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  2. Much as I miss building hurdy gurdies, using my current one for 1.5 years now is teaching me a huge amount about what to better next time. Dragging it around Europe in a rucksack was an excellent stress test, and the various repairs I’ve had to do (and continue to have to do) over the last few months highlights areas I need to put more thought into in the future.

    For example, the aluminium axle with setscrew arrangement is inadequate due to it coming loose over a period of 6 months, the trompette disengager I made was much too fragile, the strap knobs need to be glued into a solid, well-attached internal block making contact to two planes, ditto for the bridge-end string holders — having them pull up against binding (which the instrument would be better off without anyway) is inadequate. Additionally, an adjustable melody string bridge is a no-brainer, and building custom capos is almost certainly unnecessary and produces worse results than just using harp capos.

    Edit: having said all of that, it’s still a good-sounding, stable, very playable instrument.

  7. ↪ Aaron Parecki: Just launched a bunch of #p3k updates: * Webmention handler now accepts a "vouch" parameter. If you send one, it will attempt to verify the vouch and reject the mention if the vouch is not approved. For backwards compatibility right now, webmentions are still accepted without a vouch parameter. * Webmentions that are vouched will show the URL that vouched for them alongside the comment. * Inbound links from referers are tracked internally which I will eventually use when trying to find a vouch URL when I want to send one. * I am now indexing domains that I link to, which is used internally for webmention approval, but is also exposed at a URL structure like http://aaronparecki.com/links-to/tantek.com * Imported my entire food logs from August 2013, so my date permalinks since then now show everything I've eaten: http://aaronparecki.com/2014/01/01

    @aaronpk nicely done! Interesting UI choice to show the URL which vouched replies — presumably you’re also archiving the vouch pages? Also, are you planning on applying something like domain-based webmention approval also to silo replies? e.g. treating twitter.com/username as a “domain”

  10. ↪ Kyle Mahan: my dad always calls this “primacy and recency”, but apparently it’s Serial position effect

    @kyle_wm interesting, hadn’t heard of Serial Position Effect! And I like your dad’s terms. But what I was getting at (and inevitably didn’t communicate well) was not exactly that the items at the ends of a series are given greater mental weight, but that the relative orders of items at the ends is more emphasised than relative weights in the middle.

    E.G. in the example on that wikipedia page, of “smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous”, I suspect that the differences rank differences of (smart and diligent), and (implusive and jealous) are seen as more significant than of (diligent, critical) or (critical, implusive). Not sure if science backs this up (how would that even be measured?), but it’s something I’ve noticed.

  11. ↪ Feminist Frequency: I won't be speaking at any Utah institution again until such time as firearms are prohibited at schools. I encourage others to follow suit.

    @femfreq as a Brit it astonishes me that anyone wouldn’t ban guns in schools (or indeed in any other public place). Keep up the good work :)

  12. ↪ Kyle Mahan: Did you start with pineapple juice instead of water? IIRC, that’s what the Bread Baker’s Apprentice recommended and no matter how many times I diluted it, it stayed really fruity. Never could get it very sour though, I blame San Diego for not having interesting enough bacteria.

    @kyle_wm hmmm interesting, I’ve never heard that before! I just used tap water, maybe the idea with fruit juice is that it includes sugar which would feed the yeasts?

    Did you try using rye flour? AFAIK it has more variety of natural yeasts in than other flours, so you might have a better chance with that.

  13. Took a friend’s advice and abandoned my sadly gone-off sourdough culture. The new one has started very different in character to any of my previous cultures — not very bitter, quite fruity, and lots of bubbles. It might be due to this one being a lot wetter in consistency, whereas previous cultures were very thick.

  19. IE doesn’t upload csv files with text/* media type. Content-type cannot be trusted, the only way of telling if data is of a particular type is to see if it parses successfully.

  20. I started the hundredpushups.com challenge last week. Unexpectedly, I found myself in the hardest of the three categories, but sailed through the week 1 without much of a problem. Just finished the first day of week 2 and OUCH this is getting more difficult now.