Skeuomorphism: A nonfunctional ornamental design cue in a design that comes from structure that was inherent to the original. (definition courtesy of Wikipedia)
For example, the “floppy” save icon. When I was in grade school, I saved my work on a floppy disk. I don’t do that anymore, I don’t even own a floppy drive, yet the floppy disk is fairly universally used as the “save” symbol. This is skeuomorphism.
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Okay everyone, let’s talk about faces. By now, surely you’ve had some relative or clickbait internet article show you a face supposedly generated entirely by a machine (or if you’re of a certain inclination, you’ve seen one of those deepfake videos).
If you’re unsure what I’m talking about, look at this lovely lady:
At first glance, you think: This is a face. But after you look at it for a little bit, you realize there’s a few things wrong with it - her glasses merge into her face a little bit, her hair interacts with the background in ways which don’t make sense, something weird’s going on with the left side of her head (is that jewlery?
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Warning: What follows is mostly just spoilers for Black Mirror.
Is it just me, or is Black Mirror substantially less dire and less Sci-Fi than it used to be? I just finished watching Season 5, and every episode in the season seems fairly upbeat, and none particularly care about the technology they reference.
In two of the episodes (“Striking Vipers” and “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”), the episode ends without any ill effects for the “good guys”.
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If you’ve managed to reach this page - congratulations! That means you’ve figured out that I’ve finally reorganized my server, something I’ve been threatening to do ever since the summer I left for Europe, which was not last summer but the one before. Summer 2017.
But I’ve finally done it. Somewhat unfortunately for you, my loyal reader, this means that a) a lot of the projects that were being hosted by Pillow are no longer, and b) all of the URLs for my blog have changed.
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I haven’t posted since May 2018, breaking my plan for a post every month. Let’s catch up, I’m now 7 posts behind. So this is the post for June 2018, about when I started playing Factorio.
So let’s talk Factorio. Specifically, let’s talk the math of turning crude oil into material goods. The usual goods I care about are lubricant, solid fuel/rocket fuel, batteries, processing units, raw sulfuric acid (for uranium mining), and plastic.
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When I moved out, I thought I was pretty much done with hardware projects. I hadn’t done any in the year prior, but I had done a lot of software projects. So when I moved, I left behind a lot of my bulky hardware, like my oscilloscope.
As anyone who follows my blog knows, that prediction turned out wrong.
It turns out that PCB production costs have fallen, and my salary has risen, to the point where I can afford to custom-make PCBs.
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I come from a long line of radio engineers (my father’s brother, his father before him, and before that they hadn’t invented radios, so they were just normal engineers). I’m even licensed as a hamateur radio operator, KF5NJG. However, I’ve never operated on my own, seeing as I have never had a radio.
This has changed - for my birthday I received a HackRF One software-defined radio.
I could do an unboxing video.
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So over Thanksgiving weekend my family and I went go-kart racing at K1 Speed, a multinational chain indoor electric go-kart racing establishment.
I too didn’t think that indoor go-kart racing was a thing. I stand corrected.
Before you read any of the things I write, I want to say that I enjoyed the experience. It had an appropriate mix of adrenaline and skill. I walked away bruised and bloodied, but still had lots of fun (just kidding on the bloodied part).
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Let’s talk about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. By Rian Johnson. Rian Johnson the Great. Rian Johnson who brought his legendary vision to Star Wars and made everyone happy.
Honestly, I have yet to find a negative review of The Last Jedi. So here I will write a negative review of something everyone loves.
There’s already been a major backlash against the movie, by die-hard fans. I am a die-hard fan of Star Wars, but I’m not one of those fans.
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So, I was thinking about the “Bechdel test” the other day, since sexism has been the “in” thing for the past few weeks. Also other reasons. Basically, it’s a test to highlight gender inequality in fiction (thank you, Wikipedia, for that description). There are three criteria that must be met to pass:
There must be at least two (named) women in the movie, These two women must talk to each other, About something other than a man.
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