I was running out of space in the hall to keep spare hard drives, so I put up a hard drive shelf. In order to achieve this, I used the wrong screws, applied those to the wrong hammers, and then carefully glued them into the wrong fasteners. It is level. It is mostly being held up by the pliant wall fasteners acting as springs. I used my splendid Bosch-PSB 1800 , which performed its role beautifully, injuring nobody.
Ants micro-manage aphid populations : aphid farming extends to remarkable levels of population control.
Jeremy Corbyn fails to win backing of other UB40
Satire possibly dead.
A pro-Corbyn Labour source insisted they were unworried by the 50% endorsement. "We have the backing of the more popular and successful UB40" they said. "Proof that splitters don't prosper".
They actually tried to make #UB4Corbyn a thing.
blinks
The Chemist's war: how the U.S. government deliberately poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.
It seems like I've been waiting all my computing life for VDUs to exceed 200 DPI . Well, that's an exaggeration. I've been waiting for it for about as long as I was first exposed to system-wide vector-based type rendering, in the late 1980s. So I'm understandably excited about Apple's new "retina" MacBook Pro , with it's display of ~220 DPI.
Why care so much about DPI? It's all about the text, in particular the inherent problems with clearly scaling non-rectilinear strokes. Text is the fundamental component of everything I do with computers. It always has been, and it seems likely that it will long continue to be. As a floppy haired, slack-wristed aesthete, I really care that the text, which I will be staring into for hours, is clear and beautiful.
The LCD screens used for most modern displays are constructed from a mesh of tiny discrete transparent shutters , which work in combination to make up pixels, which are the smallest visual element that can be addressed on a bitmap display. Typically these pixels are nearly square, and they are arranged in a 2D matrix of perhaps a few million elements. That may sound like a lot, but it's coarse enough to introduce perceptible distortion into lines that are not perfectly rectilinear.
One of my favourite things about Mac OS X, and it's upstart little brother, iOS, is the respect their type-generating software applies to letterform. Typefaces render very faithfully, regardless of scale, and pains are taken to smooth out the curves, using anti-aliasing techniques, that detect the staircasing edges of lines, and soften them into their background with gradual shading. This works very well, but it's not un-noticeable; there's a soft-focus effect that gives a fringey halo to certain text shapes; you become inured to it over time. Other GUI systems tend to adjust the letterform to make the text better align to the pixel grid, it's common for people who aren't habituated to the Mac to comment about the degree of blur.
Things are much better than they used to be. Way back in the day, when outline curved rendering was just too computationally expensive to be routine, everything on-screen was painted as a copy of a pre-drawn bitmap , and blocky graphics were everywhere, particularly once scaling and translation was applied. We peered at them on our tiny goldfish-bowl CRT monitors. Outline font rendering was a specialist feature of certain software packages or dedicated computer systems, perhaps not even rendered online. The fanciest workstation computers had gigantic 20" CRTs , and all vector graphical engines like Display PostScript . It seemed reasonable then to expect the exponential improvements in technology to scale this up to at least print-quality DPI, and the costs to come down.
The costs did come down, and the computers continued their frantic pace of improvement, but something appeared to lock mainstream display rendering at somewhere around 100 DPI for over a decade. I think it was a combination of factors.
There was the move away bulky from beam scanning phosphor dot CRT monitors, which are theoretically capable of precise drawing at a perfectly graduated range of resolutions, over to the more space and power efficient LCD displays, with the aforementioned discrete physical pixel elements. Fifteen years ago I had a 19" ADI multisync CRT monitor, and the effective resolution of my computer display crept up as I upgraded my graphics card and display, and the monitor kept pace. For the last ten years, I've been using a nice 23" HP widescreen LCD , and my desktop resolution has been locked at 1920x1200 that corresponds to the mechanical pixel array of my screen.
LCD screen technology manufacturing is closely tied to flatscreen television production, where the standard vertical resolution has settled on 1080 pixels, which is marketed as ' High Definition ' which is actually pretty low definition if you stop to think that cheap desktop computers were routinely rendering higher than that years before its roll-out.
The system software used on desktop computers, made optimisations and took short-cuts based on the average dot pitch, using fixed bitmaps for painting GUI elements, making assumptions about proportions and spacing of on-screen elements that entrenched and subsequently proved remarkably hard to shift.
