Convert an SVG to a PNG easily:
convert -resize <x>x<y> input.svg output.png
Gnome Keyring doesn't support Ed25519 SSH keys
Filters can be used through an annotation or they can be declared directly in the application config section for Jinja2.
Cowboys and Insects has a bright, colourful post-war American style that reminds me of Geoff Darrow and David Aja.
The story features an alternative history where giant mutated insects fuel the post-war American economy and provide a metaphor for Jim Crow discrimination.
As ever violence underpins the American dream and the central character has too choose whether they will conform to expectations and enjoy the benefits of majority rule.
It's quite a dark story but lighter than the source material it's riffing off.
itsdangerous a Zelda joke and a signing library
European Christians got tired of waiting [for the Resurrection]; lacking "the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity", they rebelled and decided to build their paradise on earth, using their own powers. This was how the modern age was born, through a gnostic "immanentization of the Christian eschaton" - that is, the pursuit of the millennium in the political here and now.
If we believe in reason and debate then why do so few of us change our opinions and modify our beliefs over time?
Thin Places
A person account of OCD combined with a historical look at the disorder throws up all kinds of interesting little facts.
Diagnosis of OCD rose when pharmaceutical treatment became available.
My village has hit around the fifty people mark and now has people playing drums, children running round and romance. I was watching a couple flirting and admiring the motion-capture when they lay down on the ground and started some grunt-heavy, fully-clothed dry humping.
In some ways it was an admirable way to demonstrate a different attitude to romance and sex in a very different society. Still given that someone had to put some serious work into making this happen it did feel a little bit weird to be voyeuristically watching caveman copulate badly in a game.
Marian Churchland has done a beautiful fantasy whimsy cover for issue 12. It's full of detail and nuance, I'd love to see it as a poster.
JSON.stringify can be used to pretty print JSON.
Arguments are the JSON object, a replacer function that can be used to override the string translation and a number of spaces that are used to indent the keys.
hash -r to rehash an executable that previously was not found and does now exist on your path
On skill-based matchmaking in Destiny:
People tells us that they just want to be able to make the choice. and we understand that. Sometimes you just want to kick back and have fun. But what does that mean?
Maybe ... that means 'I want to win a majority of my games'. But that's tough because you're playing against other human players. If you win ratio is 65, 70 percent ... then someone else out there is on a 30 percent win ratio. And we don't want that, because they're just going to stop playing. How do we balance that?"
Lars Bakken, Edge 297
The Redline Showdown is a bit more to my tastes, essentially putting the pedal to the metal on a V8 and ideally attempting to simply drift off the acceleration rather than actively brake and accelerate.
Requestify, a straight-forward HTTP client library
Forms of software architecture :
- set standards and ensure others follow them
- provide a guide and ensure people are accountable for outcomes
I've started to play some of the Blueprints created by other players. So far they are not amazingly compelling as things like Skill targets feel like the best the other player has been able to achieve with no way to make incremental improvements towards the goal.
Forza Horizon 3 uses an interesting mechanism of recruiting Drivatar's to a line up that grants you bonuses on races depending on the lifetime success of the players in your roster.
You get told how many festivals you are appearing in and how many times you've been hired and fired.
If they lead to an increase in congestion then automated vehicles effectively create an intractable problem for themselves rather than solving current transport problems.
"When Boone was asked if he had got lost in that forest, he said: I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days."
Letter from Kentucky, J. D. Daniels, Paris Review 203
From the FAQ: How to render a HTML node conditionally
Convert a tuple to a named tuple with the star modifier
my_named_tuple = MyNamedTuple(*a_tuple)
From Stack Overflow
I'm not sure if I prefer The Crew's radar pings to find car parts and wrecks to Horizon's search radius and visual search.
Lara is so sympathetically depicted in the script and feels quite real in the way that she is rendered that when she is brutally killed I actually feel shocked in a way I haven't by videogame violence in some time.
Issue #295 has an interesting interview with Patrice Désilets. The Leap of Faith move from Assassin's Creed was a design solution to the problem of it being boring to descend a tower you've just spent time climbing.
He also talks a little bit about the pressure of being a successful game designer moving to another studio and being expected to produce inspired mechanics on demand.
He also points out that a conventional game designer needs to be able to sell their ideas to programmers if they actually want to be able to see them produced.
He also invented Prince of Persia's rewind mechanic which if that is the original source of the idea is quite interesting.
On the esteem of literary critics:
the applause of people whose esteem is often not worth the winning
Robert Service
Alan Moore's new anthology title is quite intriguing with the Moore and O'Neill team rendering strange little shorts in a shabby cinema.
