Rolandt

All of philosophy, mapped, showing its humbling breadth and scope: “One thing I like about this image is that it strikingly—perhaps overwhelmingly—depicts the number and kinds of different philosophical areas of inquiry. It is the perfect thing to show those people who falsely fancy themselves know-it-alls about philosophy: the pandering politician, the overconfident scientistor science popularizer, even that guy in philosophy class. As an exercise, starting at the outermost ring, just have them put a star near the areas they know anythingabout. There won’t be many stars.”

I’m trying to wrap my head around the new generation machine learning tools: deep neural networks and the like. It feels like this technology is approaching where databases were 20-30 years ago: the tooling is getting easy enough that an idiot like me can have a stab at wiring something up, even if I don’t quite understand all the magic incantations that I need to type. And it’s pretty clear it’s going to be important.

The world seems to be settling on Tensorflow, for now, so I had a go at getting something stupid up and running. I ended up making an English village name generator, using a corpus from OS Open Names (with a healthy amount of awk and grep), and a character level recurrent neural network written in Tensorflow.

Like I was with SQL many moons ago, I think I understand some of the principles, what’s possible and what’s not, and I can make sense of someone else’s code – but it’s a bit of struggle getting all the words in the right order when I have to change anything.

Anyway, the results are quite fun – here’s 20 of them:

Allers Bottom
Culack
Swrarby
Fenwall St Eastake
Anbarth
St Ninhope
Thawkanham Water Green
Mige Lane
Up Maling
Firley Dinch
Lindlemere
Stan Hill
Hiddlesley
Pibley
Hunmastreet
Shenworth Strough
Hendrelds Hill
Scottedane
Crickines
Stranal Footh

And here’s another 980.

Update: I turned this into a Twitter bot, @urnowentering.

Sat 07.30.16 – With less than 300 miles before my beloved BLKPHBE the Prius turns 200,000 miles, the red triangle of death showed up today in the middle of Beach Blvd. The warning signals from the car forced it to Neutral and I had to restart the car much to the road rage distress of... Read more »

Katie Ledecky

Concentration is the new black–Andrew Sullivan https://t.co/hrbOVm54mn

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) July 30, 2016

The core conservative lie: denying that blue states are generally doing better https://t.co/vy7PuJVQdQ Progressive taxes and investments win

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) July 31, 2016

I’m thinking just now about composite objects – Tinderbox notes that are made up of several notes.

Alongside inheritance, composition – building objects from smaller objects – is one of the key ideas in object design and knowledge representation. Of the two, inheritance gets attention but composition is the workhorse: beginners are always reaching for complex inheritance chains while overlooking nice designs composed of a handful of cooperating objects.

Here’s an excerpt from my Hypertext 2016 conference notes about one excellent paper presented by Thomas Schedel. The whole thing is really one composite, a ConferencePaper. Inside, we see some smaller composites, too. There’s an author/title pair, which all conference papers have but which things like fiction readings also have. There are horizontal lists, vertical lists, and perhaps some lists of lists. There are notes about questions I had during the talk, things I wanted to ask Dr. Schedel about; he and I later had an extraordinarily productive one-on-one in the lobby of Dalhousie’s collaborative health education building – a lobby nicely designed for this sort of collaborating.

Many questions remain. Do we tell Tinderbox that “this is a conference paper”? Or do we build a prototypical ConferencePaper and ask Tinderbox to discover conference papers automatically? Suppose we have a ConferencePaper that doesn’t quite fit our definition: how can we relax the definition without getting bogged down in some sort of generalize Backus-Naur notation? (Trust me on this: when Tinderbox users are trying to keep up with a speaker in a scientific conference, they do not in general want to be juggling BNF simply in order to get what she's saying into their notebook!)

What is “ConferencePaper,” anyway? It’s less than a Class or a Type, but I think it’s more than a Name or a Label. I wonder if there are lessons from Duck Typing that I should study, or perhaps something from Programming By Example? Ideas? Email me.

Leonard Baskin waved his arms around his head:

I tell you honestly that I do not live in air. I live in air filled with images, waiting, waiting. And they are mad at me because I don't make them. This is not a fantasy. It is real, I assure you.

I know a few programmers who feel the same way about code. I have periods of such immediacy myself.

This is one of those double-edged phenomena, though. Many people would like to find some goal or activity that so enlivens their world, but they also do not want it to drive them to endless distraction. Fortunately, when we get deep into creating a new something, the swirl goes away for a while.

(This passage comes from Conversations with Artists, which I have now quoted a few times. I promise not to type the entire book into my blog.)

Images courtesy the artist

With more than 270,000 followers on Instagram, Shamekh Al-Bluwi has definitely captured the attention of users with a thirst for creative visual projects. He uses the platform as a way to share his work with a large audience, and also to take viewers on a journey to places around the world through clever paper cut-outs. Using his background in architecture as a jumping-off point, he began examining the similarities between architecture and fashion. “Back then, I had to deal with different architectural styles, mixing and matching several layers and structures,” Al-Bluwi tells The Creators Project. “Apart from that, I always used to sketch ladies and dress them with interesting patterns and cityscapes.” His two areas of interest come together in a series of photographs that feature him holding drawings of women with their dress designs cut out. The empty portion is filled with the building or landscape in the background, which becomes the unique pattern of the dress.

Before choosing a location, Al-Bluwi thinks about the subject he is depicting. “I start by researching the model's posture, then after sketching a suitable one, I add the outfit design putting into consideration the parts I could cut,” explains Al-Bluwi. “I do the illustration as line art on Photoshop using a Wacom tablet. I make sure to keep it very simple, for the surroundings to pop when it's time to take a photo.”

Once he creates the design for the dress and cuts out the negative space, he looks for the right setting to bring the dress pattern to life. The patterns are created from a variety of backgrounds: an insteresting facade, a cluster of flowers, and the setting sun are just a few examples.