The turning point seems to have come with the iPhone 4 , and it's "Retina" display, with a DPI count of 326 - close to that of low-grade print - on it's highly saturated backlit LCD screen. Text looks fantastic on this generation of iPhone, still to me the nicest display of this type I've seen. This was followed up by the slightly coarser (264 DPI) Retina iPad model a couple of years later, with a and as of last week, the still slightly astonishing Retina MacBook Pro. Seems like the high DPI era I've been waiting for is here!
And yet I'm not going to buy a Retina MacBook Pro. I did give it some excited thought. I rushed right out to Apple Covent Garden after the announcement, and fondled one for a little bit, and decided it's not really for me. Experience has taught me to steer wide of a 1st iteration Mac Platform, especially one where Apple seems to be pushing the hardware design into some advanced new shape. There's often early adopter trouble. A couple of early warning signals jump out at me from the start. Pushing that many pixels around is really going to need some grunt work. I have my suspicions about cooling; why the big air vents down the side, why devote five minutes of the keynote describing a cunning new fan design? It's a Mac, I want no fans. Steve always wanted No Fans . It's too big and heavy for me, and yes of course, it's really expensive.
I ordered a new generation 13" MacBook Air . It will replace my current laptop, a last generation 13" MacBook Air. Which replaced my previous laptop, a 13" MacBook Air from the year before. Seems I have a MacBook Air habit .
The wedge-shaped MacBook Air is iterating rapidly to converge upon my ideal computer. Light enough to move around without becoming a burden. A full scale keyboard that I enjoy typing upon, as an emacs -wedded touch typist prone to RSI. Enough pixels on the screen to productively juggle the magical 3 window pattern I tend to adopt for work (an editing window, a reference window, and a command shell). Enough power that I don't need to worry about where my next charge point is. And the 13" display has fairly small pixels (~128 DPI). Smaller text isn't as legible as I'd like, mind you, and some of the GUI elements are a bit small. It would be nice to have more CPU cores. Like I say, iterating rapidly...
200+ DPI displays are clearly here to stay. Where Apple plant their flag, all the OEM PC hardware makers ineveitably follow. Microsoft Windows , which to me increasingly looks like it's playing catch-up, seems to me, looking from the outside, to be more completely resolution independent than either of Apple's operating systems at this point in time, so that shouldn't be a hold-up to broader deployment any more. Production will simplify. Costs will fall with scale.
I had been planning on buying a nice external display, probably an Apple Thunderbolt , because they make lovely docking stations for Thunderbolt-equipped laptops, but that's a foolish idea now. It seems sensible to bet that there will be a high-DPI equivalent along within a couple of years, and monitors are a long term investment. I can wait.
We seem to be at something of a transitional phase for the personal computer at the moment. It seems likely that the future of the Mac is some kind of convergence point between the iPad, the retina MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, but I can't quite figure out what shape that thing will take. I am typing this final sentence on my box-fresh, just powered up, 2012 MacBook Air, with it's new Mac smell, and it's LCD screen cleaner than I will ever be able to polish it; already I am day-dreaming about it's replacement.
Octopus hitches lift on Dolphin's genitals : I once had an octopus attached to my forearm for ten minutes. Harder to shift than melted chewing-gum.
UK commuters crowdsource legal action : British commuters are raising money for legal action against rail franchise. Interesting times
Quite a parameter list : @duncang is always telling me genomics is crufty
Wreck of HMS Tarpon found : Royal Navy submarine sunk in 1940 with a loss of at least 50 souls.
If it's the last weekend in May, then it must be time for me to go to Primavera Sound ! Barcelona's premier eclectic music festival, or as I like to call it, only semi-jokingly, my annual trip to Spain to watch Shellac. It seems like I've been going forever now, but when I tally up, I think this year is only my sixth visit. Enough for the memories to blur together somewhat; I'm starting to find navigating around the site confusing; each year there is a gradual migration of stage locations, and a subtle shuffling of stage names.
You can buy early-bird VIP passes shortly after they confirm the dates for the festival, which is far in advance of any lineup announcement. These sell for around the same price as the eventual full festival pass, but confer various privileges to reward the faithful. This year, I was finally smart and planned ahead. and I got us a pair back in July. Ah, hubris. Subsequently we fell pregnant, and had a baby just four weeks before the festival, making a mockery of my forward planning, and invalidating our usual routine of attending as part of an extended family holiday. I ended up scaling my visit right back down to a quick in-and-out just across the festival days, and after a couple of potential takers for my second ticket fell through, I ended up attending on my own.
