1. Human Theremin using conductive ink

    Using hand built circuitry I was able to turn my sister into a fully functioning theremin, the idea being that eventually the equipment could be used by dancers to create music that relies entirely on choreography and body movement to generate sound as they dance. In this way the visual performance and the audio become intrinsically linked and thus the viewer is able to ‘see’ the sound as it is created.

  2. Sandeep Shetty: PubSubHubbub (by Google for Google) or any push based solution for the web is unnecessarily complex for #indieweb. Polling works just fine.

    sandeepshetty hm, I'd actually say push based systems are super useful (certainly I have personal use cases which are too big for me to want to poll) but PuSH is way too complicated. It’s actually something I’m working on improving, as you did with Pingback => webfinger

  3. One fail I’m seeing more and more is the “we’ve got a different version of this site for your locality! Would you like to go to it?” whole-page overlay on permalink pages. So many problems:

    • Why do you have multiple versions of the same site if the content is equally valuable on either one (e.g. recipe sites)?
    • If language is the reason (I have never seen this) exactly why can’t you internationalize the UI and offer some sort of auto-translation of the content? Or leave the translation to me/my browser whilst having a small, unobtrusive banner letting me know I might be able to find similar content in my native language.
    • If I’ve followed a permalink, I want to see that content. Offering me a redirect to a generic homepage is useless
  4. tip: if you come across weird inconsistencies between apps when trying to serve static files in dev, run with runserver --insecure even if you have DEBUG=True

  5. Emil Björklund: What is the equivalent of a unit test for HTML + CSS? (Yes, I know of Selenium, webdriver etc, but I'm fishing for other answers as well.)

    @thatemil I’ve always considered style guides/pattern libraries to be unit tests for HTML+CSS, and you could automate them with JS if they get too unwieldy.

  6. After RSVPing the local meetup tonight, I get an email with shared signup details for wp10.wordpress.net so I can post my photos from the party to their site.

    This is another, rather bizarre example of WordPress promoting monoculture. Even funnier is this misguided quote from the email:

    If you don't already have the WordPress mobile app for your smartphone, you'll want to download it so that you can upload pictures and post to the site right from the party. It would be a good idea to add the site to your mobile app before your party so you don't have to worry about it later.

    Paraphrased: “So that you can participate TO THE MAX, post to our hosted silo and download yet another app that you’ll delete straight away”.

    Nevertheless, I plan to download the app and try it out as I’ve never used it before and WordPress UX tends to be pretty good. Perhaps then discuss the whole thing in on freenode to brainstorm a better way of doing this topic-based aggregation.