content: 2026-08-03 capture run — 8 finds across 3 productive sources

daily-finds.log.md

@@ -4873,3 +4873,50 @@ What it beat:
 **The caveat this pick ships with, stated rather than buried: the hero is 728×628.** The homepage hero slot is 720 CSS pixels wide and requests up to 1280, so retina visitors get a 1× image where they would get 2× from `saugerties-lighthouse` (2200×1466) or `archimedes-palimpsest` (2000×1438). It is a flat-shaded CAD render on neutral grey with no fine texture, which is the kind of image that degrades most gracefully, and it was still the best of four candidate assets. Flagging it as the one honest reason an operator might veto this pick.
 
 Never-picked pool, fourth consecutive run recording it: **21 of 116 reviews have ever held the slot, leaving 95 that never have** — and 64 of those carry a hero at least 1200px wide, so the reserve is not short of usable material. Three graduations today added three reviews and spent one pick, so the reserve grew again by two. The 07-29 standing note said the first genuinely thin day should spend from it rather than default to a hold; today was thin and the pool *was* opened (see the Kodak entry above), which is the note being honoured even though a same-day graduation won in the end.
+
+## 2026-08-03 — capture run
+
+Sources scanned: 59 total — 18 actively fetched (all 200 except MoMA), 1 blocked (MoMA Design Store), 13 `fetch: skip`, 28 cadence-skipped.
+Productive sources: Hacker News — Show HN (6), A.Word.A.Day (1), icanhazdadjoke (1).
+
+**Three productive sources, and one of them carried three-quarters of the run.** The 08-01 sweep was full, so every weekly, monthly and as-needed source is still inside its window and only the daily tier was live for the second consecutive day. Of that tier, most feeds had not moved at all since the 08-02 run: Atlas Obscura, Kottke, Open Culture, MacStories, Six Colors, This Is Why I'm Broke and Permanent Style all serve the same newest item they served yesterday, and Product Hunt's feed is two days stale (newest entry 08-01). Show HN is the only daily source that actually refreshed, which is why six of eight finds come from it. Eight is the honest number; nothing was padded.
+
+Captured finds:
+- isopolis — Isopolis — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- ssh-place — ssh.place — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- creakwork12 — creakwork12 — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- project-espanol — Project ESPAÑOL — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- kakehashi — Kakehashi — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- sixwhyo — sixwhyo — source: Hacker News — Show HN
+- crotchet — Crotchet — source: A.Word.A.Day
+- joke-cashew — I'm a cashew! — source: icanhazdadjoke
+
+Shortlist (6, ranked):
+1. isopolis — the real city's geometry repainted tile by tile into isometric pixel art, with tours and a postcard you can send [review candidate]
+2. ssh-place — r/place with the browser taken away: one command, any SSH key, one pixel every fifteen seconds [review candidate]
+3. project-espanol — ten thousand public-domain poems clustered by verb form so you can read at the tense you just learned [review candidate, hero caveat below]
+4. creakwork12 — pitch tracks the lid angle, volume tracks how fast you move it, and the stated reason is "funny"
+5. kakehashi — Wine pointed the other way, with the benchmark gap stated rather than hidden
+6. crotchet — a word from the Old Norse for hook, and the etymological twin of crochet
+
+Not shortlisted but published (2): sixwhyo, joke-cashew.
+
+**Two heroes out of eight, and for once both are the actual artefact rather than a poster.** `isopolis` publishes a designed postcard og image (1200×630) with "ISOPOLIS SAN FRANCISCO" set large across the map; cropping to the map panel alone leaves 832×300 of pixel city — Chinatown, the Financial District, Rincon Hill and the Bay Bridge all legible, with the biplane and its banner intact because those are drawn into the scene rather than laid over it. Same crop-first call as `elevators` and the `wavelength` App Store shot on 08-02. `ssh-place` is the better story: the site serves `/canvas.png`, a live render of the shared canvas, so the hero is not a screenshot *of* the product, it *is* the product at the moment of capture (1400×780, saved as a static snapshot and eyeballed before saving — the drawing is ordinary internet scrawl, nothing to answer for).
+
