I added a new Upcoming feature to Release Notes:
Release Notes now has a new section for what’s coming next. In Upcoming you can save birthdays, anniversaries, trips, and one-time events. You can choose when you would like these events to show up in your Release Notes. Trips include a destination with a start and end date. All of these upcoming events are private to only you.
I’m having a lot of fun journaling each days version.
The nnxyz rooms
Years ago I discovered the work of nnxyz on nifty.ink. I acquired a few of his pieces and grew to like it more and more. I ended up collecting four complete collections of hundreds of pieces. I had always wished to create a gallery like experience for anyone to experience. With the help of AI I was able to make that vision a reality.
Check out the nnxyz rooms.
Some highlights of what the website has.
- Every drawing can be watched being made. The 574 Nifty Ink works are rebuilt from their archived brush strokes as native vector images, and each one replays stroke by stroke, with the recorded order, widths, colors and transparency.
- Hung like a museum, not a feed. Six wings, 28 rooms, 626 works. Every work hangs in exactly one room, rooms hold 20 to 30 works, and each room is hung in the order the works were drawn, so a walk through a room is a walk through a few weeks of drawing.
- Wall text in a museum voice. Each room has an introduction, chapters, labels, one-line notes, explained comparisons and a closing.
- An audio tour in every room. Press play and a voice reads the room while each work comes on screen, about seven minutes a room, with pause, skip and a progress line.
- A screen saver that draws. One work at a time, drawn stroke by stroke on black, held with its caption, then the next. Fullscreen, with your choice of drawing speed and hold time, and it can be limited to one room.
- A map of the building. The collection as a three-floor museum map, rooms sized by how many works they hold, colored by collection, with doors between consecutive rooms and stairs between floors.
- Readable by machines too.
/llms.txtindexes the site for language models and/llms-full.txtcarries the complete gallery text in one file. - Light or dark. A white gallery by default, black by choice, remembered across visits. The artwork itself is never altered.
- Everything downloadable. Each artwork page offers the native SVG, the original PNG and the archived metadata and provenance records, with a link to the collected NFT.
Years ago I purchased three collections of art by nnxyz on nifty.ink. I’ve now archived them in better detail than they were ever before available on my nnxyz collection site. Nifty.ink captured all art in dots and strokes so I used that to render SVG versions of all the art. Lovely. 🎨
My Maker Space is now in a totally workable and ready spot!
WT353 — Release Notes for Every Day
Claude Haiku 5.5, hard budget caps on usage-based APIs, zkAPI private payment credits, rumored Apple M8 Ultra AI servers, and Tufte’s Razor on the data-ink ratio, along with the launch of Your Version Number: Release Notes and the Twin Cities Marathon. Weekly Thing 353
A world that doesn’t need new software is a world without ideas.
In 2018 I wrote about Your Version Number. A few months ago I made a website for it (including a work edition). Then I thought “I wish I got my version number in email” and what if you could add notes for each version!
This is brand new today. Let me know what you think!
Thingy, my digital librarian, got a big improvement this week with a brand new design and moving its reasoning to the 5.5 level models (Sonnet for subscribers, Opus for supporting members). I’m very happy with how this is working now!
We got to watch the US Men’s National Team take on Canada tonight in an international friendly. USMNT won 1-0. There was an impressive amount of fireworks to go with the game and the stands were completely full with long lines to get into Allianz Field. Great to see so much enthusiasm for soccer!
Weekly Thing Archive Improved
Over the 10 years that I’ve published the Weekly Thing I have used three different platforms to send it. Each one of those had unique requirements for how I structured the issues. For a while I’ve wanted to get the entire archive updated so that no matter how far you go back the issues have the similar structure that they have today. With the help of Claude I was able to make this happen! The full archive is now updated renders cleanly. It required pretty extensive source doctoring behind the scenes.
Along with that I was able to then render every issue in audio as well. Now the Weekly Thing Podcast feed goes all the way back to the very first issue as well which is pretty cool.