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Observe: Nick Sweeting

In case the intent of the por­trait isn’t obvi­ous, the cap­tion includes his Github pro­file name, @pirate.

Just stum­bled on Nick Sweeting’s cool home­page (via ArchiveBox, which showed up because I was trying to learn how I can share video with­out expos­ing viewer ana­lyt­ics, again) and he links to a lot of inter­est­ing things: 

  • a free VPN for Chinese stu­dents, project phased out in the past few years. 
  • the ArchiveBox, a free, con­fig­urable, self-hosted auto­mated archiver of web content. 
  • Featured on his About page: the con­cept of B‑type people who are bio­log­i­cally out of phase with the day­light cir­ca­dian rhythm. There’s a whole advo­cacy move­ment, the B‑Society, laying out sci­en­tific argu­ments and call­ing for more sleep time for school-age teens. 
  • Monadical, an eth­i­cal and long-view dev agency, with a solid work his­tory, and a very nice hand­made theme of brand illustration. 
  • This exten­sive list of YouTube chan­nels for seri­ous inter­ests, pref­aced by a list of key­board short­cuts for nav­i­gat­ing YT. Quote: “Specialization is for insects, learn all the things!”
  • This great arti­cle on the making of a leg­endary Hokusai remix poster, The Wave of the Future, was writ­ten by the OG designer behind the con­cept, Judy Kirpich.
For con­text, this is from the early 1980s, when there were no PhotoShop actions for this – and no PhotoShop.
  • HedgeDoc, a qual­ity col­lab­o­ra­tive Markdown editor, Wiki-style, which he uses to run his entire blog. Allows for guest arti­cles with perma­link URLs.
  • An arti­cle that relates and links to this con­cept, big at the Recurse Center, of ‘No Feigning Surprise’. The spirit of the rule is to be gra­cious in answer­ing ques­tions which seem obvi­ous. Julia Evans has a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally upbeat take on the idea.
  • HackClub: a well-run umbrella group, with a good system to help devel­oper non­prof­its to admin­is­ter and mon­i­tor spend­ing, plus legal frame­work and sup­port. Discovered the Project Boom ini­tia­tive to donate old com­put­ers world­wide, but the site is down for rebuild… 
  • Sweeting built a proof-of-con­cept botnet for the Mac, based on the book Violent Python, which presents the idea of ‘offen­sive com­put­ing’ for beginners.
  • He has a bounty chal­lenge to dis­cover any per­sonal infor­ma­tion he hasn’t delib­er­ately put out, from middle name to gov­ern­ment ID info. 

This was an unplanned surf ses­sion of about 1.5 hours; oppor­tu­ni­ties dis­cov­ered, prob­a­bly 3 or 4. 

ArchiveBox and the related mirror project for Wikipedia, I have to keep in mind; very worthy work on vital tools for the health of the Web.