+Heroless and checked rather than assumed: `project-espanol` (a scatter-plot page; the GitHub repo carries only `css`, `data`, `js` and `export_data.py`, no screenshot anywhere), `kakehashi` (repo `docs/` is nine Markdown files, no images; the GitHub social card is the signed-URL poster pattern), `creakwork12` (repo `assets/` holds exactly one file, `creak.wav` — the demo is a video attachment, so there is no still), `sixwhyo` (og image is a logo), `crotchet` (Wordsmith serves the illustration at 180×121, well under the 400px floor — same outcome as `disannul` on 08-01). **That is the browser-toy hero problem for the sixth consecutive run, and today it decides a review candidate rather than just a bundle slot** — see the reviews entry.
+
+Amazon links added: none. Nothing in today's pool is a physical product — six web/software projects, a dictionary entry and a joke.
+
+Dropped on verify/dedup (notable): **three of the four Cool Tools items were already published here** — Pixel Thoughts, the Infinity packable travel bag and Fabien Sanglard's Jurassic Park computers piece were all captured on 07-23/07-27 from Recomendo and Kottke, which is what kk.org/cooltools republishing Recomendo looks like from the dedup side. **Huckberry x fret12 Rail Jacket** (The Awesomer) — dropped on the bar, not on taste: the coffee-dyed workwear jacket is a good find and its limited pre-order has already closed with no wider availability announced, so it is not a currently-buyable thing. **Ogre Super-Size Bag** (The Awesomer) — dropped because the maker could not be identified: the Awesomer post is the only page describing it, its feed entry carries no outbound product link, and search returns only the unrelated "1000 LB Bag" duffel. A find needs a real product URL; linking the aggregator instead would be a first here. **Agent Fone** (Daring Fireball) — an AI-hardware concept from fail.xyz with a 7:52 film and a fifty-unit run allocated to labs, i.e. exactly the speculative/not-shipping case the bar excludes. **Blue Chair Bay Coconut Rum** and the **Heavy Shot Glass** (both The Awesomer) — alcohol rule, categorical, no deliberation. Also dropped: the Show HN AI wall again (visibility checkers, agent toolkits, a 236M-parameter LM, an AI-written book of fables, two coding-agent reimplementations), `accomplishments.app` (generic performance-review SaaS with a stock landing page), the "Shitty" terminal (a real project, but the name is the whole joke and there is nothing to look at), Eclectic Light's "On the beach in paint 1/2" (same art-history series dropped 08-02), OSXDaily's Wolfenstein ray-tracing post (third appearance), The Browser's "Memories And Joe Wright" (a links roundup, not a thing), and Product Hunt's stale 08-01 batch, already triaged yesterday.
+
+**Content-rule note on the two finds that touch the edges.** `ssh-place` saves a snapshot of a public canvas anyone can draw on; the snapshot was looked at before it was committed and is unremarkable, but it is worth recording that this hero is the only one on the site whose upstream can change under it. `sixwhyo` is an AI code-review agent, the category this log has been dropping wholesale for a week — it is published because the delight is the joke rather than the automation, and it is deliberately *not* shortlisted, which is the same treatment the joke finds get.
+
+Prompt-injection watch: nothing fetched was treated as an instruction.
+
+Source maintenance:
+- **MoMA Design Store — third consecutive block, feed probe run, `fetch: skip` applied.** The skill's threshold is three (08-01, 08-02, 08-03) and the rule requires probing for a feed before skipping. Six paths were tested — `/collections/new.atom`, `/collections/all.atom`, `/blogs/news.atom`, `/feed`, `/rss.xml` and the bare homepage — and all six return the same ~5.7KB Cloudflare "Just a moment…" interstitial (HTTP 403) to the Safari UA. No feed rescue exists, so the entry is now `fetch: "skip"` with a dated `skipReason` and a re-probe due 2026-11-01. `fetchUrl` is deliberately left on the record so the quarterly re-probe has the known-good endpoint to test rather than rediscovering it.
+- `sources.json` `updated` bumped 2026-08-01 → 2026-08-03. `fetch: skip` count is now 14 of 59.
+- **The Awesomer's article pages are now Cloudflare-challenged (403) although its feed is fine.** Both Awesomer candidates today needed the post body to find the maker's link and neither could be opened. No action taken — the fetch path in `sources.json` is the feed and the feed is healthy — but if outbound links keep being unreachable this source degrades to headlines-only, which is what cost the Ogre bag today. Worth watching rather than editing.
+- Reddit (r/macapps, r/BuyItForLife, r/shortcuts, r/dadjokes) — cadence-skipped, not re-probed. The 07-28 diagnosis is unchanged; still four sources recoverable by regenerating one credential.
+
+New source nominees: 1 (fabiensanglard.net — see candidate-sources.md). candidate-sources.md backlog now 23 unvetted. No targeted search was run, on the same reasoning as 08-02: the skill offers one when a run yields few organic candidates, and a 23-deep unvetted queue does not need another name in it.