notes.husk.org

"Reblogging for the bunny cartoon. I should really find the sketches I did for modern rabbit..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:45:14 +0100

“

Reblogging for the bunny cartoon.

I should really find the sketches I did for modern rabbit tactical armor in college…

”

- paperbits.

That makes sense, because it was pretty much blogged for the bunny cartoon.

I would love to see the tactical armour.

"There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:18:40 +0100

““There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said”

- Flickr gets revamp — with 1 TB of photo storage free — and Yahoo gets new NYC office — Tech News and Analysis (via iamdanw)

"In 2007, around the time it launched its second unmanned station, Bigelow Aerospace boasted that as..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:37:04 +0100

“In 2007, around the time it launched its second unmanned station, Bigelow Aerospace boasted that as many 800 paying crewmembers could be flying in 10 years’ time. Six years later, the number of Bigelow astronauts remains zero. Bigelow has launched ambitious self-funded enterprises before, but he is also known for being capricious with them. In 2004 he pulled the plug on the National Institute for Discovery Science, which funded paranormal research. Bigelow’s”

- Greg Klerkx: Living in space

"Here comes the Royal Family now. The automobile has now stopped…. Oh, there’s the King — he’s..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:35:07 +0100

“Here comes the Royal Family now. The automobile has now stopped….
Oh, there’s the King — he’s stepping out, followed by her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, nattily attired in a silver coat. Mr. King is now shaking hands with the King and introducing Mr. Queen to the King and Queen and then Mrs. Queen to the Queen and King. They are now proceeding up the steps to the well-decorated City Hall, the King and Mr. King together with the Queen being escorted by Mrs. Queen. The King has now stopped and said something to Mrs. Queen and goes to Mrs. Queen and the Queen and Mr. King and the Queen laughed jovially. The King leaves Mr. King and goes to Mrs. Queen, and the Queen and Mr. King follow behind…”

- From CBC Radio report of the 1939 visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Winnipeg, where they were greeted by Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Winnipeg Mayor John Queen and Mrs. Queen.

Royal Moments in Broadcasting (via anglepoised)

"tumblr_backup.py is a script that backs up your Tumblr blog locally. The backup includes all images..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 23:19:45 +0100

“tumblr_backup.py is a script that backs up your Tumblr blog locally. The backup includes all images from photo and photoset posts. An index links to monthly pages, which contain all the posts from the respective month with links to single post pages. Command line options select which posts to backup and set the output format. By default, all posts of a blog are backed up in minimally styled HTML.”

- Paper Bits: Tumblr Backup python script (GitHub)

Mainly reblogged for the benefit of iamdanw.

"Political meaning: a formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:00:39 +0100

“Political meaning: a formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to form or take part in a government: draft the party’s election manifesto.
Not to be confused with: a social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking, and entertainment: an engagement party.”

- Thick with meaning: 6 UK political terms explored at the OxfordWords blog.

"HANNITY: You have been around Washington a long time and a number of administrations, the IRS being..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:07:44 +0100

“HANNITY: You have been around Washington a long time and a number of administrations, the IRS being used for a political witch-hunt against those who have differing viewpoints. How dangerous is this for the president himself?
CHENEY: I think it’s very dangerous. I can’t believe some guy down in the bowels of the organization in Cincinnati set this up. It would require, I would think, because of the sensitivity of it, somebody pretty high up to sign off on it.”

- Yes, the IRS as a political witch-hunt would be terrible, wouldn’t it? Good thing nothing like that happened while Cheney was VP.

In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”

Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the “No. 1 climate criminal.” The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

"Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:04:27 +0100

“Commonplace books that survive from the Tudor period contain a huge variety of texts, including letters, poems, medical remedies, prose, jokes, ciphers, riddles, quotations and drawings. Sonnets, ballads and epigrams jostle with diary entries, recipes, lists of ships or Cambridge colleges and transcriptions of speeches. Collecting useful snippets of information so that they could be easily retrieved when needed, or re-read to spark new ideas and connections, was one of the functions of a commonplace book. But the practice of maintaining a commonplace book and exchanging texts with others also served as a form of self-definition: which poems or aphorisms you chose to copy into your book or to pass on to your correspondents said a lot about you, and the book as a whole was a reflection of your character and personality.”

- Tom Standage: How commonplace books were like Tumblr and Pinterest, drawing from the research for his forthcoming book.

See also: the distractions of social media, 1673 style.

"The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:34:28 +0100

“The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage space. (In comparison, Facebook uses about 1.5 petabytes to store about 10 billion photos.)”

- Ashlee Vance in Bloomberg Businessweek. via Tom Insam, who comments

This is presented to make the point that “Netflix use a lot of space”. But I see it more as “Facebook is already 50% the size of all of Hollywood’s output ever”.

"Drones have killed untold thousands of civilians—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:11:39 +0100

“Drones have killed untold thousands of civilians—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggest it’s somewhere around 2,000. But when they’re not busy doing that, the incredible technology can be used to wow and delight, says Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and current MIT professor studying unmanned aircraft.”

- Jason Koebler for Motherboard at Vice introducing Can Drones Make Us Laugh? (via)