It turns out Barcelona is still pretty much my favourite place on earth. In a break from the usual routine, I was staying in a hotel out close to the festival site, at the far end of the Avinguda Diagonal , rather than an apartment somewhere more central. The facilities nearby are pretty excellent, if a little characterless, with the large modern Mall development el Diagonal Mar providing pretty much every consumer amenity you might need, including free Wi-Fi. It's still easy to reach central Barcelona on transit during the sociable hours of day, and it solves the problems associated with picking a time to leave the Festival, and locating a means of transport home, once you hit the small hours of the morning on the weekdays. Door to door from the festival to my hotel was a leisurely ten minute walk.
Once again I had a really good time. I had a few reservations heading in. Last year was a bit crowded, and occasionally hard work. Being on my own was is a bit weird. I've done stints working away from home, but they aren't like this. Luckily I did find some people to talk to at Festival; I enjoyed the chance to spend some time with Matt and Anne , and I also bumped into a few friendly groups by chance; Mike and the Canadian islanders, and those nice chaps from Leicester from the Jeff Mangum queue. Hello to any of you who find your way to reading this!
The upside of attending on my own, it meant I was able to watch lots of bands. I overdid things a little on the Thusday, watching upwards of twenty acts in a session stretching from 4pm through to 4am. I subsequently found myself flagging a little through the middle of the session on the Friday, and finally found a happy balance for Saturday. Weather was excellent, probably the hottest Primavera I've attended. I even managed a mild sunburning on the elbows on Thursday, and I rarely sunburn. The VIP passes turned out to be a good bet - subsidised bars, segregated rest and food areas, and easy access to the indoor concert hall for the posh gigs.
Shellac completely owned it, once again. Year after year, always different, always the same. My other musical highlights were Kleenex Girl Wonder, Spiritualized pulling "Electric Mainline" out of the back catalogue in the middle of a perfect festival setlist, the pro-celebrity karaoke festival of the Big Star's 3rd tribute ( Mike Mills! Norman Blake! Ira and Georgia! Alexis from Hot Chip! ), and I need to pass out a special mention for the marathon Cure set. A bedrock foundation act from my indie disco days, they played a 30-odd song set of old fanservice and hit singles, and I nodded along from the VIP lounge, surprised by how much of it I recognised, given that I own precisely one Cure LP ( Disintegration , naturally ), and one single ( Inbetween Days, I'm predictable like that)
Here's everything I saw, replete with aribitrary ratings :
Baxter Dury ★★ Afghan Whigs ★★ Wilco ★★ Franz Ferdinand ★★ Death Cab For Cutie ★ The xx ★★ Spiritualized ★★ La Estrella De David ★★ Pegasvs ★★ Iceage ★ Grimes ★★ Danny Brown ★ A$AP Rocky ★★ Peter Wolf Crier ★★ Field Music ★★★ Kleenex Girl Wonder ★★★ Dominant Legs ★★ Bombino ★★ Lovely Bad Things ★★ Other Lives ★★ The Cure ★★ Afrocubism ★★ I break horses ★★ Dirty Beaches ★ Sleigh Bells ★★★ Nick Garrie (plays "The Nightmare of J.B. Stanistlas") ★★ Jeff Mangum ★★ Big Star's Third ★★★ Picore ★ Orthodox ★★ Sharon Van Etten ★ Justice (live) ★★★ Beach House ★★ Neon Indian ★ Demdike Stare ★★★ Shellac ★★★ The Pop Group ★ Atlas Sound ★★ Michael Gira ★★ Milagres ★★ Jenn Grant ★★ Cadence Weapon ★★
There weren't too many low-lights. Occasional bar queues. The subsidy at the VIP bars meant that the occasional drink bought outside of those enclosures had a costly sting. A couple of occasions of queuing; to collect the passes, and to get a ticket for, and then gain access to the limited entry Jeff Mangum show. Aggravating cancellations , Björk, Death Grips, Sleep and Melvins - acts I wanted to see, and in the case of Sleep, probably my ideal of the biggest single draw of the festival. Luckily I'm a veteran, pragmatic festival-goer, I don't place too much weight on being able to see individual acts. If I hadn't already seen Sleep at ATP vs Fans:2, I might perhaps think differently.
Leading up to the festival I had been wondering if it was going to be my last year at Primavera. Logistically it's growing more awkward to arrange, I've been a serial attendee for years, and sooner or later the charm should wear off. The inaugural edition of the Portugese sister festival had been catching my eye, And then everything worked it's usual magic. I plan to head back to Barcelona for 2013 if I can. Maybe I'll see you there.
