diff --git a/daily-finds.log.md b/daily-finds.log.md index b6c3664..65e121f 100644 --- a/daily-finds.log.md +++ b/daily-finds.log.md @@ -4304,3 +4304,43 @@ Uncovered finds (11), none padded in: coast-mac-control-surface, etymologue, ram - **`rampage-trail-can-toolbox` + `pay-phone-charger` would have made an obvious "objects wearing another object's shape" bundle** — and `2026-07-25-wrapped-as-something-else` shipped exactly that theme three days ago. Refused as a near-duplicate; pay-phone-charger went to the handmade cluster instead, where its virtue is the hand-painting rather than the disguise, and rampage stays unbundled until the disguise angle has some distance on it. - **`osaurus`, `open-minis`, `imagin-raw-photo-browser`, `orate-mac-text-to-speech` and `coast-mac-control-surface` cluster cleanly as "no service in the middle"** — and that is `2026-07-11-nothing-leaves-the-device` under a different name. Held for the same reason. Ineligible (alcohol), excluded from the pool up front: fieldbar-mini-bar, do-your-whisky-whiskey-making-kit. + +## 2026-07-28 — reviews: datatype-chart-font, ants-phenakistoscope-turntable, submarine-safari-tenerife + +Three graduations, all from today's shortlist, all three review candidates taken. Two of the three produced factual corrections that were pushed back into the find as well as stated in the review. + +### review: datatype-chart-font + +Graduated from find captured on 2026-07-28, source: Kottke.org. +Hero: `promo-images/Pies.png` from the project's own repo — the pie glyph stepped from empty to full across four weight/width settings, 3240×1620, no marketing copy. Deliberately a *different* asset from the find's hero (`Table.png`, the stock table with inline sparklines) so the two pages do not show the same image. Both were found only because the repo turned out to ship a `promo-images/` folder; the site's published og.png is a title card and was rejected under the overlay-text rule. +Category: design (existing). +Fact-check: **find held up, with one correction.** Verified against the project README rather than the demo page. The find said "two variable axes tune density and stroke" — that phrasing came from the demo site's own copy and is wrong. The axes are the ordinary `wdth` (50–150) and `wght` (100–900); there is no bespoke density axis, and the point is precisely that the charts respond to standard type controls. The find was corrected before this commit. Also confirmed and added: a hard cap of **20 values per chart**, a **0–100 value range**, SIL Open Font License 1.1, WOFF2 for web and TTF for desktop, and credit to Frank Tisellano with guidance from Emma Marichal and Dave Lab6. +Honest limitations surfaced: twenty points is a sparkline and not a time series; you must normalise to 0–100 yourself, so the font can never draw an axis, label, legend or tick; and the whole thing depends on OpenType ligatures being enabled — when they are not, the reader sees `{b:15,45,80}` sitting in the sentence. +Amazon: n-a (a font). + +### review: ants-phenakistoscope-turntable + +Graduated from find captured on 2026-07-28, source: The Awesomer. +Hero: the linked video's YouTube `maxresdefault` at 1280×720 — a hand mid-stroke drawing ant figures onto the paper disc, inspected by eye first and text-free. **Reused on both find and review**, which the skill permits as a fallback and which is recorded here as intentional: there is no richer first-party asset, the artist publishes no stills, and The Awesomer's post is Cloudflare-blocked to both curl and WebFetch. +Category: design (existing). +Fact-check: **find held up and was expanded.** The Awesomer's framing was verified independently through the YouTube oEmbed endpoint and a search of the artist's channel: **Yohei Kisanuki (木佐貫洋平), who publishes as LimbaTrip and is a professional kalimba player** — the phenakistoscope discs are a sideline on a channel that is otherwise thumb-piano performance. The linked video is titled 「蟻人間」メイキング動画, so the work itself is **蟻人間** ("ant men") and the video is explicitly the making-of, which matches how the find describes it. The Kid Should See This has covered the same artist's earlier discs (climbers, dancers, walkers) — that is also why it became this run's source nominee. +Honest limitation surfaced: a phenakistoscope is a physical illusion, and a *video* of one is the camera's shutter doing the interrupting rather than your own eye. The review says so rather than pretending the recording is the artefact. +Link note for the operator: the find and review link to the making-of video (`youtu.be/PG6DG3UXZxY`) because that is the only URL The Awesomer exposes that could be verified. The short piece it credits appears to live off-YouTube and its address could not be confirmed, so it was not guessed at. +Amazon: n-a. + +### review: submarine-safari-tenerife + +Graduated from find captured on 2026-07-28, source: Atlas Obscura. +Hero: the find's Atlas Obscura contributor photo, reused. Attempts at a first-party image failed in both directions — `submarinesafaris.com` is a JavaScript-rendered WordPress site that serves no usable `og:image` and only language-selector flags to curl, and its `wp-json/wp/v2/media` endpoint timed out at 25 seconds. The contributor shot is a photograph of the actual vessel at its actual mooring, which is the thing that matters. +Category: places (existing). +Fact-check: **two corrections and one attribution fix — the most substantive fact-check of the run.** Checked Atlas Obscura's contributor account against the operator's own pages, and the hero photograph against both. +- **Capacity and depth.