“When I decide on locations, I try to play with contradictions,” says Al-Bluwi. “A busy background or a chaotic landscape versus the simple sketch. In fact, my eyes are always observing my surroundings, and I try to spot interesting textures to add them against my sketches. It gets really fun when I'm travelling, as I can take photos of sketches while exploring new cities.”

The series started as an experiment, but has snowballed to include a number of dress design and background combinations. The artist is able to find a way to channel his creativity and interest in two seemingly disparate fields to make something memorable. He encourages others to get crafty and push their own methods of creating to see what they might discover.

“No matter what your talent is, artistic or not, always try new techniques, and don't limit yourself to the norm,” writes Al-Bluwi. “Even if you don't think people would receive your work well, just do it for yourself; you'll learn a lot along the way. Also, I'd like to tell all budding talents to post their work online and share it with others. It's always great to hear feedback from others, to know what you're good at and what you can work on to improve.”

See more of Shamekh Al-Bluwi's work on his Instagram.

Related:

Go on a Rollercoaster Ride with Paper Cutout Art

This Fashion Line Literally Lets You Wear Pencil Sketches

Hand Cut-Paper Sculptures of Microbes Make Bacteria Beautiful

Rumour from Brent Toderian is that the person filling the Chief Planner position at City of Vancouver will be announced this week.

As Brent has tweeted and written in the Hive:

. . . .   our new chief planner will face big challenges, and will need to be positioned well for success by Council. He or she will need to be allowed to take the time needed to listen and learn, because there will be a huge learning curve with the job. We will all need to give the new chief planner the room and support to take intelligent risks, the mandate to innovate, and the independent, un-muzzled voice to once again be a vocal champion for great city-making! . . .

. . .   I wish our new chief planner good luck and much success, because I love Vancouver, and I want us to keep getting better in every way. But it will take more than wishing. It will take all of us helping and participating, and constructively contributing to the important processes and discussions that shape our city. It will take a new culture, a plan, and real action to fix what’s been broken. It will take positioning this new planning leader for success. And it will take all of us sending the message that we value smart and creative city planning, great urban design, and honest public engagement. Vancouver deserves nothing less.

His Hive article is a good read, with lots of history and 5 “big high-level challenges” he sees facing the new Chief Planner.

sillygwailo shared this story from Day One.

Journaling. I never had a journal in my life. I never wrote down anything from my ‘childhood’ days nor did I really keep anything. Perhaps I was too engrossed in the present moment to care about writing things down about my life and experiences, perhaps I was just lazy and didn’t want to spend time on that. I don’t really regret not having written anything as there is no reason to regret anything but now that I think of it, it sure would be nice to have something from the past. To see actual physical evidence of what I was thinking and going through at the time and not having to rely on memory for these things. One might ask, why would you even want to remember the past and keep anything from it, what is past is past. It is gone. Why not focus on the present moment and think of the future? I can only answer that question for myself.

It started with a present. A cube calendar. It was a cube with little cards that had days written on them that one can tear off after the day has passed. It also had motivating and life quotes on some of the cards. It looked great. I didn’t think much of the present although I was incredibly happy that I had been gifted such a thing. So days passed. Cards were torn off. After a while of seeing these cards being thrown away and my cube slowly shrinking I thought to myself why not get some use of these cards. I decided to write something memorable that has happened to me on this day on the back of these little cards. The space on the cards was small but it was perfect for the task. I thought it was a great idea. I wrote all the memorable things that have happened to me during the day and put the ‘used’ cards in a box. Even the days that didn’t have anything ‘remarkable’ happen, still had my ink on them. This was in Winter of 2015. Fast forward 8 months and I have this little joyous stack of little cards stored in a box in my room :

With time I actually grew a kind of love for writing on these cards. I realised that not all days are equal. Some days you try and fit everything you can in the space of this little card. Some days you have a sentence and you are trying to think what more can I write about this day. With time the collection of cards grew and I could play games. I can pick a random card from the pile and try and recollect what happened to me on this day.

But this was just the beginning of my little experiment with recording my day’s memorable experiences. During my time of writing these cards, I have found out about a little great app called Day One. This app back then was a simple digital journal. It had a simple design and a simple premise. There were entries that you could write in, each entry could contain text and one photograph. It also had tags. I really love well made tools and applications that in the spirit of unix do one thing and do it well, this was one of these tools.

I thought about the idea of having this digital journal of things. What if I could write my cards in the app instead? Of course it would kill the novelty of writing things on physical cards with actual ink but what about the great benefits of having things be written in this digital format? There would be no boundaries of how much and how little I can write. I would have the power of search at my disposal. If I wanted to read my writings from some past day, I didn’t have to pick out through all the cards to pick out the card I needed. I could be able to write my cards anywhere now given that my laptop and also my phone is always with me. I could also read them from anywhere. What more, now my recordings from the day are not only constrained by language but I could add a photograph. As they say, a photograph is worth a thousand words and I am all for writing less and remembering more. The choice of a digital journal evolution was obvious plus my little cube was growing smaller and smaller with each day.

I also had an idea. A way to extend my writing to take advantage of this new and exciting digital format. I thought and came up with two things that I wanted to include in my newly digitally written entries :

1. What have I learned this day?
2. What memorable things that have happened to me?

I thought those two to be the most important things I would love to capture from my day. I try and learn new things every day so why not write them down? The process of writing things down helps to cement the newly learned ideas in your head. After all, you do have to write it out in your own words. The second point was essentially the continuation of my ‘cube’ legacy. Wow. I have just created a systematic way to journal. I had a template with two simple questions that I could answer. I love little systems like this. What about giving them a name? After some time I concluded that these entries are essentially evaluations of my day so why not give them an appropriate name. Day Evaluations.

One problem that this newly created template brings is that I would then need to write the two questions every time and only then try and answer them. Wouldn’t it be great to have the template be ready for me with every new entry I write? Well I had a little utility named Typinator just for that. It allowed me to make expansions of whatever text I wanted to write. All I needed to do was create my expansion :

And use it :

No longer bounded by space of a little card. I was free to write what I wanted and how I wanted. This was September 2015. Fast forward to July and I now have 370 entries.

