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  2. Went whale watching, saw several dolphins, two minke whales, a load of puffins and several thousand unexpected jellyfish.

    Comic highlight when the announcer tried to give us a sense of just how big blue whales can be…

    “Imagine a basketball court, with a blue whale in. That basketball game… would be over”

  3. I just sent a support email to @github making the following request for better 404 pages:

    Your 404 pages are pretty but useless for actually trying to find stuff which is misspelt, moved or gone. Could you consider implementing some of these improvements?

    • Show the github header on the 404 page for consistency
    • If the path is /real-username/missing-project, show the user’s profile and a list of their repos
    • If the path is /missing-username/*, show a search for “missing-username” or at the very least prefill the search box with that text
    • Keep track of projects which have moved and do HTTP redirects to their new locations

    Thanks for all the great work you’ve done and made possible,
    Barnaby

    Archived here for posterity and public commentary.

  5. “So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.”

    — Walden, Henry David Thoreau

  6. What happened when I started a feminist society at school is a wonderfully written article documenting the troubles encountered by some humans trying to promote their equality with other humans

    One of the worst parts of this is the school blatantly victim-blaming:

    As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.

    Seeing as the activism was happening on the web, I read this as “give up, don’t offend the misogynists, they might hurt you”, which could hardly be called “support”. The pseudo-politicalese “take steps to recommend” is vague and and improvable.

    Clearly such institutions cannot be trusted to support the fight for equality.

  9. Human Theremin using conductive ink

    Using hand built circuitry I was able to turn my sister into a fully functioning theremin, the idea being that eventually the equipment could be used by dancers to create music that relies entirely on choreography and body movement to generate sound as they dance. In this way the visual performance and the audio become intrinsically linked and thus the viewer is able to ‘see’ the sound as it is created.

  10. After RSVPing the local meetup tonight, I get an email with shared signup details for wp10.wordpress.net so I can post my photos from the party to their site.

    This is another, rather bizarre example of WordPress promoting monoculture. Even funnier is this misguided quote from the email:

    If you don't already have the WordPress mobile app for your smartphone, you'll want to download it so that you can upload pictures and post to the site right from the party. It would be a good idea to add the site to your mobile app before your party so you don't have to worry about it later.

    Paraphrased: “So that you can participate TO THE MAX, post to our hosted silo and download yet another app that you’ll delete straight away”.

    Nevertheless, I plan to download the app and try it out as I’ve never used it before and WordPress UX tends to be pretty good. Perhaps then discuss the whole thing in on freenode to brainstorm a better way of doing this topic-based aggregation.

  14. The spam on the wiki just gets weirder and weirder. This one is masterfully surreal in all its mundane glory:

    “How about a garage door you can see through? Well almost”
    “The neat thing is that these are overhead sectional garage doors just like any other.”
    “Can you acquire a bucket of paint?”
    “you'll amaze yourself”
    “Now that you understand how financially important your garage door really is to you, it is time to get to work.”

  15. 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.

  18. Small rooms or dwellings help the mind to concentrate itself; large rooms are a source of distraction.

    Thoughts on Art and Life

    Note that I skipped a whole tonne of Da Vinci’s longer notes, which can be summarised as: “painting is great, poetry is rubbish, music and sculpture are somewhere in between”.