Going nearline 

By David Roessli

Posted in thoughts

Tags :
Postcard with a red train running up a mountain

We’ll be taking time off these two upcoming weeks.

Nearline is a term used in computer science to describe an intermediate type of something that represents a compromise between online and offline. Nearline dates back to the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System tape library, which was announced in 1974.

We’ll be open to last-minute opportunities, we might sail-off on the lake for a few days, lay in, eat at restaurants, clean-up, sort-out, dream, walk or cycle, take a train eastwards into Switzerland, catch-up on our movie backlog, drink wine and beer, forget about cooking (or not), sort and process photos (might even print a few), visit friends we haven’t seen for a while, do nothing and feel guilty about it, practice yoga on a daily basis, lay in grass, find shapes in the clouds, try to live in the here and now.

Recent Logs — or the next 10 entries

Well, they might not be all that recent. You'll find the older entries in the archives.

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Recent Links — Pinboard

I've been using Pinboard (and del.icio.us before that) on and off to save my links ever since 2005. Here are the latest links I saved. You'll find all the others on Pinboard.

  • A Cheatsheet for User Interview and Follow Ups Questions by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.

    I put together a “cheat sheet that helps write interview and follow ups questions for user research and usability test protocols” Those are fragments of questions to should help you get started writing your own questions.

    Tagged with: research / ux
  • SmolCSS

    Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components

    Tagged with: css / layout
  • Serving sharp images to high density screens - JakeArchibald.com

    If you want your images to be as sharp as possible, you need to target images at the user’s device pixels, rather than their CSS pixels.

    Tagged with: css / image / performance
  • Bryan - Hicks.design

    John Bryan Hicks (1932–2021) was an architect, photographer, railway enthusiast and most importantly my Dad. Bryan is a free, single-weight open type font, a faithful digital recreation of his distinctive handwriting.

    Tagged with: font-face
  • A Complete Guide to Custom Properties

    Everything important and useful to know about CSS Custom Properties. Like that they are often referred to as “CSS Variables” but that’s not their real name.

    Tagged with: css / reference
  • TimeMachineEditor

    TimeMachineEditor is a software for macOS that starts backups in Time Machine at particular times. You can choose an interval or create other types of scheduling.

    Tagged with: mac / timemachine / backup

More links »

Paros — Our favourite greek island / 2021

Flickr album page

We’re off to Paros in the Greek Cyclades for a short break just the two of us. It’s our first trip as a couple since before the children. It feels weird and exciting to fly and travel again after over 18 months of covid, confinement, etc.