I have 370 days documented and remembered. I know what I did in every single one of of these days. I have evolved my writing to include photographs, some entries having more than one of them. I have made use of the great tagging system and I have started giving my days ratings on a scale of 0 to 10. I have never went below a 5 yet and my most occurring rating was a 7.

My writing has evolved and I have evolved with it. Writing in this journal and making these day evaluations was one of the best decisions and habits I have formed. It is an incredible feeling knowing that my life and most of my memories are accessible within a minute’s time. Memory is a strange thing, all needs is a trigger, a way to bounce off something to form a coherent picture. I now had that ‘something’.

With inclusion of Day One’s multiple journals, I now have a journal for documenting my travelling adventures. I have a journal for ‘lessons learned’ where I lay down little personal lessons I have learned over my life. Perhaps I have bought something I didn’t need or hurt someone and didn’t apologise. I write it down and record it. I started writing in a dream journal where I write down the dreams I remember thus improving my recall and eventually having lucid dreams. A human spends 26 years of his life unconscious and sleeping, isn’t it great to use that time to fly or explore the inner working of your own subconsciousness?

Perhaps you too have a journal that you are already writing in. If so, great. I would love to hear from you and how do you approach writing in it? Perhaps you too have a personal system. And if not, I hope I could convince you how having a digital recollection of your memories can be an incredibly empowering feeling and an incredible asset to one’s life.

About the Author

Nikita Voloboev (@nikitavoloboev) is a computer scientist, writer, and an aspiring web developer.

sillygwailo shared this story from GIANT SQUID.

Last time we wrote about our Fluid Controls, which touched on our camera. Today we’ll expand on that and explore how the camera works in ABZÛ.

Our design for the fluid camera started with these goals:

1. Don’t roll with respect to the horizon, even as the diver rotates freely.
   
2. Mirror the fluidity of the diver’s movement while still following predicatively rather than lagging behind.
3. “Just work” from any direction with a wide gamut of unusual scene collision arrangements without needing lots of designer annotation.
4. Seamlessly move in and out of in-game cutscenes.

Overview

We expanded on the basic ideas that John Nesky developed for Journey, while also responding to wrinkles introduced by freeform-swimming:

Orbit Camera

The primary module which runs the interactive camera during gameplay. We use a three-step pipeline: Detectors, DOF Solvers, and Constraints.

Detectors gather data from the scene, sanitize it, and extract the camera-specific inputs: player input, diver kinematic-prediction & acrobatics (as described in the last article), 2D forward direction, the follow direction and strength, gameplay boundary conditions, collision neighborhoods & distance-fields, designer hints, and special events (surface-breaching, flipping, boost-chaining, going-over-ledges, riding creatures, etc).

The 2D Forward Detector generally picks the direction that the diver is pointing.  However when the diver is pitched up or down, this direction becomes ambiguous. Therefore, the detector uses her belly or back direction in those cases.

DOF Solvers compute the main Degrees of Freedom:

1. Tracking Position - the world-space location we’re looking at, usually the diver’s collar-bone.
2. Pitch - looking up and down, deadzoned around a slightly-down pitch.
3. Yaw - looking left and right, pulled along like a leash.
4. Distance - pulled-back from tracking position, annotated by level designers.
5. Framing - where the tracking position is placed on-screen, typically positioning the diver according to the rule of thirds.
   

The DOF is converted to a world-space POV (”point-of-view”) representing the actual location and rotation of the camera. The rotation, represented as a quaternion, is computed using euler-angles, and the location is the sum of the tracking position and a rotated local vector which combines the distance pull-back and framing offset (X=forward and Z=up):

POV.Rotation = Quat.Euler(0, DOF.Pitch, DOF.Yaw)

// convert the screen-space framing into a
// world-space “parallax” offset using the camera’s
// field of view and the screen’s aspect ratio
TanFOV = Math.Tan(0.5 * DegreesToRadians(FieldOfView))
ScreenToWorld= DOF.Distance * Vec(TanFOV, TanFOV/AspectRatio)
Parallax = ScreenToWorld * DOF.Framing;

// Pullback in the local forward/backward direction (X),
// and parallax in the side-to-side directions (YZ)
LocalOffset = Vec(-DOF.Distance, Parallax.X, Parallax.Y)

POV.Location = DOF.Tracking + (POV.Rotation * LocalOffset)

Screenshot of our in-game Camera DOF Visualizer. The yellow bit is the framing parallax (here placing the diver in the bottom third of the screen).

Constraints take the DOF results and nudge and/or clamp them to safe ranges to account for: line-of-sight occlusion, water-surface breaching, smoothing (using critically-damped springs, to avoid acute speed-hitches), and “custom camera” matching (discussed later).

An example LOS (”line-of-sight”) constraint. First the distance is clamped so that it doesn’t go inside solid collision, and then the pitch & yaw are nudged to try and restore the original orbit distance (biased towards the follow direction).

The orbit camera behaves a little differently at different times.  For instance, when the Diver flips, we don’t want to swing the camera around with her. Therefore, each step is post-hooked by an override. These are ordinary game objects which implement an abstract interface with various optional methods to override default orbit behavior. For the programming curious, it looks something like this (though it’s a bit more complicated in production):

interface IOrbitCameraDelegate {
  OverrideCamTracking(Camera* Cam, vec3* InOutLocation)
  OverrideCamFraming(Camera* Cam, vec2* InOutLocation)
  OverrideCamPitch(Camera* Cam, float *InOutPitch)
  OverrideCamYaw(Camera* Cam, float* InOutYaw)
  OverrideCamDist(Camera* Cam, float* InOutDist)
}

Delegates default to the diver, but can also be set explicitly in scripting for special moments. Structuring these overrides to use ref-arguments instead of return values was helpful to perform blending or hysteresis in the delegate itself.

