Run Meetings like a Dungeon Master ✶

Ben Collins-Sussman:

I’ve been a manager for decades, with my own strengths and weaknesses. A couple of years ago one of my reports asked me candidly:

I hate meetings, but for some reason, I love coming to your weekly staff meeting. What’s going on? Why is it different?

Paparazzi! ✶

Mac utility for taking screenshots of webpages that still works after many years. Bravo!

Saturday, 20 July 2024

A Playful Path ✶

Game maker and player Bernie DeKoven:

The basic idea of New Games is that…It’s not the game so much that’s new, it’s the attitude that people have towards playing it. Where even though we may be playing competitively, we’re not really playing against each other. We’re playing with each other. So it doesn’t really matter what game you play, you could even be playing football, but there’s a tone in the way the game is being played, that is clear that the people who are playing it are more important than the game that’s being played.

Keep thoughts open and go outside, or inside, and play.

Friday, 19 July 2024

♫ Satellite ✶

By Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions.

Sunday, 14 July 2024

Copy and Paste SVG Code into Illustator for Editable Vector Image

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Today I learned that you can copy scalable vector graphics (SVG) code in text form from anywhere and paste it into Adobe Illustrator to make an editable vector graphic appear.

For example, you can copy SVG code generated by an orthographic map projection from within its page source and paste it into Illustrator to get an editable vector file of the globe image.

Nota bene: The above code was simplified to latitude and longitude lines only to reduce file size for this example.

Idea: Make a web page that lets you spin a globe with latitude and longitude lines to a desired orientation and then download the image in SVG format with the click of a button.

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G.Projector ✶

NASA tool to transform a map image into different projections.

Wednesday, 10 July 2024

Pixii Max Digital Rangefinder Camera ✶

Half the price of a digital Leica M, full-frame, uses M-mount lenses, no digital screen, connects to your phone via wifi.

The small team seems good, et j’espère qu’ils s’en sortiront bien!

Leicas cost too much and their batteries don’t last which is why I shoot mostly with Fuji X100s now, though I miss a mechanical rangefinder when out in the wind.

Sunday, 7 July 2024

Fly to any GPS coordinates in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

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  1. Get the Global Positioning System coordinates in decimal notation from any map service. On Google Maps, right-click anywhere on the map and then click the GPS coordinates decimal numbers such as 36.01983, -75.66880 to automatically copy them.

  2. Paste the coordinates in the search bar on the top-left of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s World Map screen, then click on the coordinates to place a Custom waypoint on the map.

  3. Click on the waypoint and set it as the departure or destination.

Happy landings!

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What Bennet Foddy is currently reading ✶

From the What’s on your bookshelf series over at RPS:

First of all I have to admit I feel like a bit of a charlatan answering these questions because I didn’t read anything for years, burned out from a career in academic philosophy and too besotted with games and film to look elsewhere. But I’ve picked up the habit again over the last couple of years, and at the moment I’m picking at Mary Beard’s The Fires Of Vesuvius, a historical book about Pompeii that I got started on when I visited the ruins there recently. Friends may lampoon me for embodying the ’men thinking about the Roman Empire’ trope, but at least Mary Beard thinks about it more than I do.

Saturday, 6 July 2024

How to Grow a Community ✶

Freedom of access. A strong community has to be physically and intellectually diverse. This is a basic lesson from smart crowd theory: too many people with the same mindset and background will make large, well-argued, and elegantly executed mistakes. You need the challenge that ignorance can bring. So removing barriers to entry lets you bring in more diversity.

Wednesday, 26 June 2024

Goodbye, Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson ✶

Great pilot and person. Died in his sleep at 102 years old. If you like stories with airplanes in them, you’ll love To Fly and Fight.

IL-2 Korea ✶

Last time I flew over a digital Korea was in Rowan Software’s Mig Alley which featured glints from silvery planes and glassy cockpits in the distance.

