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Posted October 16, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Play On In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, you get a very long delay echo. A few years later, the young man used this idea for the legendary title track of his fourth studio album and went on to basically invent the genre of ambient music. He worked and produced records with artists like U2 and David Bowie – whom he... #music #blogtober #web #play #Brian Eno #technology 9 Webmentions
Posted October 15, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Overshoot I still remember that moment. Do You? For me, that was a moment I never thought I’d see. The leaders of the world, finding common ground – agreeing to limit global warming to 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C. Everyone, finally, coming together. Acknowledging that to avoid catastrophic damage to the planet and the ecosystems we depend on – and to protect our very livelihood – humanity must act. We all must act. It’s now ten years later, and we’re overshooting. Suddenly, the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about climate change don’t make sense anymore. In that moment, when world leaders raised their... #blogtober #climate #climate action #podcast 15 Webmentions
Posted October 14, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes The HTML Output Element One of the most amazing things about working on the Web is that you can have years of experience under your belt and there are still things you don’t know. Often, people associate this with a more quickly-moving language like JavaScript, but it equally hold true for HTML. Although, on the first sight, HTML seems like a very “easy” markup language, it can still be incredibly hard to write solid, semantic HTML – even for seasoned developers. But then, there are even moments where you are just surprised because you hear about a little detail you never heard before or... #html #development #elements #TIL #web #blogtober #accessibility #a11y 14 Webmentions
Posted October 13, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Listening Closely My son, who is the violinist in our family, recently told me an interesting little fact about Augustin Hadelich, one of the greatest violinists alive: it’s hard for him to enjoy other people’s performances. Not because he’s critical or dismissive – to the contrary – but because when he listens, he’s also always playing. He just can’t help it. When he hears someone play a phrase, he always wonders how he would play it. He notices a bow stroke and immediately imagines what he would do differently. When he listens, he’s not just hearing what’s there. He’s hearing what could be... #blogtober #craft #web #music #Hadelich 17 Webmentions
Posted October 12, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Compressed Fluid Typography When it comes to web typography, I’m a sucker for fluid type. I love that it creates a harmonious rhythm for the typography of a project. I love how it speeds up the responsive design process in the browser. And that it feels like you are working with the grain of the web, not against it. Instead of trying to control every typographic detail, you are defining boundaries that make sure your design works well – regardless of the end device. Fluid type is a textbook example of what Jeremy likes to call declarative design. Fluid type can sometimes also be... #blogtober #web #typography #fluid type #css 53 Webmentions
Posted October 11, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes The Lifeblood of the Web One Thursday in May, I was sitting in a slightly delayed train, heading home from Düsseldorf after three days of meeting good friends and making new ones at beyond tellerrand, my friend Marc Thiele’s wonderful conference. As usual, after visiting a conference, and beyond tellerrand in particular, my head was bursting with ideas and creative energy. I would feel the same way again a few months later, after visiting Smashing Conference in Freiburg. There’s something magical about walking into a conference venue in the morning. The hum of first conversations, the smell of coffee, the anticipation, and the smiling faces. And... #blogtober #web #conferences #community 67 Webmentions
Posted October 10, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes What Could Go Wrong? In 1986 – when I was four years old – three researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were working on an idea that would change the world of technology forever: they figured out an efficient way for smart computer systems they called “connectionist models” to learn from their own mistakes. Not by manually correcting each error individually but by using a procedural algorithm that tells every little part of the system how much it contributed to the error. This mechanism, which is now known as backpropagation, is the reason neural networks can learn patterns by adjusting the... #AI #neural networks #technology #LLMs #society #politics #humanity #blogtober 21 Webmentions
Posted October 9, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes That’s My Rank Have you ever wondered why new CSS features and other web technologies very often seem to just work across browsers these days? The reason is probably: Interop. The Interop Project is a collaborative effort between major browser makers — Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla — to improve the Web by making it more consistent and reliable across all browsers. The idea is that instead of each company implementing web standards slightly differently, each year, Interop defines shared goals for the “interoperability” of web standards like HTML and CSS, which are created in organizations such as the W3C... #css #html #web #platform #interop #blogtober 17 Webmentions
Posted October 9, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Yuni Grotesque Beautiful new release by Philipp Neumeyer and TypeMates. 😍 Next TDC Award incoming … 😉 #type design #typefaces #fonts #typography
