Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I was delighted to learn that I wasn’t imagining a new trend in car paint. Hank Green hankschannel also wondered why more and more cars look like clay and demonstrated how to find out the reason (at his typically fast pace and high volume, with B+ autocraptions).

Nardo Gray is the original case—a dark gray that's contrasty enough to use for large but not regular-size print. Audi tests its cars at the Nardò, Italy racetrack. That’s where they debuted this doubly cool color. (Not only is it soothing, it's got blue undertones, unlike the brown undertones that create warm grays.. Much more detail at nardo-grey.com.

What makes these colors unusual is the lack of metallic paint (no little flecks of reflective metal, what I called "candy flake" when I was assembling model cars growing up.) So now I find myself hollering Nardo! whenever I catch sight of these mellow colors. Do you roll with nardo or do you prefer shiny candy flake?

Hank explains on YouTube ( or stream him right here )

I'm here to kvell about a nifty browser extension, StopTheMadness

(Everything except the name, which I could do without. More accurately, it's GiveMeBackControl).

StopTheMadness wrests control back from websites, so I can always right-click, copy text/images, prevent opening in new pages, prevent media autoplay, and much more. Visit site for full marketing info:

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

It's currently available for Chrome (and Chromium browsers) on Windows, Mac, Linux.

For Mac/Safari it's a full-fledged app (as now is required for Safari extensions) with even more benefits.

I can assign browsers to domains and apps to URL schemes.

The social media giants seem to optimize function for Chromium-based browsers. So in my case, I always use Brave (with its robust privacy features) for FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Gmail and YouTube. Any cookies left by those sites are isolated to those sites, with my principal work remaining in Safari.

URL schemes means I control which apps open feed://, mailto: etc.

It also offers domain-specific implementation of styles if I use the Safari style sheet option -- it's not a full replacement for Tampermonkey yet, but who knows? The dev, Jeff Johnson, has been steadily adding features.

Sadly, it's not available for iOS (yet?)

If so, Emanuel Feld has made browser extensions for you. They replace the “post” button with a “breathe” button. Once clicked, you’re guided by a pulsing blue circle to breathe for a while (you can modify duration and pace) and then get another chance to read what you’ve written and commit with the post button for real.

Calm Twitter - for FireFox - for Chrome

Calm Metafilter - For FireFox - for Chrome

I’m here to share the good word about “quiet web reading.” ( Four approaches with step-by-step detail )