Tiny Little Life

A friend of mine is obsessed with brains; if there was ever a zombie apocalypse, she would ask to be in their “special-interest group”. She also likes to sew, so for me the obvious thing to do was to make her a brain pincushion.

To me, the most evident way to construct a brain was to make a Hilbert Curve and wrap it around a ball of some kind. None of my Google searches for “hilbert curve brain” came up with any relevant results, so I’m forced to conclude that I’m the first person to use a Hilbert curve to approximate the wrinkled shape of a brain.

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Here are some pictures of insects and spiders at the San Diego Zoo, in the Insect House.

Like this Goliath bird-eating spider. Yes, it eats birds.


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Here are a few pictures I took at the reptile house at the San Diego Zoo.

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I don’t often see these masked hunter young (Reduvius personatus), probably because they go to great length to camouflage themselves.

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I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of FontClustr, which is freely available on GitHub, now supports an interactive HTML tree for browsing its output.

This is a step toward an interactive font chooser that sorts by appearance.

When I go looking for a good typeface, I usually have a few styles in mind that I want to try out. Once I pass over some fonts that I definitely don’t want to use, it’s handy to be able to collapse the list. This is now possible, by clicking on one of the colored vertical bars to the left of the font previews.

In this case, I am clicking on the bright red bar to hide all the entries attached to it.

Currently, this action is not very aesthetic; the tree is changed instantly — without animation. Additionally, the excess space is not taken up in a logical way, so if you collapse a big section then it might be ambiguous as to whether the other fonts slid up or down to fill the void.

Still, its one less thing between me and the perfect typeface for whatever I’m doing.

Not counting the padding the font previews here are 50px in size. Collapsing them makes them fit into 20% of the original amount of space.

About 12 years ago, I became a big fan of the art of Digital Blasphemy — digital artwork that was quite impressive for its time. I was a member, and downloaded every bit of media I could get my hands on. One of my favorites was a short video clip of an abstract undulating blob, which repeated a few times.

Although I had made up my mind to convert it to an infinitely-repeating GIF, I lacked the tools to do so. Then I forgot about it, until today. Of course, today it’s so easy; VirtualDub made it child’s play, and there are many other free tools that would have made equally short work of it. But here is the result, in what (I think) is its native resolution.

Not bad for 1999.

This weekend, I went on a trip to Vermont and saw a lot of interesting wildlife.

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Both of these pepper grinders broke after less than 6 months of daily use because the grinding mechanism is held together with flimsy plastic.

Through the hole in the centers, you can see where and how the plastic broke. Both times, this resulted in peppercorns all over my food, counter, and floor.

It’s easy to sort a single directory by date in Linux with the ls command. Here’s how to sort a directory and its subdirectories by date:

find Music/ \
| xargs -d"\n" -i{} \
echo "stat --printf=\"%y\t%z\" \"{}\" \
&& echo \"\t{}\"" \
| sh \
| sort

If piping arbitrary text through the shell makes you nervous, try it without the |sh |sort beforehand.

In my experience, hoverflies will become used to your presence and not fly away while you are trying to photograph them.

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