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Flaky Fluesday Flinks, Part Deux
I think the last time I posted a link dump, I was flaking from my new tattoo. This week, I’m flaking from the tattoo’s touch-up! Much less pain for the touch-up, but the itching may drive me nuts if it doesn’t end soon. Luckily, it’s healing very quickly. Have some good reading: Tony and Hilary’s Tiny Loft Apartment – I feel like it's been forever since I read The Tiny Life blog, but what a purdy little house to come back to. Six Thoughts On The Case Of The Breast-Feeding Professor | Alas, a Blog – "The child was allowed to crawl on a floor! Shocking! She had to take…
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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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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: Friday Fon
That’s, um, fon. I’m currently taking an evening off from former-house cleaning to sit and chill with my busted shoulder. An old, old injury reared its head when we moved, and my left arm can’t raise more than about 20 degrees from straight down without quite a bit of pain. Lifting is a no-go. I’m very lucky that my right shoulder (also generally wonky) didn’t give way, too. This week’s been chock full of coding, moving, fun food, and a bit of escapism, and my reading probably reflects that:
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Deployment Automation with Fabric: Bee’s Knees
One immensely valuable thing I learned at Skookum was the value of automated deployments. I worked with a gent who took the time to work up Capistrano scripts for each staging and production environment of the whale of a project I worked with him on. I appreciated it during development, but I didn’t appreciate it until we were deploying single tweaks out to production on Amazon EC2 in rapid cycles. I haven’t worked with EC2 since then (second half of 2009), but let me tell you, deployments were for the birds. With his scripts though: run the script, enter your SSH or git password(s) a few times, and you have…