Restore Bounce Mail : Mail.app lost it's "Bounce Message" command in Lion. Restore it via AppleScript.
And just like that we're back. What happened cms?
It was never entirely my intention to go offline for such an extended hiatus. Even though the web is intrinsically brittle and ephemeral, I like to do my bit to keep my little backwater serving 200 OK s to the half-dozen people who stop by to check in regularly, and the couple of dozen who linked to something I put up at some point. It's basic web-citizenship as far as I'm concerned.
Before we went fully dark, I'd not posted for a long time already . And before that I'd slowed my posting down to something of a crawl. I think there's a few reasons for that. It's easy to get bored with blogging for the sake of blogging, especially in our current age where everyone shares profligately across many social platforms . It's fairly common to see blogs that have fallen into a recursion of no posts for months, then a post apologising about that, and then further disuse. I don't think this is one of those, but the proof is in the posting I suppose.
There's certainly been less time in real life for auxilliary pursuits like online rambling, and that's a big part of the reason. No time for any proper content posts, concomitant with a surge of alternative social platforms to play around with, meant it often seemed a bit redundant to post arrays of short-links , when I could just throw them up on twitter / adn / diaspora* / flickr / ello / imzy /whatever, with a bigger audience, and more interaction.
I was also feeling a bit self-conscious about standing up in public. After leaving last.fm (fairly amicably, as these things go, fwiw, albeit with a slightly battered heart), which felt like a fairly visible shift sideways, I was quite deliberately courting more obscure, maybe more unexpected job roles, and I remember feeling like I really didn't want to bare my thoughts to the internet judgement machine whilst I wasn't even entirely sure what I was doing myself a good deal of the time. Also busy! Young family plus startups really left little time for anything much else.
I also was really feeling the pain of Wordpress . I never quite managed to find an authoring approach to use with it that didn't make writing anything seem like far harder work than it ought to be, also because I always insist on self-hosting, the sheer weight of it for maintainence and security updates, and backups, and DBA -ing, and having to write PHP or perhaps even plugins to do the inevitable customisations someone like myself inevitably finds themselves suckered into doing. So Wordpress was a drag, which was feeding my reluctance to contribute much of substance. So I decided to pause on updating whilst, in true wannabe-hacker style, I whipped together some kind of alternative content publishing system.
I'll just take a paragraph out to stress that I actually admire WordPress a great deal. It's a very sophisticated and flexible web platform, and a great choice for site management, in either managed or self-hosted configuration. It kept this site ticking along for years. It just isn't a particularly good fit for my requirements, which are extremely simple
I thought about using another off-the-shelf blogging system, which would have been the sensible route, but I figured that would just lead to a similar frustrated stalemate. So I started to sketch out an application that would allow me to quickly fling out tagged and dated content without much overhead of hosting or writing. And I carried on intermittantly piecing this app together, often on trains, for a couple of years. As an exercise in procrastination, it worked out better than I expected, and I carried on posting short content to twitter and others, reasonably happy to continue to defer the responsibility.
But then the site went dark. I was hosting it all on a linode instance. I've been a very enthusiastic linode user for perhaps ten or more years, I think they have an excellent product, offering well-provisioned VPS instances , inexpensively, with an easy to use management site. Generally I've been very happy with them to date.
This changed somewhat last year, and my confidence deflated a little. There was an extended outage of service across linode in December 2015 , apparently as a result of a targetted DDOS . This lasted for many days, and the communications about it from linode were muted and suspiciously vague. This isn't really what I expect from a first-tier ISP. I came away with the impressions that there were some significant architectural problems with their infrastructure, probably from acrued technical debt , and potentially some exploitable vulnerabilities in their public facing application software . I decided it was time for a change.
I did some reasearch and rented a couple of new hosts. This time I've gone for low end, physical servers. This represented another procrastination opportunity, because when I originally set up the beatworm.co.uk linodes, almost ten years ago, I just hand configured everything by remote shell. Now I like to use the ansible configuration management system to set up hosts, and I took this opportunity to port my public infrastructure across to use repeatable playbooks. This turned into another major yak-shave , because there was slightly more to it than just a WordPress deployment, I was hosting mail, calendars, media streaming, IM, DNS, the works. After getting lost in this tarpit for a couple of months, I decided to move the application tier over to use the playbooks from the sovereign project , which covers much of the same ground, but is already written, and uses more modern components. Of course it wasn't entirely straightforward to integrate these plays over my existing base provisioning, and I ran into a couple of glitches and gotchas with some of the choices they'd made for configuration, but it only took a couple of weekends worth of fiddling to get it all running in a fairly acceptable shape. I moved the DNS across, at which point the wordpress site was left behind, and everything went dark.
