Fresh Lick Of Paint

14 January 2015

Quick note for the RSS crew: I’ve overhauled the design of infovore.org the tiniest bit. I think everything works Well Enoughâ„¢.

Why? Primarily, because every time I look at it, I realise my eyesight is tired of 12px typefaces, and it was all a bit cluttered. So: something simple, a bit more spread out, none of that two-column nonsense, and a face I find readable. All of which was a good excuse to practice my Sass and learn a few new tricks.

And now, back to your regular schedule of endless Pinboard links and the odd post about something or other.

Slight Outage

02 March 2011

This site was down for about four days, from Saturday, owing to a server failure.

We’re now back in the world, after a hair-raising few days. Usual service now resumed.

  • "XKCD minus XKCD is a site dedicated to removing XKCD from the XKCD comic strips, with apologies to Garfield Minus Garfield." Very droll.
    (tags: xkcd comics meta )
  • "Harrison's concept–which works, by the way–uses the body as a sort of echo chamber. Which is to say, when the user taps a particular part of their body, a sensor worn around the upper arm can tell if the tap-point was at a particular spot on the forearm or on one of the individual fingertips, by assessing the vibrations sent throughout the body by the tap." The detection of tap location is remarkable – a single sensor, that picks out location based on the characteristics of the body's reverberation from the tap.
  • EA Sports Active 2.0: for iPhone, Wii, and PS3 (along with centralized online hub). That's a really, really interesting lineup of products – especially considering that there's going to be peripherals for all of them – and slices through a casual-games/casual-exercise market.

Where I’ve been

08 November 2009

Me, on Bufavento Castle, in Cyprus

Up a hill, mainly.

First holiday in a year: hiking in the Five-Finger mountains in Northern Cyprus (the Turkish bit). Really excellent: sun and skies and outdoors and lots of photographs I am currently processing. Recharged batteries that were more run-down than I realised.

And, before that, I moved house again. Could have done without that, but on the plus side, the new place is lovely.

The links have still been chugging along, as you can see, and there’s been lots more stuff from me over at the BERG blog.

There should be some stuff here quite soon, though – something on loot and Borderlands (ah, Borderlands, how I love you), not to mention a few other things – so in the meantime, I hope you haven’t minded the cavalcade of links.

Onwards!

Lack of “Momentum”

07 November 2008

It’s been a long while since I’ve pulled a post from this site. If you missed the post in question don’t worry. If you did see it and can’t find it… sorry about that. I’ve decided I’m not happy joining thoughts from an incomplete experience with phrases that can only be hypothetical; it’s cheap and lazy. Better to wait for a full product – only a week away – to pass judgment. So in 10-14 days, I imagine I’ll be talking about Momentum again. And I think I’ll be happier with the results. The thinking won’t go away – it’ll just be constructed a bit better in future.

Sorry about that.

A few small changes

09 September 2008

A small tweak to the blog’s design – updating the way comments looked. Ever since this design premiered, I’d been meaning to tidy them up, but never got around to it until today. No idea why it took so long – 10 minutes of sketching and 20 minutes of code was all it took to get there. Anyhow, they now look like this, with gravatars and slightly-better-spacing and all. Feels a little more finished, for the time being.

New lick of paint

30 September 2007

So, if you occasionally drop by the website, you might notice there’s a new lick of paint around the place. Nothing too drastic on the surface – under the hood was more drastic.

infovore.org is now running on WordPress 2.3, after a long hiatus on 2.0.x (due to the way the site worked). I’m now relying way less on hacks and custom plugins, and way more on the core codebase. Tagging, for starters, is now native. That’s nice.

I’m also using categories a bit more effectively – you’ll notice some main ones on the right, there, and I’m looking to focus my writing around these topics, I think. It’s a long job to go back and recategorise four years of posts… but I’m going to do it, somehow! In the meantime, if you fancy re-orientating yourself around the site, the new-look archives might hint at what’s going on better.

There’s been all manner of WordPress jigerring, too – mainly around the way the breadcrumb-header works, and how each category colour-codes a lot of its posts.

I’m pleased with the new look. I’m afraid I’ve not tested it in IE6/7, yet, and I’m sure there will be a few rough edges around the place. Let me know if you find any. I think the only one I found was, in my tag migration, everything got tagged as “holiday”. Oops.

Status Report

01 July 2007

A long while since my last “real” post, then. In that time a lot’s happened; most significantly, I failed to pass comment on Russell Davies’ Interesting 2007, which was pretty excellent. There’s lots of stuff scattered around the web and Russell’s on site about it. It was a delightful, gentle, eye-opening, very British day of talk, tea, and apples. So good, I stayed out eating and drinking, rather than heading to Hack Day until the next day.

What I saw of Hack Day on Sunday was pretty good. I even attempted a hack in about half an hour, which went far enough as proof of concept without really being worth showing. It was a gag-hack, basically, but fun to have the challenge.

My talk at Interesting is available on Slideshare. Not only that, it’s also available on my slightly-revamped talks page. I say “slightly” revamped, because the whole markup could do with an overhaul, really, but for now, there’s lots of Slideshare action – including slides from my ETech talk last year, previously too big to host on my pitiful hosting.

Workwise, we had the official launch of Nature Precedings, which is a place for life-scientists and life-science researchers to share pre-publication and in-progress work; something a bit like a preprint service for the life-sciences community. If you’re within the larger scientific community, you might understand why it’s reasonably significant. It generated a fair bit of buzz, and I hope it goes from strength to strength. Great to work with many colleagues from NPG on it, as well as with the team at Thoughbot.

As ever, I’ve been neglecting the blog, but I’m thinking of ways around that – less, more often, might end up being some kind of solution. Right now, I feel on the cusp of something, but I have no idea what – how big it is, what it is. I’m just pushing myself forward, hoping to find that edge at some point soon.

In the meantime: I’ll keep linking, keep taking pictures, keep writing, and keep aggregating the results of those endeavours here.

So much to say…

23 December 2006

…so little time. I’ve been not so much busy as hectic in the past few weeks, and very out of practice at the blog. I’m planning to change that – in fact, to change a lot – in 2007. Rest assured that all is well here, though it hasn’t been the easiest of times.

I’m catching a train early tomorrow to head back home, to Gloucestershire, and spend a few days with family before meeting the Girl’s family for a few more days, and then it’s back to the Smoke for an extended New Year break. I’m looking forward to lots of food and rest. I’m also probably going to be able to finish the various unfinished blogposts sitting around – about print-out-ed media, about a few of the tricks I wrangled to build this new blog design, about Gears of War, and about 2006 as a whole.

In the meantime: keep safe, keep sound, hold your loved ones close, have a very happy Christmas. That’s exactly what I’m planning to do.