Posted October 8, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Making Space Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio, shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up, it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down. Let’s say you realise that the track you are working on needs more bass. So you pull up the fader for the bass by a few dB. But now you notice that the drums could be more present, so you pull them up a tiny bit as well. Now, the vocal is a bit too silent, so you... #blogtober #creativity #music #design #mixing 20 Webmentions
Posted October 7, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes CSS :is() :where() the Magic Happens For Blogtober, I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started writing this post, :is() and :where() had just landed in CSS, and — just like with so many other new CSS features — I was expecting them to “change the way we write CSS.” Both are now widely available baseline features supported by all modern browsers. We often write about CSS features when they are brand new, but it is equally interesting to see how those shiny... #css #blogtober 53 Webmentions
Posted October 7, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 The History of the Web A wonderful newsletter by Jay Hoffmann about the web's history, the incredible people that built it, and all the websites, code, and browsers you've never heard of. #web #history #newsletters #World Wide Web
Posted October 6, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Visual Regression Testing for External URLs With Playwright We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button gone? Especially when you are working on a larger codebase together or you are refactoring your CSS or consolidating redundant styles, seemingly small changes in one corner of your CSS (or JavaScript) can have repercussions in a seemingly unrelated component. If you ever changed your base typography styles, you know what I mean. The Cascade and... #testing #playwright #css #blogtober 20 Webmentions
Posted October 5, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Jane Goodall’s Famous Last Words Jane Goodall, the scientist, conservationist, and educator who died last Wednesday at 91, will always be remembered for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She lived with wild chimpanzees to study them, befriended them, and made a groundbreaking discovery: that they could make and use tools, a trait that, up until then, had been thought to be uniquely human. But more importantly, by helping the world see chimps as the socially and cognitively sophisticated creatures they are, that they are thinking and feeling beings, she transformed our understanding of the animal world. She then found her purpose in advocating... #interviews #climate action #earth #blogtober 11 Webmentions
Posted October 5, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Footer — The only footer gallery on earth. A really nice gallery with a lot of footer design inspiration in all forms and colours, sorted by type and style. The footer often is a neglected part of a design. But it doesn’t have to be this way. #web #web design #design #inspiration #footer #gallery
Posted October 4, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes European Tech Alternatives 🇪🇺 For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political perspective, but also poses very real risks in areas such as data protection, surveillance, legal frameworks, regulatory compliance, taxes, and (random) tariffs. The more digital economies outside of the US – and we as users – are intertwined with the US economy and Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, the more we will feel the repercussions of political,... #technology #europe #software #blogtober 112 Webmentions
Posted October 3, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Tweaking the Circuits When the people at EMI ordered a bunch of Altec 436B compressors in the late 1950s for Abbey Road Studios, they were hoping for that legendary American sound they had heard at their sister studio Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But when the units arrived in London and the engineers at Abbey Road gave the freshly installed units a thorough going over, they didn’t really like what they heard. So, they started re-designing the unit from the ground up. First, they added an output attenuation, so that the output signal, which will often be louder after compression, could be turned down... #blogtober #web #design #engineering #audio 14 Webmentions
Posted October 2, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Age Quod Agis Age quod agis. This Latin phrase, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, translates to “do what you are doing.” Do what you are doing. Like in: dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to whatever you engage in. Do what you are doing. Not the thing over there. Not that thing on your phone. Not the thing you will do tomorrow. That thing right in front of you. That thing you are doing right now. We live in a world full of distractions, emails, and notifications, and a culture that applauds juggling several things at once. Being busy is seen... #blogtober #blogging #writing 2 Webmentions
Posted October 1, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Blogtober 2025 — Day 1 It’s Blogtober again. And this time, I’ve (more or less spontaneously) decided to take part in it. For those of you who don’t know what it is: Blogtober is a writing challenge that takes part every Oktober (similar to Bloguary, Blobuary, Blarch, Blapril, Blay, Blune, Bluly, Blogust, Blogtember, … 🤓), in which bloggers commit to writing and publishing a new post every day throughout the entire month. So just like Inktober for artists, Blogtober is a good excuse to start to sit down and create a little piece of work every day. The posts you publish in Blogtober don’t have... #writing #blogging #blogtober 4 Webmentions
Posted July 24, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Best Free Synthesizer Plugins in 2025 I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve been starting to get interested in software synthesizers lately. I can barely play proper melodies on my Arturia MiniLab – seems like 10 years of playing the piano as a kid somehow mostly vanished from my brain cells – and I haven’t recorded anything that would be remotely useful or even worth... #audio #music #synths #synthesizers #plugins 47 Webmentions
