People and resources added to my reading list in 2021

Since 2013, come January, I’ve written a recap of the most notable discoveries and additions to my bookmarks and feeds made during the previous year. I’ve also taken the opportunity to talk a bit about what kind of stuff interests me, what’s worth checking on a daily basis, what kind of content annoys me and puts me off, and I’ve also talked about my RSS feeds management. Last year I even added a new section on fun and useful online tools I’ve encountered while browsing the Web or via other people’s suggestions and recommendations.

This year I’ve managed to catch January by the tail, as this month has truly slipped away, what with the general increase of work assignments and personal stuff going on behind the scenes. But here we are, on the last day of January, still honouring the tradition.

As I wrote in January 2020 and January 2021, for the past five years the influx of new, consistently interesting resources to read has been dwindling. And at the same time I’ve noticed previously added people/resources become unfocused and less interesting, with edge cases getting so annoying that I removed them from my feeds or daily reads. When I mention this disappointing trend, usually someone appears in my email inbox telling me that it’s not true, that there’s plenty of great stuff out there, and so forth. I don’t doubt it, but when I talk about the problem of finding resources worth reading and adding to the pool I routinely check, it’s always from a personal standpoint. It’s about what I find and what I stumble upon. And I’m pretty sure that the most impactful factor influencing the disappointing trend I’ve mentioned is having less and less time to dedicate to actively search for new people and resources, and then having less and less time to catch up with everything I put in my RSS feeds.

Blogs: the Cinderella of current media

Again, this is a subjective impression and observation, not a scientifically verified phenomenon, but from where I stand I’m noticing a decrease in the use of blogs as means of personal expression and exposition. On the one hand you have video, whose increase in popularity over the past years has been quite remarkable. On the other hand, the written word is increasingly used in shorter-form capacity. Brief articles, often with little to no substance, often badly written. And then of course ‘micro-blogging’, which for me is a staggering euphemism that makes 280-character-long updates sound better than what they actually are.

Blogs and long-form pieces are increasingly perceived almost as ineffective solutions to explain something or make a point. They’re perceived as the most laborious way a creator/author could choose. When it comes to production, they’ve perceived as time-consuming and slow. When it comes to audience engagement, they’ve perceived as ineffective and requiring too much attention on the part of readers whose attention span has been sorely and steadily diminishing.

But aren’t YouTube videos and video essays (the video counterpart of a long-form written piece) longer to write, shoot, edit and publish? Without doubt, but the final product is perceived as being more rewarding and impactful when it comes to engaging an audience. And if it is indeed well-produced, this is true. There are many narrative devices a YouTube creator can employ to make their point and keep the viewers interested. The video format also has an immediacy and can have a visual impact potent enough to hook viewers from the very start. Video can also put on the foreground subtle elements that add to the general effectiveness, like the creator’s charisma — the way they move, talk, be on video, which sometimes for certain viewers almost becomes more important than what’s being said in the video itself. We tend to trust or at least be more sympathetic towards cool people on video.

Mind you, you can achieve similar results with the written word, it’s not impossible — it’s harder and, at least with long-form content, requires excellent writing skills. Using the written word in shorter formats can be effective at transmitting someone’s quirks, personality, and charisma. It has a different kind of immediacy and it’s something you notice over time: I’ve stumbled on a lot of people on Twitter who have a staggering number of followers and they basically tweet witty remarks, jokes, memes, and little else. If you take a few of their tweets out of context you’ll certainly be wondering why on earth this person has 85,000 followers; but when you zoom out and consider their timeline in progression, you start noticing their personality and — whether you like it or not — you understand why many could find these people’s shitposting relatable.

Tech blogs

Back to blogs, my experience in 2021 has again reinforced the impression that they’re an endangered species. Good tech-oriented blogs in particular. What I find less and less frequently are good tech blogs with meaningful, long-form commentary. Not tech sites or portals, but personal blogs. The kind of content I generally stumble on can be categorised as follows:

Blogs with brief, ‘linked-list’ entries where the author quotes someone else or a piece of news, then adds a couple of sentences in response. Sometimes they even leave the quote without comment, a tacit sign of agreement with what or whom is quoted.
Blogs with infrequent and very technical posts, whose author is evidently a software developer/engineer, and whose content is evidently directed to an audience of peers, not laypeople.
Blogs with infrequent and practical content, like tips tricks tutorials. Useful stuff, no doubt, but everything often feels sterile, and in certain cases the posts read as if they were either AI-generated, or copied from sources in other languages and pasted after a hasty machine translation.
The occasional long-form tech article that is informative and well-written, but it’s published on an external site like Medium, which makes things more impersonal. You can of course start following the article’s author on these platforms, in the hope that they’ll publish more good stuff down the road. Sometimes they do, but you’ll typically wait a long time.
And then you have bigger tech-oriented sites, like Ars Technica, The Verge, or Input, which indeed can offer quality content, long-form features, extended commentary and (gasp) even good examples of tech journalism. But given the sheer amount of content they output daily, I end up missing a lot of stuff.

