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Also known as the Stoke Newington Eight. Middle-class anarchist terrorists on the early 70s, who are (reportedly) now a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. Making a note of it, because it's a superb name, and I want to remember they existed, because it's bound to be useful one day.
Author: Alasdair
Restart
It’s the end of a hungover dog of a Friday, there’s a major project going live at work on Tuesday, for which I have bben hurridly coding most of the day, I’m slowly getting the hang of this Twitter business, and I’m going to spend my weekend with a small horde of people infesting my house. Again.
Spent last night out with a collection of very clever bastards getting very savagely drunk. Possibility of getting involved on the tech side of a fairly interesting project came up, and digits are duly crossed that something comes of it. The plan for tonight is a bit of shopping, in order to be able to feed the hordes when they arrive tomorrow, a bit of tidying up, some fixing of my recalcitrant printer, so I can finally make good on some prints I promised people, and decorate my new office properly (about which, almost certainly more later, as I am quite ridiculously enthused about it), and a last going over of some notes to get them into useable state before tomorrow.
Which is all by way of saying: back to blogging at http://www.black-ink.org again. No plan for any theme, other than the general random crap that occurs to me, but not going to limit the range of topics. Most of them won’t be what-I-had-for-breakfast shit like this, but I thought I’d start with a general state of my life on an otherwise ordinary day, just to set the scene.
Minimal Beauty
Little bit of research help, if you can spare a minute: tell me of your favourite blogs with a minimalist design. Don’t care what the content of the blog is, just that the design be minimalist.
Links For Thursday 15th January 2009
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Linking to this rather than the portrait, because I'm nerdy enough to be amused/interested in the EXIF data that tells us about the tools and settings used to take the photo.
Future Sheappin’
(This entry is mostly a note to self, so I can find these specific links again, and cross reference them with a slightly shoddy shopping cart system.)
While I like XKCD, it is a very hit and miss comic. It’s often cloying, trite or sentimenal, or even just a little nerd-creepy at time. But when it hits, it’s superb. I note this, because yer man there is now selling signed prints, and specifically, it’s possible to buy three of my favourites. Exploits Of A Mom, Duty Calls and Cat Proximity. Of the three, the first two are definitely going on the “buy” list, and the third is a maybe, if I have the spare cash.
If only he’d do a print of my all time favourite, the only comic strip I have ever printed out and pinned to my space at work, Goto, I’d be a very happy man indeed.
Links For Wednesday 14th January 2009
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Me personally, I don't really like most kittens, and a lot of the cooking here is beyond my capabilities. But I can cheerfully fillet and skin kittens for other people, thanks to my old part-time job.
Links For Friday 9th January 2009
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A fucking huge, and fucking lovely, photo of well, exactly what it says. No particular reason to link to it, it's just pretty, that's all.
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My friend Stu is a bit handy with words, and a lot more aware of the word around him than I am, and he occasionally writes up the interesting people he encounters as he commutes or otherwise goes about his business in London. These are a beautifully rendered, and very real, slice of what life is like in the greatest city on earth. Go and read them.
Links For Thursday 8th January 2009
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I am so tempted to skip out on family Christmas next year, and produce a set something like this. OK, there's not a chance I would, but still, the set pretty damn impressive anyway.
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Like everyone else, I'd never heard of these before. And like all right-thinking people, I do think the entire notion is fascinating. Mouldering hulks of poisonous stone that no longer light up the night. Perfect fodder for a maritime ghost story.
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Good round up of various cleaning options to remove sensor dust. My old D70s body is a martyr to it, and the D80 is bound to pick up some at some point.
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Some interesting old terms in here I hadn;'t run across before that might be useful in the future.
Links For Wednesday 7th January 2009
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Not really much to say about this, other than that there are some very nice typefaces in here.
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Ostensibly for Rails, but most of these apply to anyone using an MVC framework, and are worth a look.
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This is a pet peeve of mine: people who use tinyUrl type services completely needlessly in blog posts and the like. I understand why, say, twitter does it, because of character limits, but it's still shit practice. URLs should clearly indicate the content they are the URL for. So I'll be plugging this in to my browser.
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This is an interesting idea – a more environmentally sound font, but will it have any actual impact on ink use at small sizes? I couldn't find any actual maths on the site. Also, I am a slave to Helvetica, and particularly Helvetica Neue, so until someone produces an ecofont variant on them, I don't see myself picking this up.
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Can we all please just move on from this now there's some accurate reportage about it?
LJ: The Sky Is Not Falling
I am quite capable of reading the blogs of any my friends who blog using any given set of popular blogging tools in a convenient manner without having to make a daily round trip of hundreds of sites, thanks to the magic of RSS readers. I use net netnewswire, others just use google reader or bloglines or some windows desktop app or other.
All of said alternative blogging tools offer, or can be set up with various privacy options. In fact, LJ is a bit stunted in it’s privacy tools, because it doesn’t allow authentication to enable reading of locked posts via RSS.
If LJ goes away (and despite the links posts that I have coming up later in the day, I am a long way from believing it will, and certainly not overnight, although the service might get a bit shoddier) then I will still be able to read and comment on the writings of any of my friends who care to set themselves up with any one of a number of free services in a a manner just as convenient as reading my LJ friends page.
Which is another way of saying: breathe the fuck out, everyone. There is no need to start screaming yet.
Or, in one sentence: the net interprets damage as censorship, and routes around it.