Rubenerd

I somewhat resent the claim that some of the world's most important inventions and scientific discoveries were "accidents". Granted, the initial spark may have been unintentional, but further developing an idea to its full potential takes its own kind of genius. Penicillin, and the work of Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain is but one example.

But we digress! This incomplete loading of a JPEG from some guy's blog post is a genuine accident that ended up producing something quite beautiful, I thought. It's as though Singapore was gifted a honourary Wiphala from Bolivia, irregularly tessellated and bound with further bands of colour for added effect.

Or maybe it's just a mess of incomplete JPEG data; whatever floats your boat. Or your square flag, as it were.

I’ve used and adored TextExpander since hearing Dan and Merlin discuss it on Back to Work.

By defining snippets, you can substitute whole blocks of text or forms with a keystroke shortcut. For example, ;me is replaced with my name, email address and phone number. ;i gets replaced with an img HTML tag complete with image dimensions and a field for alt text. It’s really nice.

For my student friends though, its been hard to recommend a $35 application. If this is a limiting factor, I’ve since found a promising alternative called aText. It appears to perform a subset of TextExpander’s tasks, for $5.

I adore TextExpander, but if you’re on a tight budget AText may be the way to go.

2015 is less than two months away, so its time to clear out the drafts folder. This post was drafted in January.

Here in 2014, the Georgia font is out, and inscrutable meatstack icons (pardon “hamburger icons”), fonts as big as your head and full-height banner images are in. Every second site is now also employing Helvetica Neue Light and Ultra Light, presumably in an effort to ape iOS 7.

Unfortunately for us, such efforts are hopelessly misguided. Apple was able to employ these fonts on iOS 7 because every client using it (save for the first iPad mini) would have a Retina screen. Regular displays lack the resolution to render ultra-lightweight fonts with sufficient detail to be readable. This is why lightweight fonts were seldom used on computer displays before.

Subpixel rendering and antialising improve the appearance of many fonts. If you’re relying on it entirely to make your text readable, you’ve doing it wrong. If you’re basing your exploit-friendly CSS font imports on user-agent, by all means give Retina clients that XSS malware vector. Otherwise, please stick to regular weight fonts at a minimum.

Believe me, I’m looking forward to the day we all have Retina-grade screens and such fonts will be fine. The irony is by the time that happens, Helvetica Neue will be passé.

Generally speaking (for the pendants), the current way we identify files on desktop OSs is filename extensions. It didn't used to be this way Smithers, many OSs including Mac OS and *nix could identify files without them. Another unfortunate legacy of having to support Windows.

This morning our time, John Gruber elaborated on the lack of an official Markdown filename extension. He endorses ".markdown", agreeing with Hilton Lipschitz that "we should be using the most descriptive file extensions".

I can empathise, but I employ ".md" precisely because it's succinct. NetsecReport.md is more useful to me than Netsec…ort.markdown as viewed in the Finder's column view, or TextMate's file browser.

This does create a little more work for us developing software, but I see this flexibility as a strength of this plain text format, rather than a weakness.

What does a mature, reasoned science–degree student undertake when at the Australian Museum with close friends? Naturally, locate the geology section and photograph the wonders that bear resemblance to foodstuffs.

From top to bottom clockwise, we have a rambutan, crab sticks, dark chocolate, caramel, some tomato baked potatoes, cookies and cream, potato crisps, a passionfruit slice and a scone with chocolate.

The full gallery of culinary delights can be viewed on Flickr, for those so inclined.

Special thanks to Sashin for organising the day. And to all of you lovely guys, it was an absolute blast to catch up :).

Part of the reason I got back into anime and manga around 2006 was simply because it was so different to anything I'd seen or read before. Case in point, yesterday Clara and I watched the first two episodes of Cuticle Tantei Inaba in a public library, possibly the worst setting given we wanted to roar with laughter at least a thousand times an episode, give or take.

With its impossible plot twists and settings, otaku in–jokes and gags, it was absolutely, thoroughly inexplicable.

