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Granny Squares, Now in Color
Many moons ago, I debuted my Granny Squares Color Pattern Generator, a utility to help crocheters randomize their blankets, which can be a daunting task. I recently got a request for a way to help visualize the blanket that’s generated. It’s hard to work from a list of “r/h/p”-type entries. Not very user-friendly. So I added in a color picker today, and the generator now shows the colors of the squares. As a warning, if you have a lot of very similar colors, the generated image may be difficult to work from. Then again, if your blanket’s in 15 shades of purple (yes, please!), you may not need this utility.
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Weekly Linkage: Grumpy Heroines, CRUD, and Prison Work
This week’s internet cruising: Questionable Content – Tool reference! What does English sound like to foreign ears? – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks – An absolutely amazing song and video by an Italian comedian faking English, plus some adorable animal sounds. Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Reading this sent me back to an old client’s site (from almost two years ago), remembering the CRUD-based admin console I developed that was such an incorrect way to go about giving them the functionality they needed. Oy. Renaming Many Files At Once with Pattern Matching in Bash | Andy Regan – This proved very…
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Weekly Linkage: A Microaggression, a Game, and Some Dancin’
This week’s internet cruising: Microaggressions submission – I love microaggressions.com, and this one is actually cute. Learning from Fable III’s UX Mistakes | UX Booth – A nice look at the usability issues of Fable III. Email Management Made Fun | The Email Game – Okay, this is a cute and fun spin on the (in my mind) GTD principle of fast processing an inbox. I got 2375 points in my first game, and 2250 on the second. Make Love, Not Flamewars – bitquabit – I don’t care about mercurial vs. git (I use and enjoy both), but I like the approach of giving up the silly flamewars and debates…
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Chewing on Granny Squares
My knitting colleague E. made the (arguably) goofy decision to refresh her crocheting skills by taking on a granny squares blanket. It’s a great idea for using up a ton of scrap yarn. It’s not a great idea if you enjoyed the level of sanity you had when you started. She quickly ran into the classic self-randomizing problem: given 20 different colored yarns of different weights, how do you put 3 different ones in each square while trying to keep the colors as random as possible? Sounds easy enough, but after 15 or so squares, it gets tricky. If you’re aiming for randomization, the last thing you want is a…
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Weekly linkage
Just a few: Passive voice is killing your design documents – " I would argue that if the goal is to communicate clearly, actually stating and explaining the uncertainties is going to be much more helpful to readers." The Size Of Our World – Bad graphical quality, but cool comparison. 6174 (number) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Who comes up with stuff like this? Who sits around adding and subtracting numbers to find patterns? Ta Prohm temple at Angkor, Cambodia – Absolutely gorgeous. 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live – I don't normally read the Onion (maybe I should!), but this…