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Barnaby Walters

Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:

Pronouns: they/he

  1. Are you as sick as I am of stupid modal pop-ups interrupting almost everything you try to do on the web these days? Here’s the email template I’ve started sending to any site owner who I think might be receptive about the issue. Feedback welcome.

    Hello NAME,

I was just trying to read this article on your website: URL but stopped pretty quickly because of the annoying modal pop-up window which showed up a few seconds in.

Decades worth of user research data has shown modal pop-ups to be a terrible, off-putting design pattern which will do nothing but irritate and drive away readers and users: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/popups/

Apologies for the weird email but I’m really sick of these annoying modals which pervade online life these days and decided that, in cases like this (where the website has an easily-reachable, potentially receptive contact person who is likely to both care about the issue and be able to implement a better solution) I would just write to them in the hope that it might result in the situation being improved.

All the best,
YOUR NAME

  4. Does anyone else get bizarre spam emails consisting of a single image with a bunch of chinese writing, then a long gap and around 10 paragraphs of text randomly excerpted from old books? It consistently gets past my spam filter and I still have no idea what it’s even trying to sell me.

  6. Today I realised I had never taken any good photos of this mountain dulcimer I built in 2016 as a warm-up project after moving to a new workshop.

    An hourglass-shaped mountain dulcimer with four strings, made from walnut, cedar and ebony, with mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays, against a folded blue fabric background

  7. The 70s got me covered if I end up getting quarantined due to coronavirus. Unopened and in mint condition, I can rely on McDougall to see me through these hard times

    A huge, tin of “McDougals Instant Mashed Potato” sitting on a shelf

  10. If VLC is behaving weirdly, check that you didn’t accidentally press Command-Z to try to undo something. For some reason, that shortcut activates “Random” playback mode, which can result in the same track repeating, or playback stopping rather than continuing to the next item.

  15. I love doing PCB design because it lets me take advantage of periods of high mental capacity to front-load large amounts of problem solving work, so that in the future I only have to mindlessly solder-paint-by-numbers and everything will Just Work™.

  17. sweet jesus, that’s not philosophy, you’re eating m̧̺͔̳̙͍̫͆ë͙̰̻͖̄ͦ̃͒͗̈́m̱̭ͤ̄̎̓̚̚͠ĕ͉͚ͯ͋ͫ͜s̨̲̳̞̟ͥͅ

    A “sweet jesus, pooh” meme based on the original by Safely Endangered. Pooh is eating something from a jar. Tigger: “Sweet jesus pooh, that’s not late Wittgenstein. Tigger: “You’re eating the Tracatus Logico-philosophicus!” Pooh: 1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the… [the rest of the text is obscured]

  19. Riddle me this, bible scholars: reading through Genesis 1, it seems like god singles out whales as being particularly significant. They’re the first animals to get created (1:21), other sea creatures get created afterwards, and then when mankind shows up we get dominion over, specifically: the “fish of the sea”, birds, and “creeping things that creepeth” (1:26).

    But NOT whales. They are the only animals created by god which get to escape the dominion of mankind. Is that why one ate Jonah later on? Was this supposed to be a major plot point, but which became less relevant after most of the action moved onto the land?

    Please tell me that this isn’t like the “whoever finds a treetop, he will get the master magic” line at the beginning of the Kalevala which nobody ever mentions again. I read the entire thing, patiently waiting for someone to find a treetop but it never happened. What is the master magic? Is it different from the complete knowledge of the universe Väinämöinen gained from Vipunen to finish his boat? CHECKOV’S GUN, PEOPLE

  20. the direction of a pcbnew (KiCAD) selection changes its behaviour. LtoR only selects completely surrounded parts, RtoL selects partially selected parts.

    I can’t find this feature documented anywhere, but the selection colours are different so I assume it’s supposed to be like this.

    EDIT: apparently it’s something of a de-facto UI standard in CAD apps, probably started by AutoCAD.