Custom Camera

We use custom cameras for scene bookending, cutscenes, authored-animations, and other special-cases where we need total control, without any side-effects, smoothing, or constraints. The POV is supplied by a second optional delegate:

interface ICustomCameraDelegate {
  CamBlend(Camera* Cam, float* OutTime, EasingType* OutEasing)
  CamPOV(Camera* Cam, vec3* OutLoc, quat* OutRot)
}

The advantage of an abstract interface is that anything can be a custom camera. It helped us consolidate our scripting to actors, without having webs of tightly-coupled components.

Orbit <-> Custom Blender

This module transitions fluidly between the orbit and custom cameras. It has three states:

Pure Orbit: there’s no custom camera, so we just pass through the orbit result (99% of the time).

Pure Custom: like pure orbit, we just pass through the custom camera, however we also update the orbit constraints to match the custom camera’s rotation, so that when we return it won’t swing wildly and induce simulation sickness.

Blending: when a new custom camera is set or unset we bookmark the current blended POV (because we might be transitioning from another custom camera, not just the orbit) and then blend in or out of the custom camera. There’s lots of tricky bits here that are necessary to keep the camera fluid:

1. Extrapolate the blend-from location & rotation using the intial blended POV speed so there’s no speed hitches during the blend.
2. Apply easing to the interpolation so it’s not an unnatural linear movement (we use smoothstep by default, but this can be overridden by the custom camera delegate).
3. Don’t interpolate along a straight line - in general we compute cubic hermite splines whose tangents are scaled by the amount of rotation so we don’t feel like we’re “cutting across corners.”
4. Make sure the rotation axis is consistent. In general, we rotate along the smallest arc using slerp, however, e.g., if we started rotating clockwise, then we make sure to keep rotating that way even if the smallest arc changes mid-transition. In 3D we detect this by ensuring that the dot-product of two consecutive rotation axes is positive.

Shake

Shake is applied after all the other processes as a “post effect” so that we avoid feedback between the shaking parameters and the baseline POV. We support two kinds of shakes: a simple-shake which is easy to script, and a custom shake which takes a curve asset for syncing up with animations.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed our whistle-stop tour. It all seems pretty straightforward in hindsight, but we also experimented with many more false-starts and nice-in-theory-bad-in-practice prototypes along the way. As with the diver movement, each module in the final build had about a bazillion tuning parameters that were constantly mixed and monitored throughout the project.

As always, if you have any questions or would like to follow up for more detail, you can ping me @xewlupus – we look forward to feedback on how our devblogging efforts can better serve fellow developers :)

Max Kaufmann
Gameplay Engineer

sillygwailo shared this story from Peter Rukavina's Weblog.

Casual is a television sitcom directed by Jason Reitman.

A Hologram for the King is a film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Tom Tykwer.

Neither will find a large audience, both because of distribution (Casual airs only on the streaming service Hulu and A Hologram for the King had limited cinema distribution) and because their subject matter concerns the tribulations of people over 40 trying to right the course of their social lives.

Casual is about Valerie, a recently divorced psychotherapist in her mid-40s trying to re-learn how to make friends (she’s also trying to re-learn how to date, but that’s a secondary thread).

A Hologram for the King tells the story of Alan, a recently divorced salesman in his late-50s who is sent to by his company to Saudi Arabia. Once there he struggles with carving out a new social place for himself; like Valerie, he’s also trying to re-learn how to date but, also like Valerie, he’s rediscovering how to make friends.

The perils of reverse-engineering reverse engineering friendship as an older person was also the subject of a recent segment, Why Can’t We Be Friends?, on This American Life, part of the episode The Perils of Intimacy.

Here’s how host Ira Glass introduced the topic:

OK, OK, fellow adults, here’s a question. When did you last make a friend? Like, I mean an actual friend who you see regularly, you talk about actual, personal things. It’s hard, right? To make a new one? To get to that point? To get through the awkward “hey, you want to hang out sometime” phase?

I’m in this thing right now with this guy who, honestly, I thought like maybe we’re going to become friends. And he sent me an email saying, like, hey, let’s have dinner. And I thought, great. And I responded with a specific time. I said Thursday, how about Thursday? Heard nothing.

Then a few days later, in an email about something completely else, he suggested again, like, hey, we should do dinner sometime. And again, I was like, great, how about Thursday? Again, heard nothing.

What is that, people? How do adults become friends? Neil Drumming, on our staff, has run a little experiment with human guinea pigs on this particular subject.

As an old(er) friend-making-challenged adult, there’s much to be mined from this material. The machinations that play out in kind of friendship-reverse-engineering that all of the above bring are engaged in brings to mind What is Friendship?, a chapter in one of Oliver’s books. It’s helpful to see the struggle played out in the adult population, in drama and documentary form: it gives me hope that it’s a thicket that can be untangled.

I'm still working on figuring out the best way to block browsers that have certain ad blockers running, without pushing costs onto users.

Paid whitelisting and other practices make conventional ad blockers bad for web sites. But I'm running into a couple of problems.

• Ad blocker developers can easily see blocker-blocker scripts and work around them.

• Blocker-blocker scripts waste bandwidth and energy for users who are doing things right.

• Some blocker-blocker scripts also block the users of legit privacy tools.

What I really want to be able to do is run the blocker-blocker script only for users who I can confirm are part of the problem—blocking ads but allowing third-party tracking, as seen in the paid whitelisting racket. Paid whitelisting is a dark pattern.

So what I'm going to do is first, run a third-party tracking test, then if that shows the browser is vulnerable to third-party tracking, add the ad blocker detector script to the page.

• Privacy software users will pass the third-party tracking test, so get no ad blocker detector.

• Unprotected users will get the ad blocker detector, but it won't detect anything. They'll see the page (to which the tracking detection script can add a warning about vulnerability to third-party tracking).

• Users participating in paid whitelisting will get blocked until they either fix their configuration or install a privacy tool on top of their ad blocker.

The whole thing depends on detecting third-party tracking accurately. There are potential false positives here.

• Untrained Privacy Badger

• Cookie double-keying

• Cookie cleaners such as Self-Destructing Cookies

• First party isolation

In all of those cases the tracking protection detection script will load, but the user has still made the choice to get protected.

