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  1. How to watch a film, Háskolábíó style:

    • Pay 1550IKR for a ticket
    • Watch 20 minutes of adverts
    • Watch the first 45 minutes of the film
    • Wonder what happened to the projector when the screen goes blank mid-sentence. Realise it’s an intermission. In a film. In a cinema. With adverts.
    • Watch another 15 minutes of adverts, or optionally escape into the popcorn-vending zone
    • Settle back in and watch the rest of the film
    • Exit out of the opposite corner you came in from, optionally expressing surprise when it turns out you just walked out of the back door, into the rain and cold. Hastily put your coat on and reorient yourself. Watch out for the puddle.

    Tjarnabíó is like this too. Not that it isn’t well-priced or enjoyable, but… there are some optimisations which could be made here.

  2. Watched Gravity with friends — a beautifully made film about Murphy’s Law and the importance of international UI conventions. Reminded me a lot of the scene from Explorers on the Moon where Captain Haddock gets drunk and starts orbiting a nearby asteroid before he is saved by Tintin and a sturdy rope.

  7. Made a simple garlic+mushroom+cheese risotto from this recipe — results were adequate, ignore the instructions to put salt in at the beginning though — it’s easy to put way too much in then have it concentrated as more water evaporates. Best leave it till later, or put a tiny amount in.

  8. Archiving some of my old email, I find this blast from the recent past (March 2012) in Mac app idea form:

    Postflow: A tool for social media power-users. Interactively create automator-like 'postflows' that allow you to quickly and effectively post the same bit of content to lots of different social networks.

    With useful features, such as:

    • Real-time execution and editing: Work through a postflow step by step, changing it and the content you're posting as you go along.
    • Floating Results window that displays text and links to everything you've posted so far in the flow. Automatically shorterns URLS.
    • Preset Variables: Set a list of commonly used items e.g. your URL, @twitter_name, other social network profile page URL, etc.
    • Fully automated postflows (?): Set up postflows that take one input and does everything else by it's self.
    • Extensive library of posting actions
    • Quick Post UI: For small updates that still need to go out to lots of people. Forego some of the fine-grained control of a full postflow for sheer speedyness.
    • Ability to add other networks through a plugin creator (?) will work provided basic API types are supported.
    • Automated admin work: Change profile photo, description, details on multiple networks simultaneously.

    The Quick Post utility by it's self could be given away as a free sampler of the more advanced full Postflow — gives people the 'post to lots of networks intelligently' ability, but not the advanced features or customisation

    Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like a certain Yahoo Pipes clone I’m working on…

  11. A bottom-up, building blocks approach to interoperability makes the barrier to entry small and the value large, as opposed to a monolithic all-or-nothing protocol approach, which demands compliance due to its implementation’s incapability of gracefully handling partial support.

    Building blocks give creators freedom to implement what’s important to them in the order it makes most sense, getting positive feedback from low hanging fruit and making complex tasks managable.

    Stop designing protocols. Create building blocks.