Barnaby Walters

#TIL about thought-terminating clichés, an excellent term for an annoying discussion habit. Adding Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism to my reading list.

#listening to Aldrei skal eg gleymur þér by FUNI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcSG0sxqsMM

With beautiful #iceland photos taken by Chris and Bára, which I stitched together into a video.

There’s a lot of truth about learning techniques in Psychology 101 Chapter 0: how to study this book. I particularly like the use of red herring vocabulary in incorrect quiz answers as a way of making rote memorization an unfeasible learning method in favour of actual understanding of the topics.

Having read it, I’m now left wanting to read the entire course.

#TIL I’ve been confusing steganography with stenography

That fuzzy feeling when people give you really, really high resolution graphics to work with.

I forgot how much fun even the simplest video editing was.

Wooooooooooooooooooooo! #cometlanding

For one brief moment there I thought the ESA #rosetta livestream MC made a Too Many Cooks reference.

Got distracted trying to find somewhere to put smelly bananas, ended up cleaning the kitchen and arranging all my jars in order of colour, which, apparently, my panorama software cannot handle:

The Heroku python client library is horribly out of date, and many simple things which should work don’t, throwing confusing errors. Here’s my version:

# coding: utf-8

import requests

HEROKU_URL = 'https://api.heroku.com'


class Client():
    def __init__(self, api_key, heroku_url=None):
        self.heroku_url = HEROKU_URL if heroku_url is None else heroku_url
        self.session = requests.Session()
        self.session.headers.update({'Accept': 'application/vnd.heroku+json; version=3'})
        self.session.auth = ('', api_key)

    def get(self, path):
        r = self.session.get('%s/%s' % (self.heroku_url.rstrip('/'), path.lstrip('/')))
        r.raise_for_status()
        return r.json()

    def post(self, path, data=None):
        r = self.session.post('%s/%s' % (self.heroku_url.rstrip('/'), path.lstrip('/')), data=data)
        r.raise_for_status()
        return r.json()

Add similar methods for DELETE if you find you require it. I haven’t yet, as the idea of programatically being able to delete apps is much more worrying than the ability to create them.

Currently #listening to Ekkillinn frá Álfahamri by FUNI. Wow. Beautiful singing and guitar harmonies.

Mozilla’s choice to rebrand Aurora as “Developer Edition” is concerning to me because it perpetuates the annoying status quo of a) development being something reserved for developers, and b) pushing different software for creation and consumption. It seems somewhat contrary to the webmaker.org (another Mozilla project) ethos.

Migrating a lot of my unorganised, unlinked text file notes and lyrics into a Smallest Federated Wiki, initially locally for experimentation and emphasis on offline use. Coming up with ideas for plugins I want to make:

• ABC notation parser using abcjs for embedding both whole tunes and music fragments
• Multi-paragraph text area for lyrics (currently using code sections, but they syntax highlight automatically which is irritating for non-code)
• YouTube embedder (or more generic, e.g. it’d be great to have SoundCloud, vimeo etc support.
• Local audio file uploads+embeds similar to images

Loving Muha’s crisp sounds. Modern Eastern European folk with a gurdy is a good combo:

America’s solution to voter apathy: a “genderless, sexless and raceless” cardboard dinosaur with huge googly eyes, which “aspires to become “a manifestation that can just be loved.””

I, for one, am in favour.

#dcdino #politics #cardboard #dinosaurs