** The find, following Atlas Obscura, said the sub "can hold over 40 people", is "rated to 100 metres" and is "held to 30 with civilians". The operator publishes **44 seats, 22 view ports, and a descent of up to 30 metres**, and says nothing at all about a 100-metre rating. The find now carries the operator's figures; the review says plainly that thirty metres is the number to plan on and that the deeper rating is not something the company publishes. +- **The manta rays are not the operator's claim.** The find said "the local manta rays come to meet it… divers make bubbles worth playing in", which is charming and is a *visitor's* account, not a promise. The operator advertises two wrecks on the seabed and schools of fish. The rays were cut from the find entirely and appear in the review only as what they are — someone's account, treated as a bonus rather than an itinerary. +- **The boat has a name, and it was sitting in the hero.** Reading the photograph rather than only the text gave the vessel's name, **Sub Fun Cinco**, and its registration, **ANTWERPEN O 6260** — a Belgian port of registry, which is a better argument that this is a classed vessel than any brochure line. Both went into the review. +Also confirmed: operating from Amarilla Marina, San Miguel de Abona since 2007; a sister boat at Puerto Calero, Lanzarote; the sub settles on the seabed partway through and passengers are invited forward to photograph the pilots; multilingual commentary and a dive certificate. **Not confirmed and now flagged as such:** the Finnish build in the 1990s is Atlas Obscura's contributor claim and the operator does not state a yard — the find's subtitle and description no longer assert it, and the review reports it as reported rather than verified. +Amazon: n-a (an experience). + +### Considered and not graduated + +- **euro-banknote-design-proposals** was the fourth-ranked candidate and the closest call. Held deliberately: the ECB's shortlist is a live public consultation, the survey is open, and a review written today would be about a process whose outcome changes it. Better as a find now and a review when a design is chosen — at which point the story is *which* one won and why, which is the more interesting piece. +- **yap-mac-dictation** and **etymologue** both clear the bar on substance but are heroless, and a review tile with no media is a poor trade when three hero-bearing candidates were available. Held as finds; both are strong candidates for a thinner day. diff --git a/src/content/find/2026/07/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx b/src/content/find/2026/07/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx index 4cff6cf..2f52cf8 100644 --- a/src/content/find/2026/07/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx +++ b/src/content/find/2026/07/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ date: 2026-07-28 shortlist: true link: "https://youtu.be/PG6DG3UXZxY" linkText: "youtube.com" +promotedTo: ants-phenakistoscope-turntable source: "The Awesomer" topics: [design-and-art] tags: [animation, illusion, drawing, video] diff --git a/src/content/find/2026/07/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx b/src/content/find/2026/07/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx index 2e2add7..a03d07a 100644 --- a/src/content/find/2026/07/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx +++ b/src/content/find/2026/07/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx @@ -5,10 +5,11 @@ date: 2026-07-28 shortlist: true link: "https://franktisellano.github.io/datatype/" linkText: "franktisellano.github.io" +promotedTo: datatype-chart-font source: "Kottke.org" topics: [design-and-art, web-tools] tags: [typography, dataviz, open-source] description: "An OpenType variable font whose ligatures turn {b:15,45,80} into a bar chart — no JavaScript, no images, no charting library." --- -Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` and ligature substitution turns it into a five-bar chart, inline, in the middle of the sentence. `{l:…}` gives a sparkline, `{p:62}` a pie. Because it is a font and not a library, the chart inherits colour, size and weight from whatever it sits inside, and two variable axes tune density and stroke. Frank Tisellano released it under the Open Font License. +Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` and ligature substitution turns it into a five-bar chart, inline, in the middle of the sentence. `{l:…}` gives a sparkline, `{p:62}` a pie. Because it is a font and not a library, the chart inherits colour and size from whatever it sits inside, and the ordinary weight and width axes reshape it like any other type. Frank Tisellano released it under the Open Font License. diff --git a/src/content/find/2026/07/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx b/src/content/find/2026/07/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx index 6b4a7ab..28d4957 100644 --- a/src/content/find/2026/07/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx +++ b/src/content/find/2026/07/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx @@ -1,14 +1,15 @@ --- name: "Submarine Safari" -subtitle: "A Finnish-built submarine that takes 40 people under Tenerife" +subtitle: "A submarine that takes 44 people under Tenerife" date: 2026-07-28 shortlist: true link: "https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/submarine-safari" linkText: "atlasobscura.com" +promotedTo: submarine-safari-tenerife source: "Atlas Obscura" topics: [travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature] tags: [submarine, tenerife, underwater] -description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: built in Finland in the 1990s, diving off Tenerife since 2007." +description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: 44 seats behind 22 view ports, thirty metres down off Amarilla Marina in Tenerife since 2007." --- -One of the few submarines anywhere open to the public: built in Finland in the 1990s, working off Tenerife since 2007, rated to 100 metres and held to 30 with passengers aboard. The route passes shipwrecks and a rock wall thick with life. The local manta rays come to meet it — they have worked out that divers make bubbles worth playing in, and will take a belly rub while they are there. +One of the few submarines anywhere open to the public, working off Tenerife since 2007: *Sub Fun Cinco* seats 44 behind 22 view ports and drops thirty metres into the Atlantic. The route passes two wrecks on the seabed and a rock wall thick with fish, and it settles on the bottom partway through so you can go and photograph the pilots at the controls. diff --git a/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/hero.jpg b/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/hero.