After this long excursion, at this point it’s hardly surprising that, for the first time in years, 2021 mostly went by without finding anyone to add to my RSS feeds. The sole exception arrived last-minute, in late December, and it’s

Chris Hannah — Chris is the developer of Text Case, a text transformation app available for iOS and Mac OS. As someone who deals with text all the time, I’ve been using it on both platforms since its first release. It’s a good app I warmly recommend. Check its website and its App Store description to understand if it may suit your needs. On the Mac I now use both Text Case and Text Buddy by Tyler Hall, and it’s like having text manipulation superpowers.

But I digress. Chris’s blog is exactly what I look for in a good tech blog: a mixture of technical content, personal commentary, informative articles, software suggestions, more introspective posts. It is updated frequently enough, well written, and it really shows that it’s a product of someone who cares. I discovered Chris’s software before discovering Chris the writer. When I saw him mentioned a few times in Mike Rockwell’s blog Initial Charge (another recommended source you should follow), it took me a moment before I connected the dots and realised that he was the same Chris Hannah who developed an app I’d been happily using for a while!

YouTube channels

As finding interesting blogs becomes harder, I seem to be finding interesting YouTube channels every week. Say what you want about the intricacies and the whims of YouTube’s algorithm, but as a viewer its effectiveness never ceases to amaze me. Pretty much like Spotify’s algorithm for music discovery.

During the course of 2021 I’ve subscribed to many new channels, and there are many others I keep an eye on without committing too much because they still don’t feel consistent, quality-wise, to deserve a subscription.

I must say, most of my discoveries are channels with a relatively low (or even very low) subscribers’ count. But quantity (of subscribers) doesn’t necessarily correlate with quality of content, as you’ll see if you decide to take a look at these channels.

Since I’ve been verbose enough, I’ll try to be brief in my descriptions and remarks. Of course, channels are listed in no particular order.

Photography

Gear Head — Mostly reviews of camera lenses, but also cameras and accessories. I really like the host: honest, playful, an all-round nice Canadian guy. Videos are short and essential.
Eduardo Pavez Goye — Eduardo is a great street film photographer. In his videos he talks about cameras, lenses and film, but also books. I like his camera reviews a lot because they always include a photowalk and great sample shots. I like his honesty and humility.
GxAce — Mostly camera reviews, but in an unconventional format and more similar to essays. I love the Blade Runner sci-fi æsthetic: in how the videos are edited, in the choice of soundtrack, and even in the host’s studio setup. Visit his channel and you’ll see what I mean.
Shutter Slaps and Snappiness — My recent passion for 2000s-era digicams lead me to encounter these two channels, which are all about low-budget photography and both convey the message that unless you are a pro photographer, there’s no need to resort to expensive gear to get decent-to-great results.
Azriel Knight — Another nice, knowledgeable Canadian. Azriel’s channel focuses almost exclusively on film photography, gear, techniques, reviews, and history.
Brian’s Photo Show — Brian Grossman is a collector and film photography aficionado. Very knowledgeable, especially when it comes to Nikon gear, his videos are informative, useful, to-the-point, never too long, and I’d say he would make a good photography teacher. He has written an ebook, Nikon Film Cameras: Which one is right for you?, available on Amazon for a little more than $3. I purchased it, am reading it, and I recommend it to all those who want to try film photography but don’t know where to begin when it comes to gear.
Vintage Optiks — Lovely little channel focused on reviews of vintage camera lenses. I love the vintage look and feel of the videos themselves, which are usually in two parts: a brief historical overview of a lens, and a gallery of sample photos taken by the host himself to showcase the lens’ capabilities.
Ira Crummey — An older Canadian fellow with a passion for photography. I really love his down-to-earth approach and the healthy dose of common sense he injects in his discussions on various photography-related topics.

Gaming

No notable additions this time. I’m very satisfied with the people I started following 2–3 years ago.

Cooking

J. Kenji López-Alt — Since the pandemic hit, and especially during the initial periods of hard lockdown, I found myself watching more and more cooking videos on YouTube. Kenji López-Alt is perhaps my favourite cook. His style is unique and I love that most of his videos are shot at home, in his kitchen, as he prepares a dish in real time. While cooking, he imparts a wealthy amount of useful culinary information, tips and tricks, all in a very casual, laid-back fashion that makes me like him a lot.