Kieron Gillen is doing a take on Pokemon in the style of 2000AD called Modded.
There is a version of the giant monster fight story with a bit more emphasis on the human element of the story called The Vast.
The two stories that aren't really working for me are Code Pru about a paramedic who discovers that New York city is full of horror film characters. Neither the source material or the metaphor really works for me.
A more perfect Union is an alternative history version of the US Civil War which seems immediately troubling as it has the great Confederate leaders in charge of the war effort against a mysterious alien enemy (at least its not zombies I suppose).
The worst enemy is the camera, which illustrates the subtle brilliance of the Arkham games. Since animation moves have times you have to anticipate things like blocks and frequently in a small arena you are simply blind to both incoming attackers and where you need to move the joystick to continue a chain attack.
You never think about this in the Arkham series and you can see in comparison all the polish that Mad Max lacks.
CSS Transitions with Jad Joubran
Some of the ways of getting fast animations are a bit disappointing. Using pixel sizes to avoid having the browser having to calculate dimensions makes sense but is throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well.
Visual effects need to be handled off to the compositor which means using transform.
Doing 3D transformations for 2D animation has been deprecated as a practice for mobile due to the poorer GPU supported.
The left-bar styling is the same as the background colour for unpublished thoughts, making it a little hard to see that the blockquote has applied correctly.
The colour should probably be inverted in an unpublished post.
Jaguar XK, black with red rims
Chrome developer tools now supports Ctrl-Shift-P to open a command palette.
vim-plug commands:
:PluginInstall install configured plugins
:PluginUpdate install/update configured plugins
set -e in a script will cause the script to fail if any command in it fails.
Very useful for CI wrappers.
The difference between LARP and interactive theatre is essentially the treatment of the audience. Theatre privileges named fixed characters and the audience is mostly nameless and collective.
In LARP all characters are notionally of equal relevance and importance.
I definitely like the way the hot-reloader works with Markdown. Looks very convenient for working on documentation heavy sites.
The native packager SBT plugin can be configured to run with certain Java Opts via the plugin configuration or an ini file that can be packaged with the deployable.
Victimhood ... is the greatest killer of solidarity with others that could possibly be invented.
Kanan Makiya
vh units can be used as input to font-size
The Internet of Things your mother never told you is not just a post-modern piece of wordplay crammed with as much textspeek and neologisms as the text can manage and interspersed with epistlery asides.
It is also a timely reminder that no matter how strange and alien modern youth or popular culture seem the underlying concerns of humanity rarely change.
Streams by this user that have been favorited by others.
Quotes
During the Halloween weekend I noticed that Harley Quinn costumes were popular, as might be expected, but that there seemed to be pairs of girls who dressed as Quinn and Jared Leto Joker.
I do find it surprising that Ello is taking off but Diaspora, which is much more community-friendly, failed to find traction.
Unlimited streams? Works for me! Unbundle the streams!
Wow. Awesome news about Nathan Kontny becoming CEO of Highrise. I use and love both Draft and Highrise.
I thought I was doing a safe upgrade of Linux on its own small partition, forgot that Grub actually manages the boot record. Result? Boot failure without a backup of the Windows content.
Fortunately a quick BIOS swap of which disk has the boot record fixed everything.
Social networks are fulfilling the postmodern promise of witnessing idiots amusing themselves to death.
So it turns out that most boutique and ethical clothes makers in the UK don't cater to people who are overweight or short. If I had the right kind of initiative then I would be seizing the business opportunity here.
I like the appeal of receiving finished books as part of a crowdfunding campaign but the problems of international shipping suggests that using POD services is more practical.
I'm giving SpiderOak's cloud file storage a go on the recommendation of Edward Snowdon and the syncing operations seem very slow. I'm not sure if that's because they are secure and distributed or because its inefficient.
Is Dropbox plus object encryption a better alternative or is the issue that Dropbox is just an evil company?
As a heavy tab abuser it has been fascinating looking at which websites use a lot of memory and which are burning up my battery life.
Deezer is pretty heavy, any kind of page with embedded video but after that surprisingly Twitter is using all kinds of resources just to show an individual profile page.
Bandcamp is surprisingly good despite also having a player, presumably they just wait for the user to initiate actions with the page.
Been having a low bandwidth holiday experience and it is interesting how many sites are literally blank for the majority of their early load.
Economist editorial on the out of control UK housing market suggests that there is insufficient land being offered to developers.
I was taken by the LRB argument that in fact land with planning permission is not the issue but the fact that private land developers have no interest in completely satisfying demand for housing since it reduces their margin.
In fact building any housing is much more risky than speculating on the value of the planning permission on the land they already hold.
