Justine Haupt has started taking preorders for rotary cellphone kits and has released a video explaining the whole thing (it includes a great Contact Easter egg!). I don’t need a rotary cellphone, but love that this wildly intelligent and creative person has created it just because she wanted one. The combination of an ePaper display, rotary dial and real ringer bell is so steam-punk exciting!
Canton Becker has released a 1,000,000 hour long song today for Earth Day, on cassette tape, of course! You can randomly skip to a section that no one else has heard before and name a 15 minute section. Here’s Squeaky Ducks on a Summer Evening at around hour 695,203 for your listening pleasure.
I spent part of Earth Day cleaning out a pond in the decommissioned gravel pit on the land we inhabit, gently replacing frogs I stirred up and waving at the one butterfly I saw, seagulls, crows and blue jays wheeling and calling above it all. It was warmish in the late afternoon sun, and I was content in a way I never am in any other place. Water, trees, sky…that’s really all I need.
I’ve been a Setapp subscriber for a few months now. MacPaw, the company behind the Setapp service, are a Ukrainian company, something I only learned since the Russian invasion on February 24. MacPaw took many steps to protect their services, and are now using their apps in innovative ways to communicate to their clients and make their voices heard, like this release note for an update that basically was, really, just this note:
A new app showed up on the Setapp service this week, PhotosRevive. It promises to colourise black and white photos using some AI hocus pocus. I popped some photos in to see what it could do, and the results were mixed, but interesting.
You can tweak the PhotosRevive settings to make things look a bit better, but I’ve not had time to play with it yet. I like black and white photos, or am at least used to them, so probably wouldn’t have gone looking for this, but it’s a fun addition to the Setapp universe.
Kiva is hosting its first international Kiva Hackathon, “supporting microfinance, digital identity, poverty alleviation and financial inclusion.” Ready, set, hack!
The first computer I remember using was a Commodore PET circa 1981. When I say using, I mean I watched as my male junior high classmates used it to play a very slow flight simulator in our Industrial Arts class; it was the late 70s, and girls couldn’t be trusted with high tech gadgetry. I did operate a plastic moulding machine in that class to make a small screwdriver I still use, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
When I was in high school, I took an introductory computer evening course at our local community college, and most of it was spent learning some of the BASIC programming language. I sort of forget, but I guess there weren’t any computer courses offered in my high school at the time, or at least not for my academic stream.
I found it difficult and never programmed anything after that course. It would be 5 or 6 years until I ever touched a computer again. At the time, computers didn’t seem like anything that would ever become important in my life, but rather something that someone smarter than me would study for a specialized career as a programmer.
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Haven’t heard all the Eurovision finalists who will be performing in Rotterdam tonight, but I’m rooting for Malta and Iceland. I enjoy many types of music, but I LOVE upbeat dance music, and both countries have fun entries.
I’ve been watching Eurovision since 2012, when I used a VPN to watch the BBC coverage led by Graham Norton. Don’t have the VPN anymore, so will either watch the YouTube stream or OMNI Television, who are the Canadian broadcasters this year. Neither of those options will have commentary, so might listen to Ken Bruce on BBC Radio 2 at the same time to learn more about the performers and their songs.
I believe the last frontier of the online world that needs to be sorted out is the ability to watch terrestrial television stations live from anywhere in the world. I would gladly pay the BBC to be able to (legally) watch their stations live, without the cat and mouse games. By now this should be easy.
David Sparks points out that the Mac special character and emoji list can be customized in some very cool ways. You can add dozens of sets, including divination symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the mysterious Glagolitic and Ugaritic. I added the ancient Celtic Ogham set, which I first learned about from Diana Beresford-Kroeger. An alphabet based on trees is thrilling to me.
Trees speak to each other through chemical and electrical impulses, and they speak to humans, too, but we are often in too much of a rush and too loud to hear them. Find the tallest tree in a forest some moderately windy day (don’t try this in a hurricane!), something that is waving gently back and forth like a birch or poplar, and press your ear to it. You might hear the wind through the branches, the creaks and crackles of the vascular system, the roots and leaves, all of it. Trees exist at a different speed than we do, rooted in one place, reaching high, making the best of where they have landed, providing shelter, feeding and drinking, sleeping and dreaming.
Standard Ebooks is a new volunteer project to tidy up books from the venerable Project Gutenberg (around since 1971?!) to eliminate typos, make them look better and easier to read on digital devices. Lovely.
Had an email from Google feedburner (or FeedBurner, as it once was) that outlined their plans to do something or other that won’t make any difference to me as I had forgotten I had used it for anything or that it still existed. They encouraged me to check out my feeds, and I found feeds for two blogs I had set up for others a decade ago, still ready and able to burn if they hadn’t been abandoned.
I was tickled to find that, in this mostly forgotten corner of the online world, someone is having mucho fun with tabs.
I had a calendar subscription for moon phases that disappeared, so I went looking for a new one and found this lovely astronomy calendar from Canton Becker. He’s a website developer and electronic musician, and also includes his personal projects on his website. I love his Peace Channel dedicated to his father and inspired by his father’s Electric Sheep screensaver usage.
Not sure where I stumbled upon Justine Haupt, but probably from reading about her rotary cellphone while I was searching for a new flip phone. She is an astronomy instrumentation engineer and seems just plain brilliant. I especially love that she has a YouTube channel but doesn’t want anyone to subscribe to it! The rotary cellphone is so tempting, but I don’t need it…if you do, though, buy it and tell me about it!