So I’ve recently started sending a monthly newsletter to my close friends containing goings on about my life, plus a dump of the best links I found since the last letter. The goings-on aren’t open access, but maybe some of you will find the links interesting. So here they are!

Music:

• Like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”? Here’s an awesome violin cover.

• An awesome article on the raw stage presence of Father John Misty. (Here’s a preview: “The combination of melody, energy, and rage I d just witnessed had manifested into something bigger than the sum of its parts, and I knew I d seen authentic art the kind that welcomed me to watch the explosion, but didn t care if the scattered firework remnants singed my brow or impaled themselves in my gut on their way back to earth. You will be affected, was the promise, and beyond that, good luck.”)

• Here’s a cute tool that lets you compose music in the browser.

• An interactive map of just about every music genre out there.

• June was a slow music discovery month for me, but here’s a playlist of my favorite songs I found.

Fun / Life:

• I never thought I liked BMX, then I saw this. Unreal.

• There’s an entire episode of the (amazing) TV show “Archer” where the titular character is replaced by a raptor that only makes dinosaur sounds. Watch here: holy crap dinosaur archer.

• A map of the US with foreign-derived place names replaced by the names’ original meaning..

• Wondering how Niral, Matt and I keep our apartment so cough immaculate? We use a “zone-defense” cleaning system, the administration of which I’ve recently automated.

• This is a Japanese Yo-Yo Wizard.

• Overwhelmed with links in your life? I recommend Pocket, and app that lets you save links for later and read them on your phone (even on the subway!)

Design / Marketing:

• Spacing and Sizing are the cheapest design wins. This (excessively long but skimmable) article provides good rules of thumb.

• You don’t have to go to design school to learn design. This step-by-step guide can help.

• Vertical centering in CSS is a huge pain, unless you use the magical and little known flexbox

• Learn “The Dark Science Of Naming a Blog Post : Based On Studying 100 Blogs”.

Tech:

• Stanford is offering a technical-oriented MOOC that teaches you that hands-dirty essentials of how to build a basic web startup. Normally I’m skeptical on the time/value proposition of MOOC’s, but I’ve been watching some of the videos and this looks like exactly the class I wish I had when I was learning to program.

• Pro-tip for Chrome: Command-click to open a link in new tab. Got that from an AppSumo video about Mac Shortcuts.

• You can instantly make your website faster by automatically optimizing your image compression

• Cool technical article on how the Echonest’s music algorithms understand “genre” to make the interactive map (above).

• Advance your advanced python by learning about descriptors.

• Best summary I’ve found about D-Wave, the company selling the world’s first (purportedly) quantum computer

George Related

• Turns out “rogueleaderr.com” is not a good blog name. So I’m moving most of my blogging to the brand new “Urbem Futurum”. The name is meant to evoke a classically-grounded civic-oriented optimistic futurism. That’s the closest I can get to presenting my weltanschauung as a tagline.

• Urbem Futurum has a first blog post. In honor of July 4th, here’s my explanation of why “Egypt needs the Federalist Papers”.

Until next time…