Allowing municipal bodies to participate in housing construction and provision seems essential to provide a spur to the private sector to actually develop rather than speculate.
If customers are showing responses to temporary price reductions like discounts I think the logical thing to do is try and reduce the regular price and rely on the greater volume.
It's not clear to me that people who run online businesses think they are in retail or not. The comparison to luxury goods is only valid if your customers are genuinely showing signs of price inflexibility.
ThoughtStreams pricing; I like the idea of a Pinboard model. A one-off fee that rises as the popularity of the platform rises (and therefore the utility).
The key purchase point for me is buying unlimited streams. Right now I'd like to create more streams given that large streams rapidly get unwieldy in the current UI. However if I upgrade and then downgrade, what happens to the existing streams? It's not clear.
I'd like to know that once I've purchased something it can persist indefinitely.
I am indifferent about posting media since that currently isn't my use case. I would be more likely to link out.
I would like more analytics information and more collaboration/commenting features. But as a microblogging platform I think the market price is $5 a month.
Really interesting slide illustrating what genuine iterative product development looks like.
I have struggled with this at both small and large companies. You need to be trying to answer a genuine user need at all stages of your product lifecycle.
$5 doesn't seem to be much for the Ghost blogging platform but I kind of feel that Posthaven has the better proposition.
Convert an SVG to a PNG easily:
convert -resize <x>x<y> input.svg output.png
Gnome Keyring doesn't support Ed25519 SSH keys
Filters can be used through an annotation or they can be declared directly in the application config section for Jinja2.
Cowboys and Insects has a bright, colourful post-war American style that reminds me of Geoff Darrow and David Aja.
The story features an alternative history where giant mutated insects fuel the post-war American economy and provide a metaphor for Jim Crow discrimination.
As ever violence underpins the American dream and the central character has too choose whether they will conform to expectations and enjoy the benefits of majority rule.
It's quite a dark story but lighter than the source material it's riffing off.
European Christians got tired of waiting [for the Resurrection]; lacking "the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity", they rebelled and decided to build their paradise on earth, using their own powers. This was how the modern age was born, through a gnostic "immanentization of the Christian eschaton" - that is, the pursuit of the millennium in the political here and now.
When God has invisible behind the world, the things of the world become new gods.
Eric Voegelin
Paraphrased as: "When you abandon the Lord, it is only a matter of time before you start worshiping a Fuhrer."
California has a grizzly bear on it's state flag but the species is extinct in the state.
Mexican Coke refers to Coke that is made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup.
Online and offline come from nautical terms.
Moon Knight #10 (2016 series) has a neat trick at the end of the issue where the panel series rotates with the comic ultimately being turned upside down.
I don't think I have seen that before and it is a trick that intimately links to the physicality of the book.
The story is so-so, with the visual imagery of New York drowning under a sea of sand being the biggest idea.
The moon has a magnetic field but no poles, the majority of the field is generated by impact craters on the crust.
London Fashion Week uses a fleet of Jaguar XF cars
Milo Yiannopoulos is British and originally lived in Kent.
If we believe in reason and debate then why do so few of us change our opinions and modify our beliefs over time?
Thin Places
A person account of OCD combined with a historical look at the disorder throws up all kinds of interesting little facts.
Diagnosis of OCD rose when pharmaceutical treatment became available.
Every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody's nostalgia.
To live a modern life anywhere in the world today, subject to perpetual social and technological change, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution.
The militancy of his nostalgia is what makes the reactionary a distinctly modern figure, not a traditional one.
... the reactionary sees the debris of Paradise drifting past his eyes.
The reactionary mind is a shipwrecked mind.
Reactionaries are not conservatives.
My village has hit around the fifty people mark and now has people playing drums, children running round and romance. I was watching a couple flirting and admiring the motion-capture when they lay down on the ground and started some grunt-heavy, fully-clothed dry humping.
In some ways it was an admirable way to demonstrate a different attitude to romance and sex in a very different society. Still given that someone had to put some serious work into making this happen it did feel a little bit weird to be voyeuristically watching caveman copulate badly in a game.
The Pyre
An account of a woman's return to India to light her mother's funeral pyre.
Obsession and Possession originated as terms to describe phases in siege warfare.
Celery is an allergen
Marian Churchland has done a beautiful fantasy whimsy cover for issue 12. It's full of detail and nuance, I'd love to see it as a poster.
You can use the path type in a route annotation to access a segment of the path in the URL that includes forward slashes.
This can then be split and turned into a map to access variable path keys.
JSON.stringify can be used to pretty print JSON.
Arguments are the JSON object, a replacer function that can be used to override the string translation and a number of spaces that are used to indent the keys.