I want to encourage, not discourage, tracking protection experimentation by users (It's better for sites.) So I can't just check if Google Analytics can load on the page. Accurately determining if a user is trackable is what makes the Aloodo Project interesting.

Anyway, script. Reduce bandwidth consumption and battery suckage, get a more accurate result. Ideas welcome. (Yes, I'll stick a real license on it if anybody needs one.)

Doug Belshaw, Ambiguiti.es, Aug 03, 2016

This is exactly right: "the attempt to define what ‘ exists’ within a given system is usually  a  conservative, essentialist  move. It’ s often concerned with retro-fitting new things into the current status quo, a kind of Kuhnian attempt to save what might be termed ‘ normal science’ ." What follows this promising start is an interesting and useful discussion of Richard Rorty and "dead metaphors". I agree with Belshaw's scepticism of ontologies. And as Douglas Rushkoff says, "It’ s this automatic acceptance of how things are that leads to a sense of helplessness about changing any of them."

These are all concerning avenues for users. Adding advertising tends to mean user privacy is compromised, as ads become increasingly targeted by the day; shutting a company down means all user data gets removed, and it’s up to each user to find a new product or service to fill the hole. Rinse and repeat.

Arguably worse is when the company and all attached user data is acquired. There’s very little control any user has over that decision: they may like the original product, but are uncomfortable with the new owner. These decisions are impossible to foresee: if you signed up for Flickr ten years ago, or Tumblr five years ago, would you be expecting your photos and blog posts to end up in the hands of Verizon today?

Source: Don’t Cry for Yahoo — Pixel Envy

We see the same thing in education. Hopefully, a vendor is successful and things go smoothly. But, corporate (or open source) failures, acquisitions, or changes of terms will all impact what happens to student data.

We need to make sure we own our data, or at the very least have workable backups and/or exports that can be quickly spun up if things go south.

Interesting quote on Recode:

Microsoft owns individual work and Google owns collaborative work, but each company definitely wants to own the other’s domain

More >

Yesterday was like Christmas at Reclaim Hosting, we got a bunch of new art for the Reclaim Hosting aesthetic (it’s all about the aesthetic!) from the brilliant Bryan Mathers. We’ve been working together pretty regularly over the last 8 months for artwork for the Reclaim Hosting site, and I think we are hitting our stride. I think that we is a wee bit royal given Bryan is really carrying the load. He continues to blow my mind with how he translates meandering conversations into concrete visuals that really capture the spirit of who we are and what we do at Reclaim Hosting. I cannot recommend Bryan enough to anyone who is trying to imagine (or re-imagine) their image. Working with him these last months has been the most fun I have had in a long while.

The other thing I want to quickly say here about the Reclaim aesthetic is how taking the time to sit and talk through who you are and what you want to communicate to folks who come to your site is a powerful process. Nate St. Pierre tweeted about Reclaim yesterday, and what he said is exactly who we want to be: small, awesome, and real!

@laurendubinsky Jay and I both finally went to @ReclaimHosting for all our properties. Small shop, same-day customer service, real people.

— Nate St. Pierre (@NateStPierre) July 30, 2016

We don’t want to be the picture of a bizarrely content corporate soul with the streamlined headset in the alienating cubicle, nor do we want to be the institutional drone thoughtlessly making the donuts. We want to be independent in the sense that our aesthetic is not defined by some bullshit run-of-the-mill marketing department that wants to remove any sense of identity from the equation to appeal to everyone and infuse the experience with a sense of corporate unaccountability. There is no there there. It’s a front for hosting conglomerates that do not love you! But Reclaim loves you. We want to be accountable. We want to own who we are and what we believe in. And we say fuck your corporate stock photo art!

Whew, OK, glad I got that off my chest. Now for the ART, dammit! For this round we were pretty laser focused, we wanted header art for three pages: Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, and What People Are Saying. One of the things I’ve loved about the recent work is while I can be holier than thou on this site, the Reclaim artwork isn’t. It’s light, colorful, fun, and tongue-and-cheek. Everything is riffing off a reference, a previous visual, or some other folks in the field. It’s playful. Nothing epitomizes that more than the Refund Policy art, “No Regrets” image above and below.

What can I say about this? Bryan had the idea for a Tattoo, and we started talking about really cliche tattoos from the 80s like  “Kill a Commie for Mommie” in a heart, and this is the result. I couldn’t be more pleased with this gem!

The privacy policy header art is awesome because it tries to communicate the idea of securing your records using the record stores aesthetic—all Bryan’s idea! What’s more, it also has a brilliant, Kubrickean cinematic touch where it is almost like you are looking at the 2001 Obelisk of evolution. What’s more, I also see a Minecraft creeper hidden away in the facade of the lockbox.

Finally, we spent a bit of time on the “What People Are Saying” concept because there is no question this is who we are to some great degree. We don’t advertise or market ourselves aggressively (save some throw away site art ) because our work is driven by the principle that if we provide affordable hosting with unparalleled support people will appreciate it, share the love, and we will grow as a community-based service organically. That has absolutely been the case, and we’re still going strong for that very reason. It’s a fairly simple formula: work with good people, do good shit, and good things happen. No one has been more central to this ethos than Tim Owens who is nothing short of amazing when it comes to supporting Reclaimers.* In fact, if you look at what people are saying he has become the stuff of Reclaim legend. So, when talking with Bryan about the “What People Are Saying” art I wanted to build in an homage to Timmyboy!!!! Bryan was playing with the idea of a Rolling Stone magazine, so he married the two. I am really fired up with the result, a fun, playful detailed cover of the Reclaim Record magazine:

What’s so great about this image is it really underscores the kind, congenial intensity that  captures the spirit of Tim beautifully. It’s been a real honor and privilege to work alongside Tim on Reclaim, so this art was a bit of a shrine to the Wunderkind. What’s cool is that this is a detail of a more involved header for this page, so art like this can be spun off into a series of posters. I want boy wonder glaring at me kindly while I blog rather than reply to support tickets.

