1. Ben Werdmuller: I built my first website in 1995; started distributing my hypertext magazine in 1994; got on the internet the same year. Distributed my first shareware game via BBS in 1993. 2017 was the first year I didn’t put something new I’d made online in 24 years. Will fix this in 2018.

    @benwerd 2017 was pretty rough though tbh

  2. Tom Morris  🏳️‍🌈: Duolingo is amazing. Learning how to deny being a horse ("yo no soy un caballo") before learning boring stuff like checking into hotels or getting a taxi at the airport is precisely the sort of surrealist approach to language education I appreciate.

    @tommorris after starting learning German just with Duolingo, my approach with new languages (currently French) is to do the Duo and Memrise courses in parallel. I like the approach. Duo has more complex sentences and better grammar help even if the vocab is a bit random, whereas Memrise has better audio (on the official courses at least) and the vocab is much more goal-oriented.

  3. Aaron Parecki: ugh that's the worst. That happened to me with that smart thermos thing. They're sold at the apple store now to rub it in.

    Yeah, it’s bad enough when campaigns fail completely, but taking pre-orders, successfully developing and selling the product, but not shipping to backers, or otherwise acknowledging them at all? Very dishonest behaviour.

  4. Eleanor Saitta: This is a really useful tool if you're trying to understand a place: http://budgetweb.com/travel-time-circle/

    @dymaxion cool! Also a great way to see taxicab geometry in action (e.g. walking for 30 minutes in Salt Lake City). I tried making a similar project a few years ago to visualise how cities distort space-time, not as polished or useful as this one but showed individual tracks which is nice.

  5. Zoé Samudzi: Honestly, though! What are Anglo/Protestant Euro dances that are practiced in casual/familial/celebratory non-ceremonial settings?https://twitter.com/mice_nerd/status/879063837315485696

    @ztsamudzi although honestly I have no idea in what sort of religious context this dance culture fitted into, I will have to read up on that and try to learn more.

  6. Zoé Samudzi: Honestly, though! What are Anglo/Protestant Euro dances that are practiced in casual/familial/celebratory non-ceremonial settings?https://twitter.com/mice_nerd/status/879063837315485696

    @ztsamudzi there are various pan-european dances found all over the continent, e.g. polka, schottish, waltz, mazur/mazurek/mazurka, polska, slängpolska/polonaise/ländler/steyrer/wickler (modern term), minuet, quadrille, etc. Each dance form typically retains the same basic step everywhere but has regional variants, or is related to dances from different areas, as the dances and music travelled along trade routes. Many fascinating examples exist of tunes or dances which are found in parallel sources in many different areas, which is a nice way of getting rid of nationalists who try to appropriate this stuff for nationalism. A lot of these dances made their way over to America too, and in a lot of cases (IIRC) mixed with black dance+music culture and became the basis for a lot of n. american traditional dances.

    Most of these were danced a lot in Europe over the past 300 years but then more or less died out in the 19th century (as the style of music changed and Europe started to import and appropriate e.g. latin dances), before being rediscovered as part of the various folk revivals in the 70s. Now they’re danced casually as “balfolk” or “eurodance”. Not widespread in the mainstream, but not totally obscure either (e.g. google “balfolk”) with widespread events and a more and more progressive pedagogy.

  7. rknDE: Hey @BarnabyWalters do you know where @free_bear_rides can find a hurdy gurdy impulse response sample?

    @rknLA @free_bear_rides impuse response sample as in for conv. reverb? Not sure what you mean, the hurdy gurdy isn’t a space you can sample (…is it?) Such a recording almost certainly doesn’t exist already, but I might be able to make you one if I know exactly what it is you need…

  8. Aaron Parecki: What!! This is amazing! Do the keys send midi messages? What else is acting as midi input?

    @aaronpk thanks! Drone and trompette (buzzing) sound are acoustic, the melody is just the synth. Magnets in the keys + hall effect sensors on a board underneath, a magnetic rotary encoder on the shaft controlling noteon/off and expression, and an arduino inside the keybox putting it all together and sending MIDI signal out. The whole thing is built into the instrument, which also works great acoustic or amplified. There are a lot of improvements to make, but I think this is a good start!

  9. Quinn's internet  👻: will think on this, thankshttps://twitter.com/teirdes/status/834892646430687232

    @quinnnorton I have observed this too on varying scales, call it the “pendulum effect”. Pushing a society/group/individual really quickly to one extreme of an axis seems to result in it “swinging” to the other extreme, and (in theory?) back and forth. GDR and aftermath is one good example of this. Usual disclaimer: not an expert/historian, someone else probably figured this out in much more detail than me already.

  10. Deb Chachra: Every time I re-read Terry Pratchett, I find new ways that he articulated or shaped my worldview. https://instagram.com/p/BNXJvcGB9tv/

    @debcha yes yes yes! books which keep on giving; with every re-read, they reflect or highlight something new depending on what’s happening in my life/what I’ve learned since reading them the last time. Rare works which are not only great in themselves, or a great mirror of the reader, but both simultaneously

  11. Barnaby Walters: typical Barnaby 01:00 insanity: implementing a patch browser and window manager in #puredata with weeeird semi-documented metaprogramming

    For those unfamiliar with , the equivalent in python would be creating a script which, in order to get user input, writes another python script containing a reference to the first, which, when run by the user, sends its output back to the first script. Which then launches another python process (based on the results of the first sub-script), and manages it’s status.

    It’s a programming paradigm which makes absolutely no sense in any other environment, but in puredata is surprisingly elegant — a pleasant side-effect of the programming environment and end-user environment being effectively the same.

    Btw, this is the first experimental step towards the most exciting project idea I’ve had in quite some time… watch this space!

  12. Aaron Parecki: What happened to the old one?

    @aaronpk classic case of uneducated, path-of-least-resistance response to time-pressurised tech problem :/ saw key was expired, wanted to fix it, didn’t know only public keys expire not private ones, no obvious public key renewal UI flow in GPGTools UI, so made a new keypair. I suppose I’m stuck with the new one now as I revoked the old one. It’s a pity, as I actually got a few people to sign my old key, not that that seems to have a practical use case…?

  13. Joschi Kuphal 吉: Wrapping up a very productive @indiewebcamp Berlin 2016 w/ a lovely bunch of people pic.twitter.com/sFfL45VN0n

    @jkphl sounds like you had a great time! Sad I couldn’t make it this time, other projects got in the way. Definitely want to attend/help organise IWC stuff in Germany in the future!