Our protagonist Hiroshi is a retired police dog human hybrid, who has ears like a cat, the mane of a fox and an uncontrollable attraction to certain human hairstyles. His crack team includes Yuuta, an exceedingly attractive young man who cross–dresses more convincingly than I care to admit; and Kei, who at least in this crazy universe appears somewhat normal.

Together, they attempt to solve crimes perpetrated by mafia Don Valentino and his associates in organised crime. Of course, Don Valentino just happens to be a goat with a literal appetite for counterfeit money. Bleet.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Ruben, you're extremely attractive. Well, I assure you flattery will get you absolutely nowhere, unless it's in the comment field after you've donated a cup of coffee. The other thing you're thinking, could a premise so utterly implausible and fantastic really be watchable, let alone good?

Somehow, this ridiculous plot and characters somehow gel together into a series that works. Combine this deliciously creamy plot with stellar voice acting and a delightfully cliché Italian-American mafia soundtrack, and we have a series I get the feeling Clara and I will both want to marathon the rest of while eating a big bowl of Japanese pasta. Good heavens how I miss that Italian–Japanese fusion restaurant in Wheelock Place.

As an aside, the manga started on my birthday in 2008. Not sure what relevance this has to a series review, just thought I'd pass it on. I've also been told by Clara I bear a passing resemblance to one of the police officers, though I think she's just being polite.

On a whim, I gave Amazon Cloud Drive a quick test. Launched in 2011, the service promises 5.0GB of free storage accessible from Windows, Mac and the browser.

After a day or so of usage, I've decided I'll be sticking with Dropbox for my for my public documents and encrypted sparsebundles. There are many reasons, but these are the most presient:

• The web interface is familiar and easy for people used to Amazon's design language, but its not as slick as Dropbox. It also requires Flash to upload files, in 2013.

• The provided Mac client defaults to putting files in your home folder. There's no way to change this in the interface of the application, short of creating a symlink in the terminal.

• Dropbox (like S3) can have public folders, with any file placed in it being accessible. With Cloud Drive, files must be individually shared, and a UID unrelated to the filename is created.

It was worth a try, but I feel Amazon has the capability of doing much better.

With the holiday season coming to a close, I decided to hit the anime image boards for some inspiring new art for my January background. What I saw ended up making me think.

See that image above? Drawn by Inoki-08 and uploaded to Pixiv, it depicts an ocean scene with what appears to a dog playing with his owner. In front of them in the distance, we see a monstrously huge, egg shaped boulder with intricate carvings on its surface.

How did they come up with that? Or more pressing for me personally, how did they translate that abstract concept in their head into something concrete? How did they draw that?

As many of my fellow IT women and men do, I design software, write code and maintain systems with admittedly cryptic commands; most of which probably look like gibberish to most people. I've gradually tried to convince myself over the years that this is how I'm "creative". And yet, seeing this image… it's humbling. Had I spent hundreds of hours in front of a paint brush, or a graphics tablet, I could have never drawn something like this. Or mascots. Or calligraphy. Even if I possessed sufficient skill, I doubt I could have come up with something so fantastic.

I've been using the term "humbling" a lot over the last year. I guess a sign of getting older is the gradual appreciation of just how much is really out there. At the risk of ending on a cliché, the more we learn, the more we realise how little we know.

Oh yeah, and artists will forever intimidate me.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

cornersoftheworld:

By Yueh-Hua Lee

I see a Carrefour! XD Also, must go.

A number of people have asked me through various channels why I now only have five posts to a page, when I’ve had ten since the site started. First, I’m flattered anyone noticed! Secondly, it has to do with media.

Since I started blogging, I didn’t want to be another of those dry sites without images on posts. We have this wonderful internet, why limit ourselves to plain text? *Turns out* there’s a perfectly valid reason why: bandwidth. I’ve been optimising my site for retina images, so I decided to reduce the number of posts demanding downloaded assets.

At some point I’ll write some rules to serve retina images only on clients with the appropriate screens. Until then, this seemed like an appropriate compromise.