From the FontFeed: Macula, The Impossible Typeface. There are so many awesome things I love about this typeface; I just don’t know where I would use it.
We have about three years of Flip video we can’t watch on our AppleTV because the Flip file format (a strange AVI variant) won’t load in iTunes, Handbrake, or most other conversion applications. I found MPEG Streamclip, a video converter for Mac OS X, which looks dodgy when judged upon the website, but which works like a charm in practice.
I cannot describe how good it feels to pick up my bass again and play it. It’s like an extension of my hands; My fingers play songs that I learned 20 years ago by themselves. The new amp Santa bought me for Christmas is a work of art. The control over its tone and sound is amazing, and the ability to wire an iPod through the speaker, adjust both the instrument and auxiliary sound levels, and play through a set of headphones is incredible. Last night I made a playlist on the spare music server and wired that directly into the amp. Awesome!
Interesting. Our music server in the basement can’t stay up and running for more than a day without disappearing off the network completely; some sleuthing reveals the iTunes (10.5) database getting is continually getting corrupted. This drives me nuts and Jen even nuttier—she’s the one working from home. Apple’s boards are predictably quiet about my problem, so I had to do some heavy Google-fu to find answers elsewhere. This one looks promising: Deleting the Genius database.. The author goes on to suggest turning Genius off completely, because it seems to the the root of iTunes evil. So I know what I’m trying this evening.
I just made a mess of myself. Look at this and weep: the 1937 Ingalls Special. It’s not the most beautiful roadster I’ve ever seen, but everything is purpose-built. I’d take this over a Lotus 7 any day.
Here’s the build thread for a very internet-famous garage (a picture seen on a thousand car enthusiast Tumblrs): The 12-Gauge Garage. What can I say; it’s inspiring. And the guy has a race-ready 911 Porsche.
I found this Johnny Lightning Scout at the Wal-Mart last week. I’m told there’s a topless model in black out there that’s not lifted and I’d like that one for my collection, but I haven’t seen it yet. Instead I found one of these, the color of which approximates Peer Pressure before she was painted purple.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
