How did I not know that there is a blog dedicated to the fashion of Star Trek: The Next Generation? This is GENIUS.

It’s not often I get to read a story by Roald Dahl that I’ve never read before! Recently I had that wonderful thrill though when I finally managed to track down a copy of Dahl’s 1952 essay “The Amazing Eyes of Kuda Bux” in an old magazine on eBay. Head over to Roald Dahl Fans to read the rest…

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/notendo/data-weave?ref=hero_thanks

Very cool. I’ve been a fan of GLITCHAUS‘s work for years. (He’s been mentioned in a couple different versions of my “Knit One Compute One” talk.) I’ve just taken the opportunity to back this latest project, ordering a scarf woven with the binary from the ILOVEYOU virus.

Me: “…considering it was a formative experience in our relationship ☺”

Snookums: “You mean, you going to the pub while I helped fix it?”

Me: “exactly”

Actual things I typed to the Snook on chat while watching this video:

• That is some excellent QWOP
• That’s also how I run in my dreams.
• 😂
• LOL I love how the humanoid runs
• Okay, that made me weirdly philosophical by the end
  RUN LITTLE PERSON RUN
  FORWARD PROGRESS IS YOUR ONLY REWARD
  RELENTLESS ATTEMPTS
  IN A NEVERENDING WORLD WHERE FORCE PERTURBATIONS HIT YOU IN THE TORSO

What can I say? I’ve become rather obsessed with 17776, and it’s giving me existential angst.

Unsolicited endorsement: Every Saturday I make a menu plan for the week*. As inputs, I go with our current fridge and freezer assets as well as whatever’s coming in the next Ooooby box. Then I use Paprika to find recipes that will use up the most perishable stuff first. Paprika’s great for organising your online recipes, and we keep our old iPad in the kitchen to cook from.

That said, last week I was looking at our bookshelf full of dead tree cookbooks and lamenting the fact that we rarely cook from them. “If only there was a database that I could search as easily as I do Paprika,” I said to the Snook. “Oh wait!” he said. “I saw something for that recently.”

Less than a day later we’d signed up for a year subscription to Eat Your Books and loaded our 40+ cookbooks into it. I was happy to see that just about all our books were already in there, and probably 85% of them were indexed. Once you’ve logged your books, you can search through the recipe indexes by ingredient, type of meal, etc. So handy! Already we’ve cooked from our books three times since: Neil Perry’s Persian-style lamb stew, Jamie Oliver’s Crispy Chicken, and Momofuku’s Brussels sprouts with fish sauce vinaigrette.

Highly recommended if you’re in the same situation…

* The Snook hates making meal decisions, so I make the list and assign him all the more labour-intensive dishes.

Tired of bulking up your wallet with several different credit cards, id cards, and transit cards? We found out a way to extract the key functional components from the Clipper Card, and mold it into a variety of wearable devices, including a small rubber plate, a waterproof aspirin band, and a breadboard bracelet.

Source: Transform the SF Clipper Card Into a Wearable: 7 Steps (with Pictures)

Ooh, that’s very cool! I wonder if it’d work with an Opal card??

In some versions of my “Knit One, Compute One” talk, I mention the Emission Spectra scarves that Becky Stern made back in 2010. Becky’s blog post links to PDF patterns for some common elements as well as an online pattern generator, but unfortunately these are all gone now. (Link rot, how I hate you.) However, Archive.org to the rescue! Their 2015 snapshot of the post has captured the PDFs so you can still access them. Tungsten is definitely my favourite!

More photos available at Becky Stern’s Flickr photoset…

Folks, I have now given versions of this talk twenty-one times. I reckon it’s about time to retire it, yes? Thankfully, the folks at Zendesk’s Software Art Thou meetup produced a wonderful video of the version I did last month in Melbourne, which is pretty much the “canonical” long version:

If you prefer the 5-minute taster, then the one I did at TEDx Melbourne last year is still the gold standard:

Things I learned from this profile of Marimekko:

• Marimekko is Finnish for “Mary’s Dress.”
• The company is 94% female!
• Their factory in Helsinki has a shop next door that sells discounted seconds with printing errors. 😳
• As part of the company’s turnaround in the 90’s, the new CEO gave individual designers profit responsibility on their designs. Giving decision-making authority to the people doing the work seems to pay off whether in tech or in textiles!
• “Early on, when Isola was making many of the company’s famous patterns by transferring her paintings to fabric, she would test them out in black and white before thinking about colors.” Good tip to keep in mind for my next sewing/knitting projects.

“When you see a colorway, you just know whether it’s Marimekko or not.” – Yep. I was lucky enough to score a pair of Marimekko Converse when I was in the US a few years back. They always draw compliments!

Instead of getting into the computer business, traditional watch companies should focus on what they’ve always done: designing and making great mechanical watches — creating a breath of analog fresh air in an ever-more digitized world.

Source: Daring Fireball: The Swiss Watch Industry Should Double Down on Mechanical Watches

I totally agree! Rather than get a smartwatch, I celebrated my 40th birthday by buying myself an honest-to-goodness grown-up mechanical Swiss watch from Longines. It’s a beautiful work of art and engineering, and it’ll last me decades.