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"The gold that once drew opportunists to this slice of California now attracts a new generation."

As a young adult, Paul "Barbs" Barbato gave himself perhaps the world's biggest social studies assignment: make a profile of every single one of the 193 UN-recognized countries in the world. Ten years later, he finally finished. 

Check out Paul’s project – and what he’s up to next – on YouTube @GeographyNow. 

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David Pierce, last week in his Installer column/newsletter for The Verge, singing the praises of the version 5.0 update to Sofa (the praises of which I just sang): Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you w...

Tool: datasette.io news preview The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this: - date: 2026-04-15 body: |- [Datasette 1.0a27](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/chang...

Shawn Hickman: A show you started last month. A book on your nightstand. A game you keep meaning to get back to. Finding something new is easy. Remembering where you left off is the hard part. Sofa 5 helps you keep track of this stuff. Progress rings show up on covers t...

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a1

This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie.

Tags: datasette

Release: datasette 1.0a27 Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern browser headers as described by Filippo Valsorda. The second big chang...

A rare event to capture on video: an underwater volcanic eruption in the Solomon Islands.

From a few weeks ago: Bush’s Tiny Desk Concert. Machinehead and Glycerine still hit.

Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs: When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you tol...

Your Backpack Got Worse On Purpose. “From a shareholder’s perspective, the bag that falls apart is the better product. That’s the business model. Repeat failure, repeat purchase, repeat revenue. The quality decline isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.”

Two Japanese aquariums have released their 2026 flowcharts of their penguins’ relationships. “Penguin drama can include serious crushes and heartbreaks but also adultery and egg-stealing.”

I love these oversized prints of vintage Pan-Am luggage tags from artist Ella Freire. The typography and colors are just perfect. (via daringfireball) Tags: art · design · Ella Freire · travel

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts. It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview as the model ID, but can only output audio files. The prompting guide...

Tool: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS

See my notes on Google's new Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS text-to-speech model.

Tags: gemini, google

Release: datasette-ports 0.3

A small update for my tool for helping me figure out what all of the Datasette instances on my laptop are up to.

• Show working directory derived from each PID
• Show the full path to each database file

Output now looks like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8007/ - v1.0a26
  Directory: /Users/simon/dev/blog
  Databases:
    simonwillisonblog: /Users/simon/dev/blog/simonwillisonblog.db
  Plugins:
    datasette-llm
    datasette-secrets
http://127.0.0.1:8001/ - v1.0a26
  Directory: /Users/simon/dev/creatures
  Databases:
    creatures: /tmp/creatures.db

Tags: datasette