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Barnaby Walters

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

Pronouns: they/he

  1. 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

  2. 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

  5. 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.

  10. 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™.

  12. 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]

  14. 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

  15. 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.

  16. ↪ Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    although I’m not convinced that the singular/plural ambiguity is a big problem. “you” already has ambiguous quantity, and both “you” and “we” are inherently ambiguous and context-dependent

  17. ↪ Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    as a staunch “they” proponent, I’d say it’s not a bad idea. I’d type ey/em/eir and pronounce [eɪ] [ɛm] [eə]. Possible use singular verb conjugation too for reduced ambiguity e.g. “ey wants to be referred to using “ey””

  18. ↪ Brian Suda: came home to a solicitation for apartment cleaning tapped to the front door window. Firstly, don’t use crap tape to secure your notice to the window. Now it needs a good cleaning after removing it! Secondly, good luck, but no thanks if this is how you leave your notes.pic.twitter.com/TpKezu6d2b

    Maybe the idea is “pay me to clean up the mess I made on your window”…

  19. ↪ Brian Suda: could argue that form input is what made the modern Web more than any other development. The first browsers had no forms (only global search). Thought of releasing a working app based on old code that works today, but without forms we lose so much functionality more than JS/CSS.

    I can think of ways of doing it, but they’re not pretty — e.g. onscreen keyboard made of <a> elements, each keypress is a full screen refresh which stores the new contents of the fake textbox server side (either cookies or URL param to identify session). Makes me wonder… did anyone do something like this at the time, before HTML forms were invented?

  20. It just took me about 30 mins to figure it out, so here’s how to install python plugins in KiCad 5.0 on a Mac.

    1. Make sure your build of KiCad has scripting enabled. It looks like fresh downloads have it by default, but it doesn’t hurt to check. Go KiCad → About KiCad → Show Version Info and make sure that all of the KICAD_SCRIPTING_ flags are set to ON.
    2. Find pcbnew’s plugin search path list. Open pcbnew, and open Tools → Scripting Console. Run import pcbnew; print pcbnew.PLUGIN_DIRECTORIES_SEARCH and you’ll see a list of folders which pcbnew will search for plugins
    3. Move your plugin files/folders to one of these locations
    4. In pcbnew, Tools → External Plugins… → Refresh Plugins. Your Tools → External Plugins menu should fill up with plugins.