly as they came, the mynah babies have departed. They sure were adorable and smart while they were here. I wish them both well!

This week’s Link List

Design

• A new CSS Tip, almost every day? Yes please!

• Type Scale is a visual type calculator that lets you preview and choose the right font size, scale and webfont for your project.

Software and hardware

• If you need a way to break down a complex task, try Magic ToDo from Goblin Tools. It’s a standard to-do list that uses machine learning to break down any task into the steps that you need to accomplish it.

• Eighty Shades of Option Key is an exhaustive guide to the option key on your Mac and the many apps that use it.

• Following up on last week’s NetNewsWire themes, here are a few more that you can add to the app.

Miscellaneous

• The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst mapped Reddit. Reddit Map is an open-source tool that displays clusters of Reddit communities with overlapping community members.

• It’s bad news if you’re using an ad blocker while viewing YouTube videos. Bleeping Computer reports that YouTube has been experimenting with blocking videos unless you disable ad blockers.

• Cal Newport gave a talk to middle school students and their parents about kids and smartphones.

  The research community concerned about these issues are converging on the idea that the safe age to give a kid unrestricted access to a smartphone is 16.

• In other news pertaining to phones and younger folks, The Wall Street Journal writes about how Gen Zers are now using flip phones to get away from endless scrolling and notifications. I had a good chuckle reading how one of them is evangelizing their flip phone use on TikTok.

Media consumption

• Eric Krasno (guitarist of Lettuce) and Stanton Moore (drummer of Galactic) have teamed up to record an album of instrumental covers. The Krasno/Moore Project: Book of Queens is an album that reimagines the work of great female artists. Joined by organist Eric Finland, the trio reimagine the work of female artists like Peggy Lee, Aretha Franklin, Sharon Jones, and others. Listen on Bandcamp and Apple Music.