On the other side of the spectrum we have the photocopied zine talk about the world of indie-edtech. I love the title of the zine, Flamethrower, I think that might be an awesome title for a real edtech zine There are some fun references here, but I’ll let you figure those out. And this one is yet another bit of detail art that will be a poster in my office! And here’s the final header for the “What People are Saying” page:

And here that header image in the wild! It’s so beautiful!!!

It’s been a very productive 8 months of work with Bryan, and I can attest to his “No Regrets” policy, namely I have none at all. So awesome to be so deep into this process and so happy with the results. It just makes me want to do more, kinda like good drugs!

___________________________
*Although he is no less impressive when it comes to building system architecture, selling Domains, imagining new products, etc. As I have said before, he is the whole package!

Screencap via

Sign languages are incredibly expressive and beautiful, but unfortunately remain insular, as the majority of the world’s population is neither versed in nor willing to learn its unique means of communication. Israeli design student Yael Weiser hopes to change this with new app, SIGNS, which teaches users sign language through games and animations.

Weiser tells The Creators Project that SIGNS is her graduation project at Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Design. Her goal is to make sign languages, in different dialects, appealing and accessible to a much wider audience. “I’ve always found the world of sign language beautiful and fascinating, but when I tried to learn it, I found that it wasn’t accessible enough, and I couldn’t find a learning tool that motivated me,” Weiser says. “Through this project, I tried to create a visual identity that shows sign language as I see it—creative, intriguing and fun to learn. I was looking to create a different learning experience with gamification and animations.”

The games and animations, created by Weiser with help from Asaf Mendelovich, are clean, minimal and visually appealing. The stylized photography by Weiser, Avi Naim, Dan Deutsch and Tomer Zmora also lends the app an attractive air, which should keep things interesting for users as well. See in action below: 

Click here to see more design work by Yael Weiser, and here to learn more about SIGNS. 

Related:

Interactive Installation Turns Hand Gestures Into GIFs

Hands That Talk: Virtual Reality Gloves Can Translate Sign Language into Spoken Words

Control A Virtual Orchestra With Just The Flick Of Your Wrist

All GIFs via

Sparse and chilling, the plasticine-like structures in Mondegreen, a short video, causes a viewer to draw in a sharp breath at the sight of towering and sometimes moving installations. An opening clarifying phrase explains the odd-sounding title: A “mondegreen” is defined as “a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from mishearing."

The video is the original idea and creation of Found Studio and Esteban Diácono. From beginning to end, Mondegreen is visually-inclusive, slowly bringing the viewer’s POV from behind one wall to the next, giving the impression that every new chamber is an individual piece in a larger puzzle. A caveat to the video is what each sculpture represents; as noted in the video description, each realistically-rendered structure is made to correspond with a word which rhymes with “found.” After watching the video, we were able to spot representations of “wound,” “hound,” and “drowned.” 

See how far you can get, while simultaneously enjoying the uberly dreamy score by Echoic Audio:

Find more visually interesting works from Found Studio on their Vimeo page, here.

Related:

Architectural Renderings Form Dreamy Getaways in ‘Sun Lounger’ [Premiere]

A Surreal World Evokes Ai Weiwei’s Sculptures

This VFX Reel Takes You From Early to Final CGI Renderings

"Pink Play," Joanna Grochowska. All images courtesy of the artist

Shot inside inoffensively carpeted rooms, underneath omniscient lights, or outdoors—only God knows where—the subjects of Joanna Grochowska's photographs are prone, posed less like living beings than the grotesque, plastic dolls of Hans Bellmer. Under the Polish photographer's provocative gaze, the body is less a thing to be admired than probed and pushed past imaginary limits. It's a process the artist calls "sophisticated mannequinization," that is, the hardening of the human form and softening of its spirit; submission at its most consensual, for how does an object object? 

"The Body, composed in an anonymous space, serves as an object of voyeuristic desires," writes Grochowska, "awaiting its limitless anagrammatical recompositions imposed by the imagination of the Viewer." Her artist's statement comes with a bibliography that reads like a who's who in transgression—de Sade, Eluard, and Foucault are obvious influences—but it's the theory, backed by Bataille, Susan Sontag, Julia Kristeva, and Hanna Segal that really shines through. Her work harks back to a particularly formative experience she had when she was only nine: "Viewing Botticelli’s The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti exhibited in the Prado Museum. The series of paintings recounting a story from The Decameron, present a scene of the hunt in the pine forest—a young, naked woman being pursued by the dogs and chased by a horseman with a sword. When the victim falls, the knight slits open her back and rips the heart out to feed his dogs." 

Writes Grochowska, "The purpose is to explore the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty." Find that pressure point—and more—in the photographs below: 

"Foiling Olga"

"The Serpent" 

"The Sublime Corner" 

"Fake Nurse"

"Caroline Collared on her Face"

"Plant Boredom"

"The Girl Next Door"

Click here to see more from Joanna Grochowska. 

Related:

Meet the Artist Duo Using the Human Body as an Exhibition Space

Literally Fuck the World Inside the 'Ecosexual Bathhouse'

[NSFW] Jonathan Leder's New Polaroids of Powerful Women

Read this:

Sorry, folks, while experts are saying the encryption checks out in WhatsApp, it looks like the latest version of the app tested leaves forensic trace of all of your chats, even after you’ve deleted, cleared, or archived them… even if you “Clear All Chats”. In fact, the only way to get rid of them appears to be to delete the app entirely.

What do you take away from this? Most people read this as:

WhatsApp is unsafe.

I read this as:

Self-important prick.

Why? Because he can do it on his phone, but he can never do it on mine. Next time somebody wants to demo in a live hack how unsafe Android is, I am going to hand him my locked BlackBerry Android and tell him to make my day. Spoiler alert: he can't. Because all of his assumptions are wrong.