I was surprised at how much this bothered me.
I like an outlet for sharing things. I enjoy the idea of having a stable internet identity . I don't like the way the modern web has folded these ideas into a handful of consumer products run by just a couple of corporate gatekeepers. That's not the web I grew up with, and it's not the web I want to see either. A very loosely federated ecosystem of ad-hoc resources, all mixed together as hypermedia, aggregated and accessed via an assorted bag of user-agents. That's how it works best . I like to write, because I like the practice and discipline of working toward articulating my thoughts for a general reader.
I like being able to curate an archive, and keep control over how that information persists and is presented. This is hard enough to do when you have primary jurisdiction over the medium and material (there is plenty of bitrot on view in my archive, particularly in the really old material, which has been migrated across multiple publishing platforms now), and basically impossible if you're relying on a third party service, which periodically re-invents itself to better serve it's own objectives, which are only ever to be tangentally aligned with your own, at best.
I don't like the sense of obligation I get from formal social media platforms. There's a subliminal sense of pressure to perform, to update, to observe the conventions, to consider and measure the implied audience. I'm not a joiner by nature. I just end up gently resenting the throng. I like to feel like I have a voice, but I don't want, or even expect to reach, an automatically provided audience.
So, I picked back up my now-neglected website platform experiment, and knocked it together enough to get an MVP out of the door. It serves HTML over HTTP. It has a relatively minimal set of style rules that should allow it to work gracefully across various screen dimensions. It has rudimentary support for RSS ( not that many people use newsreaders any more ). It's simple to run in a staging environment, and I can write posts in plain text in emacs , and edit and post them without much extra grief. It's only got about 22% of the functionality I had originally planned, but I feel the urge to ship it, use it, and hopefully I'll refine it in production.
There's a couple of interesting quirks to this new hosting setup. It's an ARM -based micro-blade, hosted on a scaleways C1 . The blogging software is semi-static , in as much as it serves generated content from the filesystem. It's written in common lisp , and deployed in a different lisp to the one it's developed on There's no frameworks (aside from using zurb foundation classes to base the CSS). There's no database. There's no comments, because I haven't yet decided on a productive way to support them.
1950s Huffy Radiobike : All I want for Christmas. Even though I can't ride a bike. Note the tube amp.
Apple Vs GPL : Apple's attitude to GPLv3 is making OS X an increasingly shonky UNIX developer system
Alternative "Heroes" : Reject cover shots, by Masayoshi Sukita, via retronaut .
Whales can adjust their hearing : Russian scientists present evidence that some whales can dynamically recalibrate the responsive range of their sense of hearing.
Compelling case for road pricing : According to a new report by the institute for fiscal studies, the UK requires a radical overhaul of road taxing to sustain revenues.
How to make XCode's UI work for you (maybe) : Wait a minute… XCode 4 has tabs?
As of 4:29 this morning we have a second daughter! Emergency C-section delivery, but both mother and daughter are stable and doing well. Father inordinately proud. We are thinking of calling her Grace.
I already mentioned in passing, St. Vincent , the band-shaped solo project brand thing of the super-engaging Annie Clark, was by far the best act I saw at Primavera Sound 2014. It was also the act I was most looking forward to seeing going in, it’s always nice when those line up.
I guess I’m a super-fan. I first spotted Annie playing with Sufjan Stevens ' touring band. I next encountered her playing solo support for the National , touring her first St. Vincent release , upon which occasion I bolted out of the auditorium by the third song, in order to make sure I got a copy of the CD she was plugging from the merch stall before she packed away. I saw another couple of shows in Bristol, with the full band, and bought all the records, including an interesting collaboration with David Byrne .
Last weekend, while idly browsing the Glastonbury live blog, I noticed that they’d just updated their description of the current iPlayer feeds to include St. Vincent streaming on the iPlayer from the park stage. I’d been avoiding the Glastonbury video feeds due to a combination of not being in the mood, and the dullness of the tv schedules, but I wasn’t going to miss out on this, so I whacked it on the TV. True to form, it was a great set, live, risky, and peppered with amusing crowd-surfing and hat theft . Even with a bit of sound problem, and some streaming glitches I enjoyed myself, and was amused to see my enthusiastic tweeting duly included in the Guardian live feed on the next page refresh.