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2f3d356 Binary files /dev/null and b/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/hero.jpg differ diff --git a/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx b/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b2cd387 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/content/reviews/ants-phenakistoscope-turntable/index.mdx @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +name: "Ants on a Turntable" +subtitle: "A phenakistoscope drawn one ant at a time" +date: 2026-07-28 +category: design +topics: [design-and-art] +tags: [animation, illusion, drawing, video, phenakistoscope] +link: "https://youtu.be/PG6DG3UXZxY" +linkText: "youtube.com" +description: "Yohei Kisanuki hand-draws 蟻人間 — a phenakistoscope disc of marching ant-men, each figure a few degrees further into its stride — then spins it on a record player." +source: "The Awesomer" +fromFind: "ants-phenakistoscope-turntable" +--- + +import { Image } from 'astro:assets'; +import hero from './hero.jpg'; + +A hand drawing small black ant figures in rings across a white paper disc mounted on a turntable, with a pen mid-stroke at the disc's edge. + +> The phenakistoscope was obsolete by 1840, beaten by photography and then buried by film. Yohei Kisanuki draws one anyway, ant by ant, and it still works. + +The principle is nearly two centuries old and has not improved since: draw a sequence of figures in a ring, each a few degrees further into its stride than the last, spin the disc, and interrupt the view — with slots, a shutter, or a camera's frame rate — so the eye sees discrete positions instead of a smear. The brain fills the gaps. Kisanuki's disc, titled 蟻人間, holds rings of small black ant-men in mid-march. On the turntable they stop being drawings and start walking. + +What makes it worth watching is not the reveal but the labour behind it. The long video is the drawing: hours of hand, pen and paper, one figure at a time, each one placed by eye against the one before it. There is no software easing the motion, no onion-skinning, no way to preview whether the walk cycle reads until the disc is finished and turning. Every animator's decision has to be made in advance and drawn in ink. The illusion is assembled in front of you, and you can watch it fail to look like anything until, quite suddenly, it does. + +Kisanuki is a professional kalimba player by trade — LimbaTrip on YouTube, where most of the channel is thumb-piano performance — which makes the phenakistoscopes a sideline pursued at considerable cost in wrist. He has drawn others: climbers, dancers, walkers. The rhythm connection is not a stretch he makes himself, so we will not put words in his mouth, but a musician's tolerance for repeating a small figure with tiny variations is visible in every ring. + +The one caveat is practical. A phenakistoscope is a physical illusion and a video of one is a recording of it — you are watching the camera's shutter do the interrupting, not your own eye. The effect is real either way, but the actual object, seen in a room with a strobe or a mirror, is a different and better experience. Kisanuki is a long way away, and this is as close as most of us will get. It is close enough. diff --git a/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/hero.png b/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/hero.png new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b0495b Binary files /dev/null and b/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/hero.png differ diff --git a/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx b/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx new file mode 100644 index 0000000..986f4e1 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/content/reviews/datatype-chart-font/index.mdx @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +name: "Datatype" +subtitle: "A font that draws the chart for you" +date: 2026-07-28 +category: design +topics: [design-and-art, web-tools] +tags: [typography, dataviz, open-source, variable-font] +link: "https://franktisellano.github.io/datatype/" +linkText: "franktisellano.github.io" +description: "An OpenType variable font whose ligatures turn {b:15,45,80} into a bar chart — bars, sparklines and pies rendered by the typeface itself, with no JavaScript, images or charting library. SIL Open Font License." +source: "Kottke.org" +fromFind: "datatype-chart-font" +--- + +import { Image } from 'astro:assets'; +import hero from './hero.png'; + +Four rows of pie glyphs from the Datatype font, each row stepping from empty through half to full, rendered at different weights and widths. + +> Every charting library ever written answers the same question: how do I get a picture into this paragraph? Datatype answers a different one — what if the paragraph could just draw it. + +Type `{b:15,45,80,30,60}` into a text field set in Datatype and OpenType ligature