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In today's episode I travel to Revolution Recording in Toronto to sit down with one of the most inventive and influential guitarists in rock history: Alex Lifeson of Rush. In this interview, Alex and I deconstruct the mechanics behind his monumental guitar tone. We explore h...

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.

Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

"Clarke Seicher is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation."

One of Mexico’s oldest shoe stores holds a collection of more than 2,000 thousand shoes in a museum called el Museo Del Calzado. From booties worn by a rescue dog to slippers owned by Queen Elizabeth II, each pair tells a story. 

This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.  

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Release: datasette 1.0a30

The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this:

The new jump_items_sql() plugin hook allows plugins to add their own items to the set that's searched by the plugin.

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4

Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /:

You can try this out by signing into agent.datasette.io using your GitHub account.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suite...

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child.

These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up of code you could type into your own machine.

I remember playing "Mad House" typed in from the 1983 book "Creepy Computer Games", so I fed that PDF into Claude and had it build an interactive version of that game in JavaScript and HTML:

Build a vanilla JS artifact that exactly recreates the game Mad House from this book, make sure it's mobile friendly and has a suitable retro aesthetic

Credit the book title and link to https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books

Tags: computer-history, games, tools

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so ...

Terrific, poignant profile of Warriors head coach Steve Kerr by Wright Thompson for ESPN: Kerr doesn’t want the Warriors to end up like the New England Patriots, marred by grudges and grievances. He watched Michael Jordan retire, then unretire, then retire, then unretire...

On the <dl>

I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer:

1. A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd>
2. You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <div> for styling - but only a <div>.
3. You can label them using ARIA.
4. They've been called "description lists", not "definition lists", since an HTML5 draft in 2008.

So this is valid:

<h2 id="credits">Credits</h2>
<dl aria-labelledby="credits">
  <div>
    <dt>Author</dt>
    <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd>
    <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd>
  </div>
</dl>

Here's a useful note from Adrian Roselli on screen reader support for description lists.

Via Hacker News

Tags: css, html, screen-readers, web-standards

Full podcast on the @complexly channel! Pre-order the Laundry Chair at Yetch.Studio.

It took Ross Ward more than 40 years to build Tinkertown, an indescribable array of carvings, figurines, and folk art. The project became both a source of inspiration for young artists, and an unexpected refuge for Ross himself. 

This episode is part of our Weekend Road Trip Series, where we bring you stories of the strange, incredible, and wondrous places right here in the United States, that you can see from the road. This series was produced in partnership with T-Mobile.  

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"This is the story of how 34 generations of Shaolin warrior history trained a once-in-a-generation NBA superstar."