👋 Hello Newsletter 🥫#1

Hello! Thanks for signing up for this!

These days, some tech folks have been into newsletters all over the place. Hype is real, curiosity is strong and therefore I shall dive in to learn more about this.

Emails have been a funny thing for me. In the beginning, everyone uses emails. I subscribed to a lot of newsletters like LangaList and LockerGnome (Anyone remembers them?). Then maybe it got spammy, so we move to RSS (blogs & social networks?), then for some reason, we’re back 🔙

I’ve subscribed to a few newsletters myself just to get the feel and so far I like cassidoo‘s style the most. This newsletter will follow her style first and slightly remixed with my own unique quirks.

To set reader expectations, I suspect I’ll cover topics that are in my interests: design, dataviz, maps, public transport & stickers.

There are 4 sections:

I used to post about my “highlights” as an experimental summary post to keep track of things I’ve done. It used to be weekly but thanks to the pandemic, I’ve switched to monthly basis due to lack of events and to reduce noise. With this newsletter, I will experiment moving them here.

So here goes.

1) 🚏 Land Transport Authority (Singapore) now has redesigned bus arrivals panel! They call it Passenger Information Display System (PIDS) which I think sounds cooler.

2) 🚆 Super insanely cool life-like animated 3D train model on Mapbox map made by Ricky Reusser! It’s available on Observable with lots of configuration.

3) 🤘 JinGen made a font! And it’s something most Singaporeans would recognise (on trains) 😉Available on GitHub.

4) 🛣️ Singapore has 3D lane markings. I didn’t know that. And it’s not the first attempt too!

5) 🛣️ When it comes to roads, online maps always draw them as lines. But in reality, one road can have multiple lanes. Very complicated lanes, intersections, pedestrian lanes, biking lanes, etc. This article explains a lot: Deep dive into devilish details: Intersection geometry.

I’ve been using VS Code Live Share these days, for some reason. It’s quite powerful as you can share your workspace to another person over the Internet, and everything works; live cursors, follow another user editing a file, opened tabs sync-ing, find files, search files’ contents, saving files into remote, etc.

And then I found that it could share servers too. Like this:

Look at that localhost:3000. I share this local server URL, another person remotely can type localhost:3000 in their browser and it load the page from my local server! That’s some ngrok magic going on there! 🤯

Shared terminal is cool too, but it runs inside VS Code. I kinda don’t like fitting the terminal inside an already-cluttered text editor UI. Would be cool if can extract it out into a separate window or Terminal/iTerm instance. 🤔

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👋 That’s all folks. Stay safe.

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