1. I love it when there’s lots of snow on the ground. It enables us to see in (blurry) 4D.

    And I get to draw googly eyes on all the bins.

  2. Miyazaki says, "Our job as animators is not only to draw scenes. We must find the minimum necessary and important lines for the specific movement in a given action. The techniques of animation drawing are not the same as those of painting a still picture. Animation is a consequence of the audience's perception of movement created by sequential drawings. For this reason, each drawing in the sequence -- especially the lines -- should not be drawn too detailed; rather, they should be drawn less [detailed] and create an instant pause in the sequential movement.” (source)

    Sounds a lot like UI design to me.

  3. If you want to generate real PDFs from HTML (i.e. with page breaks and real text, not just vast screenshots inside a PDF) then wkpdf is the way to go. Super fast, installs easily, great output.

  4. Just hooked up my notes to Brennan Novak’s rather awesome @emoome sentiment analysis API! So all my notes will have automated emotion/language analysis applied now, which I can query through machine tags.

    At the moment I’m not publicly showing this data, but if you can read HTML it’s in the source (machine tags not shown by default) and if you can read JSON, add .json onto the end of the URL.

  5. Spent the evening at a colleague’s birthday party in a private bikers club in a Reykjavik suburb, drinking (water, of course), eating tasty food and playing poker, a strange game which seems to consist mainly of the following:

    • Give people some cards
    • Put some cards on a table
    • Move some bits of plastic around a few times — the bits of plastic are different colours, and make nice sounds if you click them together
    • Arrange your plastic into piles and click them together whilst sipping a cocktail (or water, depending on whether or not you are a bodybuilder/Buddhist/bodybuilding Buddhist).
    • Do poker with your face (to do: what is this?)
    • Intermittently tap the table
    • Nonchalantly toss some plastic into the middle of the table, or, if you’re hungry, toss your cards towards the dealer and go get some food — this is called folding but DO NOT FOLD THE CARDS it is confusing and not literal
    • Repeat 2-5 a few times, then show people your cards. Say some numbers out loud (optional: confused pause), and then one of you has won. Sometimes this is because a card has a bigger number than another, or because of the shape, or because of the picture.
    • The winner gets all the plastic, unless they ran out of plastic half way through, in which case they get that much less — use little piles for this purpose.
    • Repeat from beginning

    Thanks for a great evening everyone :)

  6. Has a go at making a chicken mushroomey cheesey sauce thing (inspired by an amazing Italian place here). Surprisingly it wasn’t unsuccessful — needs a bit more cheese next time though.

  7. Robin Andrews: @BarnabyWalters Hi Barnaby. Thanks for liking my post. However, my handle is @robinmujician! How's the land of ice?

    Robin Andrews whoops, missed it that time! I need to get autocomplete working again, then I’ll never forget :)

    Iceland is great, the people are cool, the weather+scenery is amazing, the work is interesting, and my apartment has a huge DVD collection! I did a panorama from the office roof.