Gross. You probably weren’t getting updates on RSS feeds. I figured out the full story, but my guess is that I didn’t update WordPress when there was a security update out there.
I feel dirty. When I saw all of the spamvertising hidden in my footer I felt like I helped make the world slightly worse. Sorry, folks.
del.icio.us was awesome. It was my first introduction to truly social software. It was my first introduction to tags and folksonomy vs. taxonomy – which blew my tiny mind.
And it was useful. Immediately, quickly, crazy useful. You could find the stuff you had seen! You didn’t have to be on the computer you had originally seen things on! You could bubble up lists of things you were interested in! I was struck with love.
Then Yahoo bought it and did the thing that Yahoo does to promising and interesting websites. It starves and kills them. So delicious is now getting bought by AVOS.
I’ve moved on and Trunkly looks like the best replacement so far. It is free, they will import all of your delicious bookmarks, scrape your twitter and facebook feeds, and one of the first things they built was a way to get your stuff back out of the site. I always like to have an exit strategy. I suggest trunkly as a delicious migration. The developers are really responsive and they have the freedom right now to do new and surprising improvements.
Not a small benefit: It is EARLY and short names on trunkly are available. So I was able to get http://trunk.ly/mk
The trunkly submit bookmark form is a bit crap though. I fixed it. See:
Turns into:
You need the Firefox browser and the excellent Greasemonkey addon. Got those installed?
Great – now click here to install Autosuggest Tagging for Trunkly.
. You can always see the source or file bugs on it at the UserScripts.org page.
Today is my birthday, and I’ve been overwhelmed with happy birthday wishes. I’m very fortunate and grateful.
I’d like to give you a gift back.
Here is a poem about the importance of filling out forms.
Please enjoy “We Know” in a browser like Chrome or Firefox.
Tonight we will be having dinner at Superfine in DUMBO and then off to see “Black Watch” at the St Ann’s theater. Perhaps we will see you Saturday at Cinco de Matto?
I found myself wandering about detached from my head, fully committed. You don’t want to commit when detached from head, but I had.
I didn’t know how it happened, but there I was, headless. What a silly, silly git.
I reached out to a friendly spider and the answer was there in the web.
Before you wander back to your head, it is important to mount yourself to a branch, then you can use that branch to reattach your head quite easily.
Here is how the magic incantations go:
git checkout -b the_wanderer
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge the_wanderer
git commit
I’ve tied the branch to where I am, then grabbed where I was and attached that, then bound everything back together.
Clear as mud? Already done git checkout master? Check the spellbook that inspired me.
Regine has a lovely interview with Thomas Thwaites 1 about a future where the police hunt growers of hallucinogenic plants via special bees.
How did the pollen forensics researchers react to your project?
In general the reaction was that it was almost believable… which is the reaction you want for a futures project I think. A plant geneticist, (who’s ‘Crash Course in Synthetic Biology’ I later crashed) saw the project and said he’d thought about taking genes from the Marijuana plant and putting them into a tomato plant (being a respected scientist I’m sure he wasn’t saying he’d thought about ‘doing it’, just ‘about it’).
And this gem of what’s actually happening now to translate pollen to crime:
Are the police in the UK already using pollen forensics?
Yes, and its been pretty instrumental in several very high profile cases. There’s this lady called Pat Wiltshire who is the police’s go-to person for pollen forensics. She can look at a sample of pollen from clothes or whatever, and visualise the landscape it’s from – a filed of maze, with a river next to it, and an oak tree in the middle – or something like that. The impression I got about police work when I was interviewing James, and a detective, was that it’s really arduous. Pollen forensics would be one detail in many that would lead to cracking a case, and as importantly, proving it in court.
This high weirdness is definitely part of the adjacent possible, one of those strange futures that hasn’t happened, but should.
This is just a sketch of an idea. Help me fill it out.
What if you could have an angel on your shoulder that helped you make purchases that reflected your values? We’d all like to vote with our dollars, but complicated corporate structures and global supply chains have made it difficult to keep track of who is doing what.
Continue reading Project Idea: Conscience
In June I wrote up how I’ve been using Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues to nudge me towards being the person I want to be. Just seeing a daily reminder to practice industry or humility has been a great boon to my practice of life.
The ever-perceptive Sam pointed out that I should just share my calendar with you in case you don’t want to set up your own.
Click the Google link on that widget to add it to your google calendar – or if you are using iCal or some other calendar, you can also try this ICAL link or subscribe to the Atom feed. Hope you get as much out of it as I have.
Sometimes all you need is a nudge. Continue reading Automated Virtue
This great video by Fujiya & Miyagi inspired me:
Why not write a Processing sketch that will take an image and render it in dice? It might be fairly easy:
Divide the image into square sections.
Calculate the average brightness of that square – like I did in my engraving sketch. 1
That average brightness should fall in one of six or 12 levels of brightness.
Choose a die face that matches that brightness level.
Paste that image into the image.
Done!
What could you do with that? You could produce a print. You could use it as a guide for actually laying out the dice and putting them in a frame – or using them to print letterpress style.
When you get into the physical dice, laying them out gets tedious. The next big step would be to have an arduino system 2 that picks up dice and places them for you.
You could offer physical pieces for sale.
I looked through the code for the awesome Rasterbator, and I think it could be pretty easily converted to Java/Processing. Continue reading Project Idea: Rasterbator in Processing or Java