09 Aug 2018
It’s a little embarassing… but I’ve been on twitter dot com for over 11 years now.
I saw and retweeted this the other day and you know what? Maybe those onions are right. It’s high time for a break. I’ve taken breaks before. Once for close to a whole month. I’m not sure how long this one will go for.
I wonder how many books I’ll read.
I’m not sure how it came to be this way. Another embarrassment that I have to admit is I used to be one of those people who thought banning people from a platform was in some way restricting free speech.
I see now that this is not the case. For free speech to be preserved a platform must enforce a policy against hatred.
Twitter has increasingly shown that it is unwilling to do this.
I guess there’s some catching up to do. For now Twitter is protecting hatred and abuse and is working actively against its own ordinary users.
Goodbye, for now little bluebird.
Update (18-Aug-2018): Twitter has suspended Alex Jones for 7 days. Let’s see where this goes.
29 Jul 2018
Time for a change.
A while ago Jekyll released “Gem-based themes”.
Gem-based themes make it easy for theme developers to make updates available to anyone who has the theme gem. When there’s an update, theme developers push the update to RubyGems.
The goal of gem-based themes is to allow you to get all the benefits of a robust, continually updated theme without having all the theme’s files getting in your way and over-complicating what might be your primary focus: creating content.
Sounds nice in theory. But the change hasn’t caught on completely. Many themes still remain in the old format like this Texlog one that caught my eye.
Textlog is a minimalist, lefty-style Jekyll theme designed for documentation based blog.
So instead of just installing a Ruby gem and changing a setting in _config.yml we have to try doing things the old fashioned way.
In the end I just cloned the Texlog repo and then copied over all my _posts and about page and then made some changes to the config and template files etc.
I ran bundle install then bundle exec jekyll serve…
Lo and behold. It worked!
15 Jul 2018
I was wowed by this tool called Sonic Pi a little while ago. It’s open source. It lets you write music in what looks like Ruby code. But I haven’t had a chance to properly play around with it or learn how to actually make any proper music with it… until now!
I just went through a few of the tutorials and everything seems to make sense.
Anyway it’s pretty easy to get started: just download the app and run it. Then paste the following code into the editor and hit Run.
# Ambient Experiment
# Coded by Darin Wilson
#
# The piece consists of three long loops, each of which
# plays one of two randomly selected pitches. Each note
# has different attack, release and sleep values, so that
# they move in and out of phase with each other. This can
# play for quite awhile without repeating itself :)
use_synth :hollow
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.7 do
live_loop :note1 do
play choose([:D4,:E4]), attack: 6, release: 6
sleep 8
end
live_loop :note2 do
play choose([:Fs4,:G4]), attack: 4, release: 5
sleep 10
end
live_loop :note3 do
play choose([:A4, :Cs5]), attack: 5, release: 5
sleep 11
end
end
This is just one of the standard examples. It’s the one that struck me instantly. Imagine the possibilities!
The synths play through different notes that loop at different intervals so they create a kind of non-repeating soundscape.
Someone has also coded the Super Mario Bros. theme in it.
Pretty fun times ahead!
07 Jul 2018
Almost a year ago I registered a domain name, mostly because it was on special for $3.29. I’ve been wanting to build another quotes website for a long time now ever since my old website got domain-jacked and I decided to just let it stagnate.
I’ve been dragging my feet on the project somewhat. Things have been pretty busy over the past year, but mainly it’s been because I couldn’t get a vision clear in my mind of what I wanted this site to be. Would it be a showcase? Would it be just a repository? It kept changing from one thing to another, like some kind of chameleon shape-shifter.
Anyway it’s about time I shipped something else. Introducing Quoke, a collaborative (hopefully) curated collection of famous quotations showcasing different design styles in html and css (and maybe a bit of JavaScript).
It will be updated whenever I get the chance. I’ll add new quotes and designs. I’ll also be calling on submissions from friends.
So if you have a quotation in mind simply design it up as a standalone .html. file and make a pull request to the GitHub repository with it in the _quotations directory.
Your HTML should look a bit like this:
---
layout: quote
title: Every book is a quotation
date: 2018-05-19
text: Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
size: short
tags: featured
---
<style>
div.every-book-is-a-quotation {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 22px;
background-color: aquamarine;
color: crimson;
padding: 5em 15px 5.2em;
text-align: center;
}
div.every-book-is-a-quotation div.inner-text {
max-width: 960px;
margin: auto;
}
@media (min-width: 992px) {
div.every-book-is-a-quotation {
font-size: 48px;
}
}
</style>
<div class="every-book-is-a-quotation">
<div class="inner-text">
"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man
is a quotation from all his ancestors."
<small>—Ralph Waldo Emerson</small>
</div>
</div>
It’s hosted directly on GitHub (just like this blog) using Jekyll. So if you want to help out with content or even with developing the site into something special, please just shout out.
I’m looking forward to seeing the designs people come up with!
06 Jul 2018
A few weeks ago at work we started doing a thing called Chart of the Day where we make a chart and publish it each day. It has been challenging but fun and a chance to learn more about data-journalism.
I wanted to share some of my attempts anyway:
- 45 million Aussie bees buzz off to new Canadian home
- Winter is here but are things heating up in Australian bedrooms?
- Bitcoin is down 50 per cent, and that’s not nearly the worst of it
- Are you eating more veggies than a 3-year-old? Probably not
Well there you go. Hope you enjoyed.
If you have any ideas and data sources for charts please let me know!
