Heya,

This week, I have read the entire works of Paw Patrol and enjoyed the symphony of Puppy Dog Pals multiple times each. My son's obsession with cartoon dogs is surprising since he actually seems a little scared of our well-aged beagle, Jack. Happy birthday, Jackey 🎂

This week:

🖼️ Video conference backgrounds from the BBC.
🕵️ Did the CIA write a pop song?
🙏🏻 Hope quotes visualized as charts.

Enjoy,

Chris.

Bizarro Devs  

The things that kept me busy this week. 🕴️

Read less with this newsletter. Book Freak has short advice collected from books like 'Tips for Happiness' and 'Advice for Startups'.

Read more With reviews of 250 of the best adventure books, reading this list will keep you quite busy. Some of the books are available through Project Gutenberg.

Read news I switched from news websites to newsletters when I couldn't get any sleep after reading live blogs for hours. My personal favorite is The Morning News because it has an eclectic mix of news and stuff like The Office reimagined for Slack (see below).

Games A bunch of logic games free for iPhone and $2.99 for Android.

BBC backgrounds for video calls I thought the Studio Ghibli backgrounds were the pinnacle but these backgrounds from the Beeb are even better. My favorites: Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Blackadder, and Doctor Who.

Cooking A great list of 28 Salmon recipes. Not so great for the budget, but looking at the pictures is free.

Bizarro Devs  

Twitter will allow employees to work from home...forever 🏠

First!: This week, Jack Dorsey sent an email letting employees know that they could work from home permanently. While others, like Google and Facebook, have announced employees will have the freedom to WFH for the rest of the year, Twitter is the first "big tech" company to make its pandemic work from home policy permanent.

Expected behavior: The change is part of what Microsoft discovered when its Teams tool underwent "2 years of digital transformation in 2 months. Twitter was already running towards a distributed model, the track just got a lot shorter.

Homes with benefits: Roles requiring a physical presence, like server maintenance, will still require employees to head into the office. Lucky work from homers will also receive a $1,000 allowance for home-office supplies regardless of their role.

buzzfeednews.com  

Twitch to fund reality programming 🤳

Not all fun and games: Twitch announced plans to spend between $50,000 and $250,000 to bring "game shows, dating shows, sports, music, and talk" to a platform known for streaming video games.

Strike while the platform is hot Numbers for online platforms are breaking records every week, and the Twitch audience streamed 1.2 billion hours in April alone.

The audience is king: Twitch audiences are rowdy and the platform is based on interactivity between the host and the viewers. The new shows will be expected to live up to and exceed this standard. However, no escape rooms will be permitted.

The big picture: It seems like a good time to run this experiment if you have a built-in audience you can cater to. Quibi has been struggling largely because it's intended audience, commuters for one, evaporated when lockdown orders took effect.

theverge.com  

1. A simulator of the controls used by NASA Astronauts to dock the SpaceX Dragon 2 vehicle with the International Space Station.
2. You'll be surprised to see the flush toilet was the technological underdog for much of the 20th century in this graph of technology adoption.
3. A podcast finally asks, did the CIA write the hit song 'Wind of Change'? There's an article on it here.
4. If I could scroll 500 miles. This Chrome extension shows how many miles you scrolled on websites.
5. Famous hope quotes as charts.
6. An awesome flowfield art generator.
7. Bored with CSS? Check out this hover made with clip-path and blends.
8. Working from home could be a big win for the planet. Wholegrain Digital reveals the impact of the lockdown on their carbon emissions.
9. Every episode of The Office US recreated in Slack.
10. Climbs on soapboxProof that all websites look the same.

Bizarro Devs  

That's it for the week.

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Have a great week, Chris.

Bizarro Devs