Slightly related: BlackBerry is already field testing the next Android patch:

Trump is a man who will say anything, and deny in the same breath that he ever said it–Timothy Egan https://t.co/IEJnByFD00

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) July 30, 2016

datarep:

Trump’s Campaign Manager Linked to Ukrainian and Russian Oligarchs

by juliana_crane

Hmmm

“According to Forbes, CVS simply shut off the chip card part of their terminals during the holiday season, to avoid the inevitable long lines. And CVS probably wasn’t the only retailer to do that. So, to rehash, the solution for longer lines wasn’t to make checkouts faster but to completely bypass the new security feature during the busiest shopping season of the year.”

The chip card transition in the US has been a disaster
http://qz.com/717876/the-chip-card-transition-in-the-us-has-been-a-disaster/

There sure is a lot going on in the world right now. Twitter’s a mess of US election coverage, overthrown governments and localized horror shows. Oh, and the Olympics are starting soon.

What better way to tune out the noise than with some headphones and a great little portable music player? Sit back, crank up some tunes, and I’ll tell you all about living with the Fiio X3 second generation, portable, high resolution, music player.

Some history.

My first portable music player was an old Toshiba cassette tape player. Eventually it was replaced by one of those yellow, chunky Sony Walkmans. I loved that thing. Years later, after the portable CD players came and went, I bought my first MP3 player. A Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox. It was terrible. My music was all ripped at an abysmal 128kbps MP3. It sounded awful, and the interface was shit, but having six gigs of storage capacity was incredible. And then I bought another one with 10 gigs. This was around 2000, 2001.

Skip forward a year and I bought my first Apple computer, a G5 Mac Pro so I could run Logic. Then they came out with the iPod. I still had the Jukebox and was wondering what all the fuss was about. By the time the 3rd Generation iPod came around I had to try one.

It was mind-blowing.

The sound quality was incredible. Way better than what the Creative Jukebox could do with the same headphones. The iPod had a better headphone amp than just about anything before it. It was compact and felt great in the hand. The capacitive touch wheel was the first example of that kind of non-moving interface. People were on the fence about it, but I thought it was great, if occasionally dangerous. I probably damaged my ears a couple of times due to accidental volume increases. It had good line-out capabilities. I installed an iPod connector in my Audi TT that meshed with the factory sound system and sounded fantastic.

All was good.

Then the iPhone came out and ruined everything.

iTunes began the slow decline into the complicated morass it is today. Based on the number of people googling “alternative itunes players“, there’s a strong demand out there. I’m still liking Audirvana, btw, but still have to use iTunes to manage my library. I can’t get rid of it.

With the advent of the iPhone, and then the iPod touch, Apple’s interest in stand-alone music players waned. They have finally discontinued the iPod classic. I still have two of the last generation and they’ve served me well. Indeed, it seems like since Steve’s gone, nobody at Apple really cares about music or sound quality anymore.

So why change?

I’m no longer listening to 128kbps MP3s anymore and haven’t for quite a few years. I’ve reripped almost my entire CD collection in ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). I also have an increasing number of high res recordings from HDTracks and elsewhere. More artists are putting out lossless 24 bit recordings, sometimes up to 96KHz. None of Apple’s portable hardware, from the iPhone to the iPad to the iPod will play these well, if at all. My last-gen iPod classic will play 44.1KHz/24bit ALACs but I’ve noticed an odd digital distortion on a couple of recordings and wonder if it’s got a bad dithering algorithm in there.

The other annoying thing about the iPod is its lack of line out connection. Sometime around the 5th generation, they dropped the pins on the dock that provided a clean, line output. Now plugging into an external device requires connecting through the headphone socket and turning the volume all the way up. Not only is this messy, as it’s very likely overdriving the headphone amp to achieve the level required for line level, I have to be really careful plugging headphones into it so I don’t blow my head off.

And introducing…

The Fiio X3 addresses these limitations aggressively. If you haven’t heard of them before, Fiio’s a small Chinese company run by some enthusiastic music listeners. My first exposure to them was with their portable USB DAC/Headphone Amp, the Alpen E17 (now onto its second generation and worth checking out). A great little unit that really upped the sound quality on my laptop. Tear-downs of the Fiio hardware show impressive attention to detail and some real wizardry putting these tiny devices together. They do great work, and the X3 gen 2 is a fine example of what they’re capable of. It feels really solid, has a metal body, the mechanical shuttle wheel has a satisfying action with smooth detents. The buttons are all metal. The volume up button has a little nub on it so you can easily feel it in the dark.

Holding and operating the thing is a real pleasure.

Which brings me to the sound. This is their mid-level player. Between the X1 and the X5. Then they have an Android-based player called the X7. Then there’s the M1… ok, their product line is all over the map, but reviews and price point eventually guided me to the X3. The X5 has a slightly better display and a much-beefier output stage, but that wasn’t necessary with the headphones I use, Grado SR225s and Shure SE535s.

It sounds stunning.

On a high quality, high resolution recording, this thing delivers clear, crisp sound. Tons of detail in a tiny, hand-held package. Where my iPod had a “grainy” messy sound with my Grados, this thing handles them effortlessly. I may have just been hearing the iPod’s cheaper output stage – the Grados are pretty unforgiving without adequate power – but it was noticeable. On the X3, the Grados just sound pure and smooth, if a little bright. I have a custom EQ setting on the Fiio that gives a 2db bump around 65Hz and trails off on either side that adds a little warmth to the sound. My Shure in-ear monitors are unbelievably clear with this thing. No noticeable noise in the amp stage even at high volumes.

The Fiio X3 is capable of storing 200GB of music on a micro SD card. I bought a Samsung 128GB card for now and have a decent collection on it.

If you want to playback through a car system or portable speakers, the line-out jack on top of the player sounds crystal clear. Way better in the car than my iPod’s headphone jack. If you have an outboard digital to analog converter, you can switch the lineout into SPDIF mode and connect a coax cable to it via the included adapter. This thing is versatile!

Oh, but wait. You want to use the built-in DAC in the X3 to stream sound from your laptop? No problem. The X3 will also act as a USB audio device.

