Month: March 2019

👓 Schedule | WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley

Bookmarked Schedule (WordCamp Santa Clarita)
We’re thrilled to debut the first-annual WordCamp Santa Clarita will be held at the Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook University Center University Center on the campus of College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California. Friday, April 5, Beginner’s Day Time Vásquez Rocks Vásquez Rocks were named after...
Reposted a tweet by WordCamp Santa ClaritaWordCamp Santa Clarita (Twitter)

👓 8:27 pm EDT Fri Mar 15 2019 pulse rate | JR

Read a post by jr (sawv)
8:27 pm EDT Fri Mar 15 2019 pulse rate 16 to 17 beats per 10 seconds. Or 99 beats per 60 seconds. I did not check my pulse around 4am nor later in the morning but it seemed much faster. I would estimate my pulse between 130 land 150 beats per min. I think the pulse rate has declined some which is go...
An example in the wild of someone with an indie website who is posting health data.

👓 Open Your Mouth Very Wide | Peter Rukavina

Read Open Your Mouth Very Wide by Peter RukavinaPeter Rukavina (ruk.ca)

I read somewhere—perhaps it was “5 Tips to Instantly Up Your Instagram Game” or some such—that, when taking photos of people, you should ask them to open their mouths as wide as possible.

Interestingly, it works. It seems weird, both to them and to you, but the photos that result often have much more life in them than they would otherwise.

I received similar instructions many years ago from a CBC Radio producer: I was going into the studio to record a commentary, and she advised me to make my points so emphatically as to appear (to myself) to be raving. It was very hard to do this, and it made me very uncomfortable, but I had to agree that the result was better.

An interesting piece of photography advice… I like the caricature advice for audio as well. It was something that obviously worked for people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.

👓 Some important Known changes | Marcus Povey

Read Some important Known changes by Marcus PoveyMarcus Povey (marcus-povey.co.uk)

Some important changes to Known were merged in over the weekend.

Most notably, (most) external dependencies are now managed and installed via Composer, and not included natively in the repository itself.

This makes updates easier to manage, but it does mean that if you are installing from (or more importantly, upgrading from) the git repository directly, you will need to perform an extra step.

cd /path/to/known; composer install

This is particularly important if you’re upgrading, and your site is a checkout of the git repo.

I’m reminded that I desperately need to upgrade everything on my install…

👓 Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours | Ryan Barrett

Read Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours by Ryan BarrettRyan Barrett (snarfed.org)

It was winter 2014. Pharrell had just dropped Happy, the Rosetta probe landed on a comet, President Obama was opening diplomatic relations with Cuba…

…and here at Color, the bioinformatics team had a problem. Our pipeline — the data processing system that crunches raw DNA data from our lab into the variants we report to patients — was slow. 12 to 24 hours slow.

This wasn’t a problem in and of itself — bioinformatics pipelines routinely run for hours or even days — but it was a royal pain for development. We’d write new pipeline code, start it running, go home, and return the next morning to find it had crashed halfway through because we’d missed a semicolon. Argh. Or worse, since we hadn’t launched yet, our live pipeline would hit similar bugs in production R&D samples, which would delay them until we could debug, test, and deploy the fix. No good.

Read The things we do to read emoji by Malcolm BlaneyMalcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)
Ok I totally stole the title from this article, which was really good and help me fix my problems so I wanted to link to it. I recently upgraded all my servers from Jessie to Stretch, which was long overdue. The catalyst being that certbot from Let's Encrypt started complaining about the security I...

👓 The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective | Duncan Stephen

Read a post (Duncan Stephen)

The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective — Diana Budds, Fast Company

Why Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again hat, was a wildly successful design, despite being reviled by gatekeepers of good-taste design.

The “undesigned” hat represented this everyman sensibility, while Hillary [Clinton]’s high-design branding — which was disciplined, systematic, and well-executed — embodied the establishment narrative that Trump railed against and that Middle America felt had failed them. “The DIY nature of the hat embodies the wares of a ‘self-made man’ and intentionally distances itself from well-established and unassailable high-design brand systems of Hillary and Obama,” Young says. “Tasteful design becomes suspect… The trucker cap is as American as apple pie and baseball.”

This reminds me of the story that the most “tasteful” office spaces are less productive. When given a clean-looking office cubicle, people fill it with garden gnomes.

I don’t agree with the article’s premise that this challenges the idea of design thinking. Surely it means that Hillary Clinton’s designers simply didn’t do a good enough job at it (because nice typefaces ≠ design thinking).

But this does provide a challenge to the received wisdom of what good design is, and whether tasteful design is desirable.

Read a post by Stephen Pieper (stephenpieper.net)
Bookmarked The ultimate guide to DuckDuckGo - BrettTerpstra.com (BrettTerpstra.com)
If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.
I switched over to DuckDuckGo for searches a few months ago. There’s a lot of stuff here I didn’t know about especially “bangs” which look really useful.