Mourning the mysterious disappearance of the blue USPS collection box that used to live across the street.

It is surprisingly hard to figure out where a mailbox is and if it even exists. The official USPS location search still thinks ours is still there, but MailboxMap somehow knows it’s gone.

This is the kind of public data thing that I would get obsessed with for days at a time in my previous life as a journalist. Who is responsible for knowing where all the collection boxes are? Who decides to move them? Where do they sleep when they’re not bolted to the sidewalk? Do I need to remember how to file a FOIA request?

Now that Chicago’s pulled the plug on ShotSpotter, let’s dedicate that hardware to a higher purpose.

No seriously, I’m pretty obsessed with Bop Spotter. Don’t miss the details over at 404. This is what technology is for. May it never be found.

Lots of things in small improvements corner for this website this week: upgraded to the official release of Eleventy v3, started self-hosting my fonts, put proper cache headers on all the assets, reworked contrast on the color palette, and finally got brave enough to let my deploy script delete files. It’s almost like I’m about to be away from a computer again for a little bit…