Battery life seems impressive. I have yet to run it out during the month I’ve had the X3. The 2600mAh battery is rated for over 11 hours on the spec sheet and I have little doubt it’ll get there. Certainly 10 hours. Charging takes some time and they recommend using a 2 amp charger with it, not included in the packaging. A hot USB port or wall plug will charge it fully in around 3 hours.

Negativeland

ok, it wouldn’t be much of a review if I didn’t have something bad to say about the X3. Let’s get the worst thing out of the way: The display is not great. Hard to see in daylight. You can forget about seeing the screen at all if you’re wearing sunglasses. It’s just not very bright. The 320×200 pixel TFT display is like a throw-back to about 10 years ago.

And through the display, we get to see the Fiio’s interface. I’d heard a lot of negative comments about the UX on these things, but honestly, I think it’s pretty good. I just wish that one of the 6 included themes was black text on white as it might make the thing a little easier to read in bright daylight. The blue jeans theme… and the wood panelling… Not good.

But version 2.0 of the firmware fixed a bunch of UX nits except one glaring one: The Genre category. Instead of showing artists and albums in a given genre, the X3 shows you all the files within that category. Not really useful, unless you plan on shuffling an entire genre.

It actually took me a little while when I first plugged a card into the X3 to figure out how to update the media library. By default, it was set to update only manually, and it can take some time on a fully-loaded 128GB card. Like, over a minute.

And where is that media library? It seems to be stored somewhere in memory in the X3 itself, not on the card. Since there’s no external player management software, this media library is where all your playlists live. And there’s no way to edit them outside of the player’s interface. Not a big deal, but I would love to be able to make tweaks to the metadata in an editor.

Where this becomes a problem is if you want to have multiple cards with, say, different genres on each. You have to wipe out the media library anytime you change cards, losing all your favorites, recent plays and playlists. It would be nice if they stored that information on the card itself.

Conclusion

While I was shopping around, I read a bunch of reviews around the webs about some of the available players out there. There are some crazy, high-end devices, and a slew in between. Surprisingly, some of the higher end units have even worse interface problems than the X3. I knew going in the interface was going to be a bit basic and the display was going to be a challenge. These aren’t deal-breakers for me at all, and inside, when you’re not in the blinding sun, the display is quite decent. I am supremely happy with my little X3 and a huge fan of what Fiio’s doing in the space.

I’m enjoying listening to music and podcasts on this thing so much, I find myself making excuses so I can go off and listen to it. It is a total upgrade over my old iPods.

• Fiio X3 Second Generation, Black (Amazon US, Canada)
• Grado SR225 (Amazon US, Canada)
• Shure SE535 (Amazon US, Canada Listings)
• Samsung 128GB microSD card (Amazon US, Canada)

In between tackling a work project that kind of spilled over into the weekend and watching TechReady¹ sessions, I decided to fix an annoyance I had with the Raspberry Pi Zero.

Like I wrote the other day, the Zero supports USB OTG, and you can get it to act as a virtual Ethernet port by simply appending dtoverlay=dwc2 at the end of config.txt to patch the device tree and add modules-load=dwc2,g_ether to cmdline.txt just after rootwait.

That’s the work of a few seconds, and when hooked up to another computer, the Zero will simply set itself up with an IPv4 local link address and announce itself over Bonjour – which works wonderfully with my Mac and most Linux boxes, including other Pis. All I need to do is ssh pi@zero.local and I’m set.

If I need to install or update something, it’s trivial to share my network connection to it – but that just doesn’t work under Windows for me. I already have enough trouble with Docker, the Hyper-V virtual switch and access to corporate Wi-Fi (right now, for whatever reason, they’re mutually exclusive), so I decided not to fiddle with my work laptop that deeply and figure out a way to know the Zero’s link-local address.

Fortunately, I had a Scroll pHAT lying around, so all I really needed to do was solder a set of headers onto the Zero…

…and tweak the network config (on post-up for usb0) to run a little script to display the IP address on it:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from scrollphat import write_string, scroll, clear, set_brightness
from socket import socket, AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM
from time import sleep

def get_ip_address():
    """Fool the network stack into telling us what the outbound interface is without actually connecting anywhere"""
    s = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM)
    s.connect(("8.8.8.8", 53))
    return s.getsockname()[0]

set_brightness(3)
write_string(" IP: %s " % get_ip_address())
for i in range(0,128):
    sleep(0.15)
    scroll()
clear()

It’s a bit clunky and marquees have always been a tad cheesy, but it works and I can now move on to prototyping a few things. Also, I had to dim down the brightness a tad because those LEDs pack a serious punch. So if everything else fails, I now have myself an Internet-enabled reading light…

A week ago the new Wonder Woman movie trailer was released at Comic Con. I’m not sure if it’s going to be any good, and it’s not getting any easier to stomach the super hero movie slop they keep dishing out, but this is yet another one I won’t be able to resist. I’m a sucker for a magic lasso.

I discovered the trailer thanks to an old gold ds106 superstar Anna Rinko. I have written about her awesomeness before on this blog, and I always enjoy promoting her genius. She took ds106 when she was in 9th grade as a two-week summer class (something I affectionately termed the Breaskfast Club edition of ds106) and this year she became a Freshman at UMW. My only regret about leaving UMW is not getting to be part of the amazing things Anna will do (has done), a fact I was doubly jealous/bummed/excited about when hearing she’s now a Digital Knowledge Center tutor! She is truly a special person, and ever since her ds106 experience four years ago she took the art of creating trailer mashups quite seriously. She has made many mashups over the years, and you can see some of them here. She sends me short emails from time-to-time letting me know about her latest creations, and I erratically respond with “That’s awesome!” —which provides a pretty accurate insight to the quality of pedagogue I am.  But after watching her latest creation I was moved to write a post because she does such a brilliant, detailed job editing scenes featuring Linda Carter as Wonder Woman from the 1970s TV series to the soundtrack of the 2017 film’s trailer. It’s pretty awesome!

Knowing Anna is out there doing this work for all of us makes me feel good despite all the craziness right now. Just make some art, dammit!