1. Aitor García Rey: @BarnabyWalters Do they have rennet at Burið!?! I didn’t know! A few desserts for next @SumendiRest have become suddenly possible… thanks!

    @_aitor welcome back! Yep, I spent several hours today on a wild goose chase which led me to Burið and now have a small vat of Skyr curing. Looking forward to tasting the Sumendi desserts, and I actually have one I’d like you to sample: an evolution of your hot chocolate recipe with some Icelandic influences…

  2. Yesterday I dug out this rather odd track from January:

    It was recorded after a visit to Hayling Island, wherein we found an assortment of sea creatures, all of whom, according to tradition, were called Gordon. One was alive, and thus the tune was named.

  3. yiddishsong.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/di-gantse-velt-iz-hevl-havolim-performed-by-lillian-manuel has some interesting background about the song “Hevl iz Havolim”, and one of the comments has what appears to be a quite extensive translation, but of a different version — it doesn’t translate the two longer verses in the middle of the version the Klezmatics sing.

    That version is covered by this klesmer-musik.de/hevl_iz_havolim.htm German version, which seems to line up better with the sung lyrics, but Google-translated the middle verses are still rather vague. I suspect they’re using idioms and imagery which does not easily translate word-for-word.

  4. @kartik_prabhu amazing work overall! This is one of my favourite parts though — the fact that fragmention comments fall back gracefully if they’re not supported on either side, and yet all the data required to present them is preserved, so future updates can retro-actively put old marginalia in the right place!

    I wonder how tricky it would be to implement this on the comment publisher side too — detecting fragmention URLs and tailoring the reply context content…

  5. Aaron Parecki: @BarnabyWalters Also worst case you can just print it out again at the terminal.

    @aaronpk whaaaaa

    You realise that in my mind this attitude basically makes you some sort of fearless adventurer wizard hero, who, ARMED with his MAGIC LIGHTS, fears not the CHECK-IN DESK and FLYING METAL BOXES and requires no A4 SHIELD to ward off the spectres of GETTING LOST IN SOME OTHER COUNTRY

  6. Built a wheel speed measuring device 24hrs before leaving for festivals, and it turns out that without absolute positioning (which I certainly don’t have time to build) it’s actually not much use as it doesn’t tell you anything that an audio recording of the trompette does in far higher detail.

    The data could still be useful for controlling effects, but again, the audio level is a more accessible indicator of speed than actual measurement equipment.

    For teaching purposes, the thing which would actually be useful (as always) is not the measuring equipment, but a UI which shows you trompette traces from pro players alongside yours in real time and allows you to compare them. I’ll have a go at prototyping this if I get time tomorrow and bring it along to Chateau d’Ars if it’s successful.

  7. Aaron Parecki: @BarnabyWalters You still print your boarding pass on paper? ;-) I stick to magic lights all the way through.

    @aaronpk oh wow, I would be terrified that the magic lights would break or not work or run out of power or get lost or crash. I trust paper waaaay more than magic lights and can’t travel without my wad of A4 pieces of paper :)

  8. Genuine question to people who a lot: does the whole “pressing buttons and making lights change colour, then printing the results out onto A4 sheets of paper which magically enable you to travel to different countries” thing ever stop feeling profoundly weird?

  9. Getting the distinct feeling that traveling 35km in France is going to be more stressful than thousands of kilometres around the rest of Europe :/

  10. Trying to buy MP3s off Amazon and seeing unfriendly errors like “Important Message There was a problem with your address submission. Please fix all the areas below and try again.”?

    It’s probably because the Amazon MP3 service only works in the US, despite this information not being displayed anywhere or reported as an error. The billing information form even lets you choose countries which it knows will not work!

    This is an excellent example of terrible form design, and to communicate exactly why, I redesigned the form with some improvements:

    Important credit card number:

    Date it stops working:

    LEAVE THIS BOX UNCHECKED TO BUY MUSIC:

    Select a next step:

    (If anyone from Amazon is reading, feel free to use this design on amazon.com/gp/dmusic/verification/addCreditCardMP3 — it would be orders of magnitude more helpful than the current one)

    Source: chat with amazon support staff:

    Update: follow-up email clarified that Amazon music is actually available in the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Spain and Italy — so not just the US, but also no love yet for Iceland :( In their defence: Amazon’s support channels are excellent. Polite, helpful, quick chat and genuinely useful follow-up email.