“ That was a really good set ”, I thought to myself, afterwards, “ but it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the Barcelona one. True, that lacked crowd invasions, and nobody lost a hat, but the lighting, and the sound, and the staging, and the lack of daylight, and the crowd being really into it…A pity there’s no TV-broadcast quality stream of that night archived away somewhere ”.
Yes, I do really talk to myself like that sometimes. Especially when I’m pretending to transcribe my inner voice for a blog.
And then, I ran into this on Youtube.
Full set, multiple cameras, properly mixed sound, pretty good video quality. I have not yet watched it enough times to see if I can see myself ( front of house, stage left, VIP pen ) in the crowd, but I expect I will.
Fish Eating Spiders : Collated observational evidence identifies as many as five families of spiders that regularly hunt and consume fish.
Rusty green submarine : official news agency reported the leader “taught” the submarine’s captain a “good method of navigation”.
elfm.el is a rudimentary last.fm radio client implemented within emacs lisp. I wrote this at work to present at our internal "Radio Hackday"; dedicated to encouraging staff to experiment with the radio services and API , and make something with them in a day and a half for show-and-tell. Kind of 20% time distilled right down to an essence.
I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough time to contribute anything, so I wanted to focus on something I could hack on by myself, because I didn't want to hold a team back if I got called away. So I picked something jokey, inessential, yet hopefully thought-provoking, as per my usual idiom.
I had a real blast participating. I don't usually get time to attend things like proper hack days, being all old and family-bound. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of inspiration and industry. All the other hacks were amazing, and waiting for my turn to demo I felt quite embarrassed about my stupid cryptic toy, but it worked perfectly in the spotlight. I got almost all the laughs, and all of the bemusement I was aiming for.
The code is here . It is awful. I haven't written any coherent lisp on this scale for many years. It uses too many global variables and special buffers. It doesn't scrobble. I had to rewrite all my planned asychronous network event machine halfway through implementation, when I re-discovered the lack of lexical closures in elisp. ( I've been reading too many common lisp books in the interim, I suspect ). I think there's enough of the germ of a useful idea in there that I might just clean it up and try and extend it into a proper thing.
I built and run it using GNU Emacs 23.4.1 . I used an external library for HTTP POST , which I found on emacswiki ( HTTP GET I glued together using the built in URL libraries). I've also put a copy of the version I used in the distribution directory. I used mpg123 for mp3 playback, which I installed using Mac Ports . The path to mpg123 is hardcoded in the lisp somewhere, probably inside play-playlist-mpg123.
Here's my demo script, which I evaluated in a scratch buffer. Evaluating these forms in sequence will authorise the application, tune in the radio, and then fetch a playlist of five tracks and start playing them.
;;;; -----DEMO , this example code is out of date, see README
; will open a browser to authorise application
(authenticate-app)
; authenticate a user session
(start-user-session)
; tune the radio to this URL
(radio-tune "lastfm://user/colins/library/")
; refresh the playlist
(get-request (get-playlist-url))
; filter the playlist response to sexps, play the list
(play-playlist-mpg123 (reduce-playlist))
There is only one playback control at the moment; stop, which you can manage by killing the buffer lastfm-radio which has the playback process attached to it. You can retune the radio with any lastfm:// URL format , by re-evaluating radio-tune, and then refreshing and playing the playlist i.e. repeating the last three steps in sequence.
The internal hackday was a cracking idea. Most of the hacks were focused around radio enhancements with broad-ranging appeal, the vast majority of them looked practically useful. I suspect most of the work will filter out into site and product updates. In addition to this, and perhaps more valuably, it worked really well as a community exercise, evolving knowledge-sharing, cross-team working, and enthusiasm, and converting them into inspiration, craft, and art. More of this sort of thing, everywhere!
I've iterated on the original hack quite a lot to make it slightly less brain-damaged, and a bit cleaner to import into anyone else's emacs. Updated code is here and so is a README file with updated running instructions. It's still not really in a usable state for anyone else, but it's amusing me to fiddle with it, and I vaguely plan to get it to a releasable alpha state, at which point I will publish a repository.
St. Vincent Interview : I respect her enormously. Best thing at Primavera Sound 14 by miles.