Monday, 24 June 2024

Phyllotaxis ✶

Introduction to Chapter 4 of The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants:

The regular arrangement of lateral organs (leaves on a stem, scales on a cone axis, florets in a composite flower head) is an important aspect of plant form, known as phyllotaxis.

…

The area of phyllotaxis is dominated by intriguing mathematical relationships. One of them is the “remarkable fact that the numbers of spirals which can be traced through a phyllotactic pattern are predominantly integers of the Fibonacci sequence”. For example, Coxeter notes that the pineapple displays eight rows of scales sloping to the left and thirteen rows sloping to the right. Furthermore, it is known that the ratios of consecutive Fibonacci numbers Fk+1/Fk converge towards the golden mean τ = (√5 + 1)/2. The Fibonacci angle 360°τ −2, approximately equal to 137.5°, is the key to the first model discussed in this chapter.

Saturday, 22 June 2024

The Cornfield Bomber ✶

After entering a flat spin the pilot ejects and the empty Convair F-106 Delta Dart recovers and lands on a corn field.

Friday, 21 June 2024

The Method of Awakening the Mind to a Variety of Inventions ✶

I will not omit to introduce among these precepts a new kind of speculative invention, which though apparently trifling, and almost laughable, is nevertheless of great utility in assisting the genius to find variety for composition.

⁠By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colours, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions.

―Leonardo da Vinci, aka Leo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Tuesday, 18 June 2024

Restauravia Breguet XIV ✶

The airplane that Wind, Sand, Stars and Le Petit Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew as an postal pilot is available as freeware for MSFS and will be used for at least one leg of our around the world trip!

Metagaming ✶

Book by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, via RPS’s What’s on your bookshelf series:

They argue video games aren’t games, instead we all play multiple games inside the video game. Some of us story mode, some of us speedrun, some of us hack or mod or shitpost or read wikis… and these are all different games.

Monday, 17 June 2024

Move Lightroom Photos to Larger Drive

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Here’s my current process for moving my Lightroom library of photos, including the catalogue, from a drive that is almost full to a larger, empty one.

  1. Purchase a new disk at least twice the size of the prior one, then erase and format it with a new name such as YYYY-MM-DD-Your-Name-Photos using Disk Utility.

  2. On the existing disk that is almost full, make sure file permissions are correct that that there are no locked files inside the Lightroom catalogue folder, in my case, called Photos, by opening a Terminal window and typing the following command:

    sudo chown -R YourUserName /path/to/Photos

    This unlocks all files in the folder and all its subfolders and makes you their owner, good to do so the copy operation doesn’t fail half-way through when it finds a locked file.

  3. Copy the Photos folder from the existing disk that’s almost full to the new empty YYYY-MM-DD-Your-Name-Photos disk. I just drag and drop using two Finder windows.

    You may have a long wait if you catalogue is large, so be prepared to leave it running overnight if needed and make sure to turn off any automatic sleep features on your computer.

  4. Double click the Lightroom catalogue in the new YYYY-MM-DD-Your-Name-Photos disk to open it. Done!

Want to free more space in the new disk?

If you’ve been choosing your best and have a photography workflow, make a Lightroom smart collection called To Delete that matches any of the following settings:

  • Rating is less than ★★★★
  • Label color is not red (good photo)
  • Label color is not green (published)
  • Label color is not purple (published)
  • Label color is not blue (person I know personally or person I promised to send the photo to)

Select all the images in the smart collection and press x on your keyboard to mark them as rejected. Click All Photographs on the top of the sidebar and then, on the top menu: Photo → Delete Rejected Photos.

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Let Readers Read ✶

I signed this open letter to the Publishers in Hachette v. Internet Archive.

Saturday, 15 June 2024

Everyday life on different income levels ✶

Anna Rosling Rönnlund:

People in other cultures are often portrayed as scary or exotic. This has to change. We want to show how people really live. It seemed natural to use photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels. Dollar Street lets you visit many, many homes all over the world. Without travelling.

Has an AI figured out how to make a basic income for all humans work yet?

♫ Nature Boy ✶

Nat King Cole’s performance of Eden Ahbez’s song.

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