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  1. ↪ Aaron Parecki: Zippers are kind of magic. When you have to fix one, it turns out you gain an appreciation for them not otherwise had by merely using them.

    @aaronpk true! I’ve noticed this also with other things, especially food. My (totally failed) attempts to make Skyr have made me appreciate eating it much more.

  2. ↪ LouLouK: By which I mean to say, how entrenched is thinking. Can you change that using training? Is that's what's actually needed?

    @loulouk in my experience, yes it’s possible (although I don’t know what your context is), and that regular training i.e. some feedback loop is vital. We choose the lens through which we see the world, but need to re-choose it every day if it’s not already entrenched.

  5. How to make kiwi cake:

    1. Find other fruit cake recipes
    2. Replace other fruit with kiwis
    3. PROFIT

    But in all seriousness, I just made one (based off this recipe, using three kiwis) and it was acceptable. Quite structurally insound, and not nearly as green as I had hoped, but tastes adequately like kiwis and very moist.

  11. 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.

  16. ↪ 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”

  19. ↪ 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.

  20. ↪ 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 :)