Finally starting to finish Mome #10. Loved the complicated sci-fi Benjamin Button story by Dash Shaw and the serials by Kurt Wolfgang and Paul Hornschemeier.
Angela Merkel speaks fluent Russian and Vladamir Putin speaks fluent German.
Wild ginseng is an endangered species due to poaching and intensive foraging with quality wild ginseng reaching prices of $850 a dry pound (U.S. presumably)
Girrion channels Nausicca, the Prince of Katamari Damarcy and a little bit of Jim Henderson to create a science-fantasy tale that moves quite slowly and fails to really work in an episodic form but which might work better in a collected form.
It does have a great central idea in this issue of a tribe of scavengers living inside a damaged spaceship parked in the atmosphere of a planet, the result of a conflict they current inhabitants poorly understand. That had echoes of The Force Awakens for me.
During the Halloween weekend I noticed that Harley Quinn costumes were popular, as might be expected, but that there seemed to be pairs of girls who dressed as Quinn and Jared Leto Joker.
Brazil has thirteen operational political parties (and more in absolute terms) and they are mostly aligned to patronage and regional organisations.
Transport planners think about crush loading. Also, experienced crush load due to poor planning of my cross-London journeys.
hash -r to rehash an executable that previously was not found and does now exist on your path
hash -r to rehash an executable that previously was not found and does now exist on your path
Moonshine has beautiful art with a pencil line that is reminiscent of early Frank Miller and a nice palette of colours.
However the story of hill billy moonshiners, FBI agents, mafia goons and werewolves feels stale and too full of cliches.
The Fourth Planet has beautiful art and an interesting perspective on different alien races but ultimately it might be something that I prefer to read in a collected format.
Thoughts by this user that have been liked by others.
I'm not sure I like the inconsistent assignment operators in Go. := is the initialiser operator but then values in mutable collections are assigned with just =
Led Zeppelin have not one but two all-female tribute groups: Zepparella and Lez Zeppelin.
I actually prefer the female fronted versions of their songs as it subverts some of their lyrical tawdriness.
So after having a hankering to hear the Whole lotta love riff I actually had two different versions to choose from.
Zepparella seem an amazing technical group of musicians with great technique but I preferred the slightly rockier and grungier LezZep's version.
I've been playing the beautiful geometry puzzler Monument Valley, which rather like Thomas Was Alone frames the puzzles in a story. However the mystical story of stolen sacred geometry and the ruins that you are exploring creates an atmosphere that is closer to Journey.
I'm doing a talk next week about Mori the library of immutable data structures for Javascript and this week Facebook releases... a library of immutable data structures.
Cue panicked reading... fortunately both libraries have interesting areas of overlap and difference. Essentially both use hashmap tries to create immutable structures without cloning. Both appear to unify collections into sequences and their related operations. Both aim to provide simple memory-reference comparison for changes in support of virtual doms and reactive event streams. Both avoid intermediate forms an allocation during transformations.
Immutable.js is smaller in scope that Mori though with less operations available on sequences. It has also taken an object-orientated interface approach to expose the functionality on the immutable collection types. This seems to be the major point of difference so far and also seems an odd design choice as it limits its opportunity for composition.
So it turns out that most boutique and ethical clothes makers in the UK don't cater to people who are overweight or short. If I had the right kind of initiative then I would be seizing the business opportunity here.
An addition to your bash shell that should make the GOPATH bin directory executables directly available.
export PATH=$PATH:$PATH:${GOPATH//:// bin:}/bin
Unlimited streams? Works for me! Unbundle the streams!
I do find it surprising that Ello is taking off but Diaspora, which is much more community-friendly, failed to find traction.
Okay so you define an function in the interactive session by using let. That had baffled me for a little while.
People moan about falling standards in the media but there never seems to be any evidence of a time in the past where there was a higher quality. Either these people are referring to points in history where elites have controlled the agenda and access to audiences or to an unexamined nostalgia for the content they enjoyed at some formative moment in their past.
I saw professional singers using the trick of using your skull as a resonator for a tuning fork (something I did previously know you could do) to hit a particular note during a piece where the voices were accompanying an ensemble with pure tonal vocalisation.
Interesting example of how design up front fails in Purescript by Examples chapter that uses a phone book as an example.
It assumes that everyone has a first and last name and makes them mandatory whereas this is neither true nor a legal requirement beyond certain territories.
xz is a compression format that is based on the old 7-Zip archive format but with added Unix support.
Also poor old Bzip2 is being retired and GNU tar will autodetect the compression used on a file, no more z or j!
Your service doesn't implement REST if you only handle POST