ErBlog

90% of an iceberg's mass is under water. There are two ways to draw an iceberg. The right one and the wrong one. The wrong one looks cooler, so that's the one I usually draw. A vertically standing block of ice shows the 90% of mass under water more clearly, but heartless gravity would definitely tip such an iceberg over on its side, so the realistic version is on the right. If you're not sure your iceberg is right, you can always check it here.

An umbrella is made of a canopy and a handle. For the canopy, draw a big arc and two smaller arcs on either side of it. Then repeat these three arcs lower down so that the central arc is narrower and the side ones are wider. All that's left is to connect the edges of the upper arcs into a canopy. The handle comes down from the center of the canopy and ends with a hook. A nail sticks out of the top of the canopy.

A crutch is made of two long curved tubes and one short straight one. At the top there's a rest for the armpit, in the middle a handle to hold on to, and at the end a rubber tip so it doesn't slip. An experienced programmer can build a house using nothing but crutches.

Bluetooth is a wireless standard that works over short distances. As it happens, the standard is named after King Harald Bluetooth, because one of its authors was into Scandinavia and runestones at the time. The Bluetooth sign is Harald's initials joined together (ᚼ + ᛒ). It's symmetrical. Take a vertical line and divide it into 5 equal parts, then put dots at the same distance to the left and right of the line at the ⅕ and ⅘ levels. All that's left is to connect the lines to get the Bluetooth sign. The sign is usually drawn white on a blue background.

Lvl 1 → Lvl 2 → Lvl 3! Little Ivan is almost big now)

A flask is a vessel with a round or flat bottom. You can use it as a metaphor for a container holding something dangerous or unstable, negative emotions for example. It's not hard to draw, the main thing is to get the shape across. Draw the outer contour with a thick line, and use a thin line inside to show that it's made of clear glass.

Notes for the talk "Digging deeper into Feature-Sliced Design" from ЯФронтенд2024. An entertaining talk. The guys took the methodology and changed the parts that didn't work for them. I tried taking notes in Procreate. It's still terribly inconvenient for me. Talk recording 🎥

Sound is invisible waves travelling through the air. To draw them, we'll make them visible, and to make it clear that these are sound waves, we'll draw a speaker they come out of. A speaker has a magnet and a coil. Electricity runs through the coil, which makes it move relative to the magnet and drag the cone along with it, and the cone moves the air, which is what makes the sound waves. You can't see the coil in the picture, it's inside. The magnet is the black ring on the left, and the cone is the inner surface of the speaker basket.

Today’s Belgrade JS is all about java script gotchas)

It's 8th Annual World Sketchnote Day! On this occasion, the Sketchnote School will make a small event with workshops. I'm going to participate. If you are interested, here is the registration link.

Sixth day. Stoic it up!

Friday: Seeing the bigger picture One night I realized that the milky way is a view for the disk of the galaxy from the inside. It was cool.

Thursday: Caring for ourselves and others

Wednesday: Character and Virtues

Tuesday: Emotions

Monday: Control

Remember Little Ivan, the mech with enhanced smallness? If you don't, here's the link. Can you believe it, a whole year has passed. Time to make the second version. Say hello to Little Ivan MK2!

A long time ago, somewhere around 1995, Apple engineers came up with the idea of a specification for describing the structure and content of a website. They called it Meta Content Framework. The plan was to build powerful 3D site navigation on top of it, like in cyberpunk. The idea didn't take off, but one of the authors moved to Netscape and developed it there into the Resource Description Framework (RDF), whose first R also happens to be the first letter of RSS. RSS has three different expansions, but the essence is the same. It's a way to get articles from websites. You can subscribe to interesting news, blogs and articles, and read them in a dedicated app. In the golden years of RSS, linking to a feed was good manners for any platform or publication. Readers came as standalone apps, were built into browsers, and Google had a whole Google Reader. The format peaked somewhere around 2005. And then the world moved on. Facebook came with its algorithmic feed, and publishers decided they didn't like sharing content for free. The web became centralized. RSS went into decline. By the time Google shut down its Reader in 2013, only fans were still using the format. Now the world is moving again. Endless feeds drive people crazy. Facebook and YouTube ban whoever they want. Twitter sells blue stickers. The most freedom-loving tweeters have already crawled over to Mastodon and write toots instead of tweets. Everyone who has put enough effort into their profile, blog or channel wonders who owns the results of their work and whether it'll all be wiped out without explanation. Content creators are moving to standalone blogs. The web is fragmenting. This is all sad, but there are upsides too. It looks like soon we'll be able to take good old RSS off the shelf, gather interesting articles from different sources in one place, feed them to a GPT model to cut the noise and write a tldr, and read. Here Feedly talks about their AI. And here Readwise invites you to try the beta of their reader with RSS support. Give it a try =)

7th Annual World Sketchnote Day

Sketches can be used for various things. For example, to order a birthday cake.

Hi! My name is Artem)