Microlog
Microlog entries posted in October 2011
Why Is Carbon Fiber So Expensive?
Turns out the manufacturing process is a massive pain in the arse. Also: I didn’t realise it’s been around since the 1960s. Permalink ·
Q&A: The unappreciated benefits of dyslexia
Makes sense to me. Permalink ·
The 50 Greatest Video Game Characters of All Time
My personal favourite will always be ‘Skeleton - Mrs Benoit’ in Deadliest of the WWE. I daren’t play it with the lights off. Permalink ·
6 Movie Plot Holes You Never Noticed Thanks to Editing
It’s not so much ‘editing’ as ‘we’re throwing so much shit at you that you’re too concerned about what’s coming next to notice what just happened’. Permalink ·
11 Interesting Things About the Umbrella
So now you know. Permalink ·
Green screen: what’s happening to Irish cinema
What they don’t really get into here is that Irish cinema, as it is, is really about marketability and profitability. If worthy art is made, that’s fine, but it’s not the primary driver — there’s too much fear of taking a chance on something that won’t find mass appeal. Which is a Bad Thing, in my estimation. Permalink ·
Just Like That but Funny
Comedy writer Todd Levin on lessons learned working in the hothouse writers’ room for Conan O’Brien’s NBC shows. Permalink ·
On first glance, it’s just a blog post on dummy credit card numbers for testing e-commerce sites…
…but scroll down to the comments and things start getting insane. Only on the internet. Permalink ·
Pruney fingers for better gripping
Those wrinkles you get in the bath might be an evolutionary adaptation that allow for better gripping in wet conditions? Well I never. Permalink ·
ifttt
As in, ‘if this then that’. Basically an easier-to-understand version of Yahoo! Pipes, taking something from one site (usually an RSS feed) and making it do something else more useful. The list of ready-made recipes is growing fast. Permalink ·
Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit
A truly depressing story. If it’s true what the AP story says, that they were reported by cabin crew, that makes it even worse. Permalink ·
We’re all terror suspects now
“They’re patting us down now, my friends object, and they’re confiscating our contact-lens fluid. They’re forcing us to travel with tiny tubes of toothpaste and moving us to wear loafers when usually we’d prefer lace-ups … I listen to their grousing and think that the one thing the 9/11 attacks have achieved, for those of us who spend too much time in airports, is to make suspicion universal; fear and discomfort are equal-opportunity employers now.” Permalink ·
The blogosphere still needs codes of conduct
In reference to conflicts of interest and the recent TechCrunch saga. Permalink ·
MAKE How-To: PS/2/You LED Sign
All you need is an LED display, an Arduino board, a PS/2 port and keyboard, and a little creativity. Permalink ·
The naming of things
Bobbie Johnson doesn’t like the term ‘3D printer’, and neither does Tom Armitage. Both are correct that it doesn’t reflect what such machines actually do. Bobbie suggests a few alternatives, like ‘rep’. I prefer the unshortened ‘replicate’ myself; it already has some cultural cachet via Star Trek. Permalink ·
‘Even Harvard couldn’t protect me’
At last a commentator who eschews the typical oh-woe-is-me nonsense and really understands the “endless anxiety” of jobhunting. Permalink ·
JobBridge to Nowhere
Naming and shaming companies listing jobs under the JobBridge internship scheme that they should be paying people for. Permalink ·
An iOS Developer Takes on Android
Very interesting to see the differences. Permalink ·
MyFitnessPal
Nutritional information for a metric crapload of foods. Filing this for future reference. Permalink ·
Markdown Service Tools
Adding Markdown functionality to the right-click menu in OS X. Permalink ·
Online notes for Stanford’s Digital Photography class
What a brilliant resource! Permalink ·
From Kindle to Fire: Why Amazon Needs to Go Global
With everyone gushing over the new Kindles, Tim Carmody’s the only one who noticed that for the most part, they’re US-only (particularly the Fire, which matters diddly-squat to anyone who can’t access Amazon’s streaming media). Permalink ·
The End of WikiLeaks
Analysis of the recent full release of unredacted cables, in what seems to have been a spiteful fit over a dispute with The Guardian. Permalink ·
VideoJS
A free and open source HTML5 video player. Filing this for future reference. Permalink ·
Sass: Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets
“Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.” Permalink ·
Kurt Vonnegut explains the shapes of stories
Neat enough on its own. But then someone else went and fed those story graphs into Google Correlate. I wonder what Vonnegut would’ve made of that, being the cyber-luddite he was. Permalink ·
Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney
Who does Chaney remind you of, if not a post-colonial African dictator? His name should be as maligned as Hitler’s. Yes, I went there. Permalink ·
Why Do Limbs ‘Fall Asleep’?
To help us avoid permanent nerve damage, it seems. Now I’m kinda freaked out. Permalink ·
Junior Programmer Season at the Screen Cinema
The Screen is really becoming the kind of sassy rep house that Dublin badly needs (the IFI is great, but come on, it’s quite fuddy) and this scheme is a fantastic idea. I’d contribute myself but I’m completely paralysed by choice. Permalink ·
HiLobrow on Objectography
‘We demand a great deal from our objects: that they be functional, that they be meaningful. And yet they also stand apart from us; like creatures at the edge of a clearing, they peer off elsewhere in feral disregard.’ I think the Japanese have a better understanding of objects in this regard (cf Matt Webb muses on tsukumogami). Permalink ·
Speed-of-light results under scrutiny at Cern
Neutrinos in faster-than-light shocker: “We want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result — because it is crazy.” That’s an understatement. Permalink ·
qrtime.com - a QR Code Clock
Reminds me of the self-destruct countdown at the end of Predator. I guarantee you someone’s already working on a watch with a QR display right now. Permalink ·
About
This is the personal website of MacDara Conroy, a production journalist, music writer and mediavore in Dublin, Ireland. Read more »
Details
This page is a reverse chronology of Microlog entries by MacDara Conroy published in October 2011. You will find many more in the Archives.
Continuum
↑ November 2011
→ October 2011
↓ September 2011