hyperdata.it

I haven’t been buying many books in the past couple of years, mostly due to lack of funds. But as well as web-native docs online, there are also loads of books around as PDFs. If they’re associated with a particular project I’m working on, I’ll drop them in a folder there, typically ~/[project]/references. If not they should get dumped in...

Made a quick little electronics prototype yesterday, sounds an alarm when you touch your face. The idea being to train you to do it less often, hence reducing the transfer of infectious microbes from your hands to your mouth/nose/eyes. Demo vid, schematic & description: https://github.com/danja/touch-sensitive/ Inspired by Dr Daniel Reardon (Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device).

Caveat : I’m no expert on this, but has worked well a few times. I was first shown most of these tricks by a guitar builder at the London College of Furniture, since then have applied them and picked up other bits, learned a bit from practice. This is a friend who plays jazz guitar, really likes a guitar I...

tldr; When parts of sites are generated on the fly by browser Javascript, they can’t be directly archived. Augmenting a simple crawler with an easy-to-use browser automation subsystem (Selenium) makes this very straightforward. Background If you got past the title of this post, chances are you’ve executed a command something like this: wget –mirror –convert-links –adjust-extension –page-requisites –no-parent http://example.org This...

I noted recently with my ELFquake project that, at least with a slow brain like mine, there’s a definite efficiency trade-off between procrastinating and just Doing Stuff. In the time it took me to get around to implementation, research and plain old thought had led me to much better, quicker ways of doing things. I’ve just had another episode of...

I do not fear AI or robots. I fear humans. Within the next 30 years (again) a very good chance of computer-generated creatures being close to thinking like a small dog. Is all good. Another industrial revolution. Look at those factory jobs robots are doing, is brilliant. So everyone has to retrain as a computer programmer. Well grab your wifi....

Had a little personal epiphany just now, walking back from Castiglione (tobacco run…ok, wine too). tldr If you’re bored, read on, if you’re happy clap your hands, or vice versa.   I’ve been home for a month, done nothing you’d call productive. Each week mostly two-part: half wine bender; half depressed couch potato. Was putting it down to post-holiday malaise,...

Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua) is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle. Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. A tiny green dot in an ocean of blue. People arrived there, it is...