Downread is an RSS reader: follow your favorite blogs, news sites, YouTube channels and newsletters, and new posts come to you in one fast, clean stream. No popups, no cookie banners, no algorithm. Think of it as a podcast player, but for reading.
Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
By Elena Marsh
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn’t expect it to become the most rewarding project of the year. Three months, two boxes of spare parts and countless coffees later, it rides better than anything from the shop.
The trick, it turns out, is patience. Every part that looked beyond saving cleaned up with an evening of work, and the ones that really were gone had a modern replacement that fit without any fuss.
Below is everything I used, what it cost, and the three mistakes I would skip if I did it again.
A new compression format claims 30% smaller images
By Sam Devlin
The reference encoder is slower than anything in production today, but the numbers on photographic content are hard to argue with.
Browser vendors have been careful not to commit. Two of them have shipped the decoder behind a flag; the third says it is waiting for the format to stabilize.
For readers of this site the practical question is simpler: whether the savings survive the transcoding pipelines most photo services run their uploads through.
A growing number of writers are leaving the platforms and moving back to a domain of their own, a trend that hosting providers say has been building for two years.
The tools have changed since the last time this was fashionable. Static site builders, cheap hosting and, above all, RSS make it easy to keep an audience without an algorithm in between.
Several of the writers we spoke to said the same thing: the audience they kept is smaller, but it actually reads what they publish.
I wanted to understand how terminals work, so I wrote one. It handles the escape sequences that vim and tmux need, scrollback, and 256 colors, and nothing else.
The code is commented heavily. If you have ever wondered what a pty is, this is the shortest path I know to finding out.
Build it with the included Makefile, run it inside any existing terminal, and start deleting lines until something breaks. That is how I learned most of it.
Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
By Elena Marsh
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn’t expect it to become the most rewarding project of the year. Three months, two boxes of spare parts and countless coffees later, it rides better than anything from the shop.
The trick, it turns out, is patience. Every part that looked beyond saving cleaned up with an evening of work, and the ones that really were gone had a modern replacement that fit without any fuss.
Below is everything I used, what it cost, and the three mistakes I would skip if I did it again.
A new compression format claims 30% smaller images
By Sam Devlin
The reference encoder is slower than anything in production today, but the numbers on photographic content are hard to argue with.
Browser vendors have been careful not to commit. Two of them have shipped the decoder behind a flag; the third says it is waiting for the format to stabilize.
For readers of this site the practical question is simpler: whether the savings survive the transcoding pipelines most photo services run their uploads through.
A growing number of writers are leaving the platforms and moving back to a domain of their own, a trend that hosting providers say has been building for two years.
The tools have changed since the last time this was fashionable. Static site builders, cheap hosting and, above all, RSS make it easy to keep an audience without an algorithm in between.
Several of the writers we spoke to said the same thing: the audience they kept is smaller, but it actually reads what they publish.
I wanted to understand how terminals work, so I wrote one. It handles the escape sequences that vim and tmux need, scrollback, and 256 colors, and nothing else.
The code is commented heavily. If you have ever wondered what a pty is, this is the shortest path I know to finding out.
Build it with the included Makefile, run it inside any existing terminal, and start deleting lines until something breaks. That is how I learned most of it.
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photography
Photography
Category
PetaPixel
petapixel.com
Fstoppers
fstoppers.com
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PetaPixel
petapixel.com
Photography and camera news, reviews and inspiration.
Photographyabout 7 posts/dayLast post 2 hours ago
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Tens of thousands of sites
Downread has huge collection of supported sites: news sites, magazines, YouTube channels, one-person blogs. Almost everything publishes a feed. Then follow that source with a single click.
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No matter whether you follow just a single source or hundreds. Downread makes reading fast and effortless. Skim what's new, dive into the posts worth your time, and breeze past the rest.
Restoring a 1972 road bike, one Saturday at a time
By Elena Marsh
When a rusty frame turned up at the flea market, I didn't expect it to become the most rewarding project of the year. Three months, two boxes of spare parts and countless coffees later, it rides better than anything from the shop.
Apple announces the next generation of its silicon lineup
The new chips promise another major leap in performance per watt, and the first machines carrying them are expected before the end of the year.
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UNREAD FEEDS
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Your feeds, your order
Group feeds into folders and read a whole folder as one stream. Feeds you care about are tracked: unread counts make sure you miss nothing. High-volume feeds can run untracked: no counts piling up, just browse when you're in the mood.
The sidebar shows only feeds with new posts, so it stays this tidy even with hundreds of subscriptions.
Easy by design
Folders, keyboard shortcuts, OPML import and export, newsletter inboxes... everything you expect from an RSS reader. The difference is how little effort anything takes.
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Phone, tablet, laptop or widescreen desktop: Downread adapts to your screen. Install it like an app or just use the browser. A free account syncs everything across your devices.
Find new feeds
A large feed catalog, searchable and sorted by topic, plus hand-picked recommendations refreshed daily. Paste any site's URL and Downread finds its feed, or route your email newsletters straight into a private inbox.
When feeds pile up
Cap how many unread posts a feed may collect, so busy feeds stay readable. And after a long break, you can declare RSS Bankruptcy and Downread helps you manage your unread posts.