Comedy/Entertainment

Alasdair Beckett-King — Very British humour. If you love British humour, you will love Alasdair.
Joel Haver — Joel is a furnace of ideas. His videos (pardon, short films) are quirky, unpredictable, even when you think you know where he’s going. Sometimes he makes you laugh hard, sometimes he makes you stop and think. He’s one of the good guys.
Caitlin Reilly — She uploads one-minute skits where she often impersonates recurring characters taken from everyday life. She’s exceptional at catching the tiniest details and traits of the personality of the character she’s doing. The characters themselves aren’t particularly likeable (the annoying aspiring actress, the WASP mom, the wellness influencer, various types of ‘L.A. woman’, etc.) but what makes you smile is just how accurately Caitlin portrays them.
Michael Spicer — British humour again. Check his amazing series The Room Next Door, where he plays “a frustrated adviser who is communicating live via an earpiece with a figure speaking in public. The videos cut between the exasperated Spicer and real footage of the public figure at a speaking engagement.” (Thanks, Wikipedia) But my absolute favourite video of his is That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film When You Give Up Trying to Follow the Story

Other

Thomas Flight — Thomas writes and shoots really insightful video essays on cinema.

Transgender creators

I don’t like to use labels when it comes to people. I don’t like to specify attributes like race, gender, sexual inclinations because for me people are people, no matter where they come from. If I’m specifying here that these creators are trans people is only because a lot of their content focuses on trans issues and is really informative if you are an open-minded person who wants to understand their experience and point of view on societal matters. I’m currently subscribed to ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn), Mia Mulder, and Philosophy Tube (Abigail Thorn). These are all smart, witty creators who favour the long-form video essay format, and whom I recommend without reserve.

Podcasts

In 2019 I unsubscribed from all the podcasts I was following, and I haven’t looked back. I know and respect many people who use podcasts as their main medium for expression. My moving away from podcasts is simply a pragmatic decision — I just don’t have the time for everything. I still listen to the odd episode, especially if it comes recommended by people I trust. You can find a more articulate observation on podcasts in my People and resources added to my reading list in 2019.

Useful/fun Web tools

These are websites/web applications I’ve bookmarked and use when the need arises. You have to keep in mind that single-purpose sites like these may stop working or being maintained without warning. At the time of writing, they all work.

Parcels — Global package tracking — my go-to site for tracking packages. Fast, precise, reliable. It’s also available as an iOS/Android app.
World Time Buddy — From the website: World Time Buddy (WTB) is a convenient world clock, a time zone converter, and an online meeting scheduler. My favourite tool for time zone conversion and time calculations remains Time and Date, but I also love WTB’s simple, immediate interface.
Whitespace characters to copy and paste — A useful place that lets you copy and paste Unicode whitespace characters (zero-width space, em space, en space, figure space, braille blank, etc.). What are whitespace characters and why would you use them? Visit the website for more information.
The previous tool is just one of many Unicode tools available at QWERTY.DEV. Check the whole website for more goodies.

My RSS management

This is the part that hasn’t never really changed these past years. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps I’m using on my devices.

On my Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire.
On my PowerPC Macs: older versions of NetNewsWire.
On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit.
On my iPhone 8, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread.
On older iOS devices: Older versions of Reeder, and an older version of Byline.
On my first-generation iPad: an older version of Newsify, Slow Feeds (which is now called Web Subscriber), and the Feedly app itself.
On my ThinkPad T400 and ThinkPad X240 (with Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10 respectively): Nextgen Reader.
On my ThinkPad X61T with Windows 7, and my ThinkPad 240X running Windows 2000: FeedDemon 4.5. Discontinued in 2013, it still works well.
On my Windows Phone 8.1/Windows 10 Mobile smartphones: Nextgen Reader and FeedLab.
On my webOS devices (Palm Prē 2, HP TouchPad): FeedSpider. A really great app.
On my Android phone (Xiaomi Mi A2): the official Feedly app.

Addendum: ‘Read later’ services

Eleven years ago I talked about the ways I was dealing with ‘bookmark bankruptcy’, and one of the methods I had devised was to avoid as much as possible the Read It Later routine:

You see, come to think of it, the main factor that led to my bookmark bankruptcy is the ‘Read It Later’ routine: a lot of stuff I’ve bookmarked over the years was filed away for the purpose of reading it later. Let’s save this bit, it might come handy, it might be useful. What really happened is that 90% of the time I’ve never gone back to that bookmarked stuff. It’s been the same as if I filed it in a ‘Read It Never’ folder.

So, what have I been progressively doing? Reading things now.

In that article I was also mentioning how, unlike many other tech geeks at the time, I wasn’t really using Instapaper, relying instead on other services or strategies to accumulate reading materials (which then led to my ‘bookmark bankruptcy’).

I’ve mostly stuck with my ‘Read It Now’ approach over the years; but in recent times, due to an aggressive increase of work, life stuff that gets in the way, and so forth, I found myself in need to save a lot of reading material to peruse later. In an ironic turn of events, I found Instapaper to be the cleanest, most versatile solution. It’s the service that still works on the widest range of devices in my possession — from the first-gen iPad and third-gen iPod touch, to my Kindles, Android phones and Windows Phone devices — and I really like its tastefully minimalistic design that puts content readability first. So yes, here I am, recommending Instapaper 14 years after its creation.

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good tech writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email or Twitter. Thanks for reading!

Riccardo Mori

Writer & Translator