Barnaby Walters

I was travelling all day yesterday and missed out on the “llama dress thing̦”. Can someone fill me in?

Buying viola strings at justmusic.de in Berlin is a weird process. You choose the strings at the desk on the top floor, who give you a piece of paper and tell you to go to the ground floor. By the time you’ve got there, the strings have arrived in a little vacuum tube thing, and you pay for them.

I’m not entirely sure how this works for the pianos and do not intend on buying one to find out, unless they have a vacuum-tube to Iceland as well.

Python-land: where it’s apparently acceptable for a popular “micro” web application library to not provide a consistent way of accessing raw request data.

I’m looking at you, Flask.

This week’s illness, measured in #duolingo XP:

(Context: when feeling more like a human than a sack of flu germs, I usually get between 60 and 100 duolingo “XP” per day. Thank goodness for streak freeze.)

Stay safe, Copenhagen friends.

Drehleierwiki has a very comprehensive list of #gurdy string suggestions, and is excellent reference if you’re not sure where to get strings, what to get, or simply want to try something new.

I’m currently using a Thomastik Infeld Dominant Viola a1 medium, (synth core, aluminium wound) as my g, some unbranded roundwound violin G (turns out roundwound doesn’t sit nicely with my gurdy) and a Violin D for the D. Planning on replacing the D with another low G set up for harmony playing, and maybe trying some gut strings for my trompettes after I’ve made new chiens.

Rewatching Star Wars IV for the first time in years (not counting the Uncut) is a hilarious reminder of all the mondegreens my 10 year old ears heard amongst the dialog, such as threepio exclaiming that for droids to suffer is “our Latin life”

#TIL that “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was appropriated by Pete Seeger (and then further sanitized by George Weiss) from a song written by Solomon Linda, who died in poverty. His family only received royalties for the song’s widespread Disney use after a lawsuit in 2006 — 44 years later.

There’s an archive of the in-depth three part write-up of the whole thing from Rolling Stone by Rian Malan here.

I started translating the German WP article for Hümmelchen (a type of bagpipe) on #duolingo — want to join in?

ICELANDIC WEB DESIGN: vogabakki.is

My geeky system datetime format: longnow variant ISO8601 dates with ordinal day of year:

Protip: leave out the longnow preceding 0 in the short/medium formats as otherwise the created/modified datetimes in the Finder column view will be truncated to just the date by default.

Today’s #django lesson: be VERY careful with programmatic use of contribute_to_class(). It doesn’t overwrite existing fields of the same name, resulting in intriguing errors when the ORM tries to do a SELECT query containing the same columns hundreds of times over…