Finished some e-books I had been chugging at on and off:

• Dive Into Python 3, by Mark Pilgrim

  • great for leveling up your Python chops

• Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web, by Scott Murray

  • great introduction to D3.js

Both are awesome resources for learning their respective topics!

Made one. Yay!
Took about two hours (sans the one month shipping time of the lenses).

A must watch is the Scale of the Universe series of videos on Khan Academy.

Warning, your mind will be blown!

Another interesting space-related playlist to check out is the Big History Project. Your welcome!

Chrome Experiments is an awesome site. There’s a lot of inspiring creations to be found there! Solid hours can be lost exploring the stuff people have shared.

The great thing about it is that all the source code for the experiments is easily available.

I was watching a clip of Niel deGrasse Tyson and heard him talk about this tweet he had sent in the past.

Coincidentally, I had just done the chapter on projectiles from a very awesome textbook I had recently come across.

So, I did the math.

This book has everything!

Checkout RailsCasts by Paul Bates.

They are very well done! And pack a lot of information into 10 minute bites.

He covers a diverse range of topics related to websites such as security, payments, authentication, spam, tagging, data management, and much much more.

Even if you’re not interested in Ruby the language, or the Rails framework, the videos are useful for leveling up on general knowledge of how websites work.

#notSponsored #itsJustThatGood

I came across this webapp called Meatspace. It’s a chat system with a twist. In lieu of a profile picture, each message you send is accompanied by a two second gif captured by your webcam.

Though not unique to Meatspace, two more things add to its charm. First, the messages are “ephemeral”. If you weren’t there when they were posted you don’t see them (the server doesn’t store conversations).* Second, anyone can drop in to the conversation. There is no need to create an account or login.**

I think it’s an awesome idea!

I find myself way more confident than I would be in real life talking with people I am meeting for the first time.

I’m not sure where my interest in programming began. However, this PBS video was a distinct turning point,

When I first saw it, I thought it was the most amazing thing ever! I didn’t know coding could be used to create art!

My mind was blown with this whole ‘creative coding’ thing.
I have been hooked ever since!

:D

Magic!

I came across this video,

And was curious if I could get it working on my computer. On his website, Memo Atken shares download links for the app. After 4 hours (non-continuous) of trying to set it up, I finally got it working.

The real point of this post however is to get you to checkout Open Frameworks.

There’s a lot of cool stuff people are making with it.

Did you know RStudio’s IDE runs on a web browser?!

I am taking the Exploratory Data Analysis class on Udacity which uses R and RStudio to visualize data.

I noticed if you right click when using RStudio, you are presented with the option to “inspect.” What opens up is something strikingly similar to Chrome’s web inspector,

I was wondering if an ePUB file could be embedded with malicious script since this is a well known vulnerability of Adobe’s pdf files. A quick Google search linked to a forum where someone had asked the same question.

So it turns out ePUB is just a bunch of html and css files! What?!

Then I came across this article from Smashing Magazine. And yup it is just a bunch of html and css files.

Not only that, it is just as easily editable!

I had used BB Flashback to record a scene I was interested in animating. However, the program doesn’t come with a way to export several images at once. You have to export each one individually.

I had done this before for about 200 images and it was a never again experience! Through the magic of Google and StackOverflow, I came across Sikuli.

What would once have been a very tedious selection with the CTRL key literally took a minute by writing a simple code snippet (and using Chrome’s console to run it). =D!

This,

Became this,

Today I learned that you can abstract away frequently used code.

While working through John Resig’s book Pro JavaScript Techniques, I noticed he uses simple helper functions to keep the code neat and non-repetitive.