substitution replaces the whole expression with a five-bar chart, sitting on the baseline where the characters were. `{l:2,5,3,8,1,6,4}` gives a sparkline. `{p:62}` gives a pie filled 62 per cent of the way round. Up to twenty values per chart, each between 0 and 100, and that is the entire API. + +The consequences are the good part. A chart made of glyphs is text: it inherits its colour from `color`, its size from `font-size`, and it selects, copies and pastes as the source expression. Set the ordinary variable axes — weight from 100 to 900, width from 50 to 150 — and the bars thicken and the pies gain a heavier stroke along with everything else on the line, because the renderer has no idea it is drawing data. Nothing to hydrate, nothing to resize on rotation, no second network request. It works in Word and Figma as readily as in a browser, which no JavaScript chart does. + +Frank Tisellano designed and built it, with guidance credited to Emma Marichal and Dave Lab6. It is released under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1 — install the TTFs to a system fonts folder, or link the WOFF2 with `@font-face`. + +The limits are real and worth stating before you plan around it. Twenty points is a sparkline, not a time series. Values must be normalised to 0–100 yourself, so the font will never draw an axis, a label, a legend or a tick — it has no idea what your numbers mean. And the whole thing rests on ligature support being switched on, which is default in browsers and in most design tools but is exactly the setting some applications quietly disable. When it fails, it fails visibly: you get `{b:15,45,80}` in the middle of your sentence. + +Which is the honest framing. This is not a replacement for a charting library; it is a replacement for the sentence "revenue grew slightly, then fell." Put the shape in the line and the reader gets it without a caption. diff --git a/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/hero.jpg b/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/hero.jpg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..66902f7 Binary files /dev/null and b/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/hero.jpg differ diff --git a/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx b/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx new file mode 100644 index 0000000..aec19e2 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/content/reviews/submarine-safari-tenerife/index.mdx @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +name: "Submarine Safari" +subtitle: "A Finnish-built submarine that takes 44 people under Tenerife" +date: 2026-07-28 +category: places +topics: [travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature] +tags: [submarine, tenerife, underwater, canary-islands] +link: "https://www.submarinesafaris.com/" +linkText: "submarinesafaris.com" +description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: 44 seats behind 22 view ports, thirty metres down off Amarilla Marina in Tenerife, past two wrecks on the seabed." +source: "Atlas Obscura" +fromFind: "submarine-safari-tenerife" +--- + +import { Image } from 'astro:assets'; +import hero from './hero.jpg'; + +The yellow conning tower of the submarine Sub Fun Cinco at its mooring in Amarilla Marina, carrying the Submarine Safaris roundel and the registration ANTWERPEN O 6260, with a passenger stepping down the gangway beside it. + +> Almost every "submarine tour" in the world is a boat with a glass floor. This one submerges, with you inside it, thirty metres down. + +The distinction matters more than the brochures let on. A semi-submersible keeps its hull at the surface and drops a viewing gallery a metre or two under; you are looking through a window at the top of the water column. Submarine Safaris operates an actual submarine — it dives, it sits on the seabed, and it comes back up. There are 44 seats and 22 view ports, one each side of every row, which is the detail that decides whether an hour underwater is worth the fare: nobody is looking over a shoulder. + +The boat is called *Sub Fun Cinco*, and it runs out of Amarilla Marina at San Miguel de Abona on Tenerife's southern coast, as it has since 2007; the company's other submarine works from Puerto Calero in Lanzarote, where these hulls first went into service. The registration painted under the name reads ANTWERPEN O 6260 — a Belgian port of registry on a Spanish tourist attraction, which is the sort of detail that tells you this is a classed vessel with paperwork rather than an attraction with a periscope. The account that surfaced it puts the build in Finland in the 1990s; the operator does not say, so take the yard as reported rather than confirmed. + +The dive itself takes in two wrecks lying on the bottom and the schools of fish that have made homes of them. Partway through, the submarine settles on the seabed and passengers are invited forward to photograph the pilots at the controls, which is a small piece of theatre and an entirely good one — the cockpit of a working submarine is not a thing most people will otherwise stand in. Commentary runs in several languages; you leave with a dive certificate. + +Two honest notes, both from checking the operator's own pages against the account that surfaced it. Thirty metres is the depth the company advertises, and it is the figure to plan on — the deeper hull ratings quoted secondhand are not something Submarine Safaris publishes. And the rays: a visitor's account describes them coming to the ports for the divers' bubbles, which is a lovely image and a plausible one, but the operator promises wrecks and fish, not a specific animal. Go for the descent and the seabed. If something with wings turns up at the glass, treat it as the day being generous.