after buying a typewriter for addressing envelopes in 2007 and watching it languish in storage for the years afterwards, I decided to turn it into something more useful—a teleprinter. keypresses are sent over serial, and it prints data received.
short story: it worked, but a project this size isn't without its gotchas.
figured I'd check in since the blog hasn't seen much love lately. I've been super-busy at home lately trying to put the finishing touches on the typewriter, and I've made some really good progress. feast your eyes on this:
the typewriter is printing data sent to it from the computer now. there are obviously a few problems, but the project is on the final stretch.
Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow made his little poster showing what a bunch of Flash-using web sites look like without Flash without actually looking to see how they render on MobileSafari. Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264. iPhone visitors to these sites have no idea they’re missing anything because, well, they’re not missing anything. For a few other of the sites Brimelow cited, like Disney and Spongebob Squarepants, there are dedicated native iPhone apps.
Kendall Helmstetter Gelner put together this version of Brimelow’s chart using actual screenshots from MobileSafari, the App Store, and native iPhone apps. The only two blue boxes left: FarmVille and Hulu.John Gruber
pretty damning that Brimelow could only find two good examples for his Apple roast, including the porn card he chose. I'm on the fence on the Flash debate, but I keep finding it harder and harder to justify.
every time I visit a page by Panic, I am impressed by its design.
this blog post about blue moons is not only an informative yarn, it's also beautiful. the paperclips, the blueprint paper, the snippets — even the comment bubbles and comment form. sublime.
Serves 6-8
Ingredients:
Mash the potatoes with:
Spread potato mixture in pan.
In a bowl with a fork, mix:
Sprinkle over potatoes.
Bake at 325°F oven for 30 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes.
for the first time I'm reading a book with a highlighter and pen handy. after 25 pages of On Writing Well, it looks like every one will be marked by the time I finish.
it took me hours to get this far, not because the writing is inaccessible or full of metaphor, but because it is so simple and overthought. I find myself re-reading sentences, even paragraphs, marveling at the word choice, like the sentence “today [distractions] also include a galaxy of electronic devices for receiving entertainment and information” (page 8). as I read and re-read I wonder if Zinsser picked galaxy without a second thought or if it came from dozens of iterations, crafting the sentence into the final gem that was published.
for the next generation, where emails, IM, and SMS have already replaced voicemail, hallway meetings, and gossiping over tea, this book should be required reading. anyone who uses a keyboard or pen would benefit from it.
I've been pretty far behind on feeds lately, which means catching up in binges, which means missing out on things that take some time to process and follow up on. luckily jauricchio always seems to be looking out for me.
take for example the Academia vs. Business comic from xkcd, clearly written with an academic's bias (as pointed out by Wil Shipley). I left it at that, completely skipping the tooltip, which referred to the value 0x5f375a86 as being special. luckily jauricchio caught it and looked it up: it was part of the fast computation of inverse square roots (used a lot in 3-D graphics) and was later revised to the current value, 0x5f3759df. the code, courtesy Wikipedia:
floatI love hacks like this.
from a very early age I was bothered by religion, but not for reasons you might expect. let me take you back to middle school and one of my last video game addictions: Sim City 2000. I loved that game, but it exposed my intense dislike for inconsistencies. observe:
nice 12x4 blocks of residential. 12x4 was my building block size. the property was all close enough to the street so it wouldn't undergo traffic starvation, but the blocks were big enough to scale well into the 4x4-building-sized endgame, without too much land being sacrificed to streets.
anyway, I digress. in no time, these blocks would fill, and my little city would begin to bustle — BUT WHAT'S THIS?!
I had an issue with churches because I wanted to maximize population. people don't live in churches, so churches are wasting precious residentially-zoned land!
but it got worse. churches were a type of building that never went abandoned, so the only way to promote new construction was to destroy it. but when I bulldozed the church, the land beneath it was dezoned! look!
why do they get such a priviledge? if every time a building is constructed, is there a 1/250 chance it becomes a church? is the church going to stage a slow takeover of all the land in my city by this method? NOT ON MY WATCH! I bulldozed all those churches and rezoned the land as dense residential.
as a result of this strange childhood I've always viewed churches as land that could be used better, but never will be. they just clog up the streets every Sunday. like the one near Chez Fun that was on the way to Alice's.
but Cindy and I just moved to a new place, and within throwing distance of our place is this daycare which looks kinda funny. I guess I understand that a religiously-inclined daycare would want to look like a church, but it still strikes me as silly.
and then I saw their sign today on my way to work:
thanks to DJCapelis for sending me this link to an article from 1960 on hobbyist X-ray machines titled An Inexpensive X-ray Machine. it always delights me to read about historical hacks and how they were developed.
a sample from the article:
it makes me sad that the friends I think would make the best parents are against having children of their own. likewise of the people I know that want to or will (on purpose or by accident) have children, very few strike me as having good parenting potential.
yet another reason why the world sucks. not that it matters, we aren't here very long in the grand scheme of things.
don't look at me, I don't know either. these thoughts just strike me sometimes.