Cutting back to grow more

Hullo! I’m sitting with A beside me, watching the sun filter on to the trees and the birds making their dinnertime forays.

The garden—T’s garden, really—is doing great. It’s so rewarding to see the daily progress, the change that results from sun, water, attention and care. We finally set about pruning the cherry tomato… plant? bush? tree? What do you call a tomato plant that’s grown to seven feet in height? Anyway, it’s voluminous, but we pruned it to encourage more productive growth. This tomato thing grew faster than I could finish the garden bed cover around it, so that’s one woodworking project half done with good reason for the season.

There’s a metaphor in “cutting things out to enable growth”, and I’m sure a gardener’s written about it at length, but I’m only just starting to read up on gardening (if you have some good reads to share, please do!).

I have been reading The Joiner and Cabinet Maker, the expanded version published by Lost Art Press (sold by Lee Valley in Canada), and it’s a delightful, narrative introduction to woodworking—one of the best texts I’ve read for a beginner. It’s a fun middleground between fiction and non-fiction, a good read no matter the hour.

Today was a good one: I made it down to both Canadian Tire and the woodshop and the Ottawa Tool Library’s vintage tool sale (for, respectively: yard bags and a bike ride; cutting some plywood for a shooting board, while also unexpectedly running into an old colleague; an eggbeater drill [planned] and a wooden straight rabbet plane [unplanned, delightful]). And the sun’s been shining—hotly, yes, which is unfortunate, but it’s a bit cheerier than recent rain, so I’ll take it for a day or two.

On to the links, shall we?

• German investigative reporters put together a compelling visual story showing just how much can be inferred from easily purchased location data. The wildest part? This data was given to the researchers freely, as a trial! “Even though the dataset includes 3.6 billion datapoints, it was provided free of charge as a sample for a potential monthly subscription the vendor was hoping to sell.”
• A scathing critique of the Trump-supporting founders of a16z, one of the more influential Silicon Valley tech firms. Anything for a buck.
• Brilliant, using Obsidian’s graph view to map and tweak the connections between characters in a story.
• I did not know about “null island” (zoom to 0, 0 in various digital mapping tools), but what a hoot it is (via Simon Willison).
• “Friendship as mothering” (in the best way, for both those words) is a version of friendship I can get behind (via Jason Kottke).
• There’s loads of neat stuff happening in typography these days, and Elliot Jay Stocks has gathered some of the most recent interesting typography talks and publications.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas