While rooting through our attic, Ruth‘s brother Owen just found a mystery cable. It almost certainly belongs to me (virtually all of the
cables in the house, especially the unusual ones, do), but this one is a mystery to me.
End #1 of the cable is a 13-pin male serial connection with 6 connected pins, spring-loaded. It seems to be designed to screw in at one end. The screw is worn.
The more I look at it, the more I feel like I’m slowly going mad, as if the cable is some kind of beast from the Lovecraftian Cable Dimension which mortal minds were not meant to
comprehend. It’s got three “ends” and is clearly some kind of signal combining (or separating) cable, but it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before (and don’t forget, I
probably own it).
On the other side of the split, end #2 of the cable terminates in a fine metal mesh (perhaps concealing a microphone, small speaker, or temperature/humidity sensor). It has a
“push-to-talk” style clicker switch and a “tie clip” on it.
Every time I look at it I have a new idea of what it could be. Some kind of digital dictophone or radio mic connector? Part of a telephone headset? Weather monitoring hardware? A set of
converters between two strange and unusual pieces of hardware? But no matter what I come up with, something doesn’t add up? Why only 6 pins? Why the strange screw-in connector?
Why the clicker switch? Why the tie clips? Why “split” the output (let alone have cables of different lengths)?
End #3 looks like a fibreoptic audio terminator. Or perhaps a part of an earpiece. It, too, has a “tie clip” on (do I clip it to… my ear?)
In case it helps, I’ve made a video of it. You’ll note that I use the word “thingy” more times than might perhaps be justified, but I’ve been puzzling over this one for a while:
Can you help? Can you identify this mystery cable? Prize for the correct answer!
I wasn’t fast enough to get an order in on the first (hugely-oversubscribed) print run and had to wait on both the reprint plus international shipping.
This self-proclaimed “better Bundo book” tells a different (educational and relevant) story: in it, Marlon Bundo falls in love with another boy rabbit but their desire to get married is
hampered by the animals’ leader, the Stink Bug, who proclaims that “boy rabbits can’t marry boy rabbits; boy rabbits have to marry girl rabbits!” With the help of the other animals, the
rabbits vote-out the Stink Bug, get married, and go on a lovely bunnymoon… a cheery and uplifting story and, of course, a distinctly trollish way to piss off the (clearly anti-LGBT) Mike Pence. This evening, I decided to offer it as a bedtime story to our little
bookwork. At four years old, she’s of an age at which the highly-hetronormative narratives of the media to which she’s exposed might be only-just beginning to sink in, so I figured this
was a perfect vehicle to talk about difference, diversity, and discrimination. Starting school later this year means that she’s getting closer to the point where she may go from
realising that her family is somewhat unusually-shaped to discovering that some people might think that “unusual” means “wrong”, so this is also a
possible step towards thinking about her own place in the world and what other people make of it.
Our little bookworm, along with bookworm-junior and their mother.
Her initial verdict was that it was “sweet”, and that she was glad that the Stink Bug was vanquished and that Marlon and Wesley got to live together happily-ever-after. I explained that
while the story was made-up, a lot of what it was talking about was something that really happens in this world: that some people think that boys should not marry boys and that girls
should not marry girls, even if they love them, and that sometimes, if those people get to be In Charge then they can stop those people marrying who they love. I mentioned that in our
country we were fortunate enough that boys can marry boys and girls can marry girls, if they want to, but that there are places where that’s not allowed (and there are
even some people who think it shouldn’t be allowed here!). And then I asked her what she thought.
I normally reserve my “on this day” posts to look back at my own archived content, but once in a while I get a moment of nostalgia for something of
somebody else’s that “fell off the web”. And so I bring you something you probably haven’t seen in over a decade: Paul and Jon‘s Birmingham Egg.
Is this honestly so different from the kind of crap that most of our circle of friends ate in 2005?
It was a simpler time: a time when YouTube was a new “fringe” site (which is probably why I don’t have a surviving copy of the original video) and not yet owned by Google, before
Facebook was universally-available, and when original Web content remained decentralised (maybe we’re moving back in that
direction, but I wouldn’t count on it…). And only a few days after issue 175 of the b3ta newsletter wrote:
* BIRMINGHAM EGG - Take 5 scotch eggs, cut in
half and cover in masala sauce. Place in
Balti dish and serve with naan and/or chips.
We'll send a b3ta t-shirt to anyone who cooks
this up, eats it and makes a lovely little
photo log / write up of their adventure.
Sure, this looks like the kind of thing that seems like a good idea when you’re a student.
It was a simpler time, when, having fewer responsibilities, we were able to do things like this “for the
lulz”. But more than that, it was still at the tail-end of the era in which individuals putting absurd shit online was still a legitimate art form on the Web. Somewhere along the
way, the Web got serious and siloed. It’s not all a bad thing, but it does mean that we’re publishing less weirdness than we were back
then.
The Azure image processing API is a software tool powered by a neural net, a type of artificial intelligence that attempts to replicate a particular model of how (we believe)
brains to work: connecting inputs (in this case, pixels of an image) to the entry nodes of a large, self-modifying network and reading the output, “retraining” the network based on
feedback from the quality of the output it produces. Neural nets have loads of practical uses and even more theoretical ones, but Janelle’s article was about how confused the
AI got when shown certain pictures containing (or not containing!) sheep.
There are probably sheep in the fog somewhere, but they’re certainly not visible.
The AI had clearly been trained with lots of pictures that contained green, foggy, rural hillsides and sheep, and had come to
associate the two. Remember that all the machine is doing is learning to associate keywords with particular features, and it’s clearly been shown many pictures that “look like” this
that do contain sheep, and so it’s come to learn that “sheep” is one of the words that you use when you see a scene like this. Janelle took to Twitter to ask for pictures of sheep in unusual places, and the Internet obliged.
When the sheep is held by a child, it becomes a “dog”.
Many of the experiments resulting from this – such as the one shown above – work well to demonstrate this hyper-focus on context: a sheep up a tree is a bird, a sheep on a lead
is a dog, a sheep painted orange is a flower, and so on. And while we laugh at them, there’s something about them that’s actually pretty… “human”.
Our eldest really loves cats. Also goats, apparently. Azure described this photo as “a person wearing a costume”, but it did include keywords such as “small”, “girl”, “petting”, and…
“dog”.
I say this because I’ve observed similar quirks in the way that small children pick up language, too (conveniently, I’ve got a pair of readily-available subjects, aged 4 and 1, for my
experiments in language acquisition…). You’ve probably seen it yourself: a toddler whose “training set” of data has principally included a suburban landscape describing the first cow
they see as a “dog”. Or when they use a new word or phrase they’ve learned in a way that makes no sense in the current context, like when our eldest interrupted dinner to say, in the
most-polite voice imaginable, “for God’s sake would somebody give me some water please”. And just the other day, the youngest waved goodbye to an empty room, presumably because
it’s one that he often leaves on his way up to bed
“A cat lying on a blanket”, says Azure, completely overlooking the small child in the picture. I guess the algorithm was trained on an Internet’s worth of cat pictures and didn’t see
as much of people-with-cats.
For all we joke, this similarity between the ways in which artificial neural nets and small humans learn language is perhaps the most-accessible evidence that neural nets are a
strong (if imperfect) model for how brains actually work! The major differences between the two might be simply that:
Our artificial neural nets are significantly smaller and less-sophisticated than most biological ones.
Biological neural nets (brains) benefit from continuous varied stimuli from an enormous number of sensory inputs, and will even self-stimulate (via, for example, dreaming) –
although the latter is something with which AI researchers sometimes experiment.
“Ca’! Ca’! Ca’!” Maybe if he shouts it excitedly enough, one of the cats (or dogs, which are for now just a special kind of cat) he’s spotted will give in and let him pet it. But I
don’t fancy his chances.
Things we take as fundamental, such as the nouns we assign to the objects in our world, are actually social/intellectual constructs. Our minds are powerful general-purpose computers,
but they’re built on top of a biology with far simpler concerns: about what is and is-not part of our family or tribe, about what’s delicious to eat, about which animals are friendly
and which are dangerous, and so on. Insofar as artificial neural nets are an effective model of human learning, the way they react to “pranks” like these might reveal underlying truths
about how we perceive the world.
Just want to play my game without reading this whole post? Play the game here – press a key, mouse button, or touch the screen to fire the
thrusters, and try to land at less than 4 m/s with as much fuel left over as possible.
In 1969, when all the nerds were still excited by sending humans to the moon instead of flinging cars around the sun, the hottest video game was Rocket (or Lunar) for the PDP-8. Originally implemented in FOCAL by high school student Jim Storer and soon afterwards ported to BASIC (the other dominant language to come as
standard with microcomputers), Rocket became the precursor to an entire genre of video games called “Lunar Lander games“.
Like many pieces of microcomputer software of the time, Rocket was distributed as printed source code that you’d need to carefully type in at the other end.
The aim of these games was to land a spacecraft on the moon or similar body by controlling the thrust (and in some advanced versions, the rotation) of the engine. The spacecraft begins
in freefall towards the surface and will accelerate under gravity: this can be counteracted with thrust, but engaging the engine burns through the player’s limited supply of fuel.
Furthermore, using fuel lowers the total mass of the vessel (a large proportion of the mass of the Apollo landers was fuel for use in the descent stage) which reduces its inertia,
giving the engine more “kick” which must be compensated for during the critical final stages. It sounds dry and maths-y, but I promise that graphical versions can usually be played
entirely “by eye”.
Atari’s 1979 adaptation is perhaps the classic version you’d recognise, although its release was somewhat overshadowed by their other vector-graphics space-themed release in 1979:
Asteroids.
Let’s fast-forward a little. In 1997 I enrolled to do my A-levels at what was then called Preston College, where my Computing tutor was a chap
called Kevin Geldard: you can see him at 49 seconds into this hilariously low-fi video which I guess must have been originally shot on
VHS despite being uploaded to YouTube in 2009. He’s an interesting chap in his own right whose contributions to my career in computing deserve their own blog post, but for the time
being all you need to know is that he was the kind of geek who, like me, writes software “for fun” more often than not. Kevin owned a Psion 3 palmtop – part of a series of devices with
which I also have a long history and interest – and he taught himself to program OPL by reimplementing a favourite game of his younger years on it: his take on the classic mid-70s-style graphical Lunar Lander.
I never owned a Psion Series 3 (pictured), but I bought a Series 5mx in early 2000 out of my second student loan cheque, ultimately wrote most of my undergraduate dissertation using
it, and eventually sold it to a collector in about 2009 for almost as much as I originally paid for it. The 5mx was an amazing bit of kit. But I’ll blog about that another day, I
guess.
My A-level computing class consisted of a competitive group of geeky lads, and we made sort-of a personal extracurricular challenge to ourselves of re-implementing Kevin’s take on
Lunar Lander using Turbo Pascal, the primary language in which our class was taught. Many hours out-of-class were spent
in the computer lab, tweaking and comparing our various implementations (with only ocassional breaks to play Spacy, CivNet, or my adaptation of LORD2): later, some of us would extend our competition by
going on to re-re-implement in Delphi, Visual Basic, or Java, or by adding additional levels relating to orbital rendezvous or landing on other planetary bodies. I was quite
proud of mine at the time: it was highly-playable, fun, and – at least on your first few goes – moderately challenging.
I sometimes wonder what it would have looked like if I’d have implemented my 1997 Lunar Lander today. So I did.
Always game to try old new things, and ocassionally finding time between the many things that I do to code, I decided to expand upon my recently-discovered
interest in canvas coding to bring back my extracurricular Lunar Lander game of two decades ago in a modern format. My goals were:
A one-button version of a classic “straight descent only” lunar lander game (unlike my 1997 version, which had 10 engine power levels, this remake has just “on” and “off”)
An implementation based initially on real physics (although not necessarily graphically to scale)… and then adapted as necessary to give a fun/playability balance that feels good
Runs in a standards-compliant browser without need for plugins: HTML5, Canvas, Javascript
Adapts gracefully to any device, screen resolution, and orientation with graceful degredation/progressive enhancement
You can have a go at my game right here in your web browser! The aim is to reach the ground travelling at a velocity of no more than 4 m/s
with the maximum amount of fuel left over: this, if anything, is your “score”. My record is 52% of fuel remaining, but honestly anything in the 40%+ range is very good. Touch the screen
(if it’s a touchscreen) or press a mouse button or any key to engage your thrusters and slow your descent.
“Houston, the Eagle has landed.” Kerbal Space Program, it isn’t. Here’s a very good landing: 3 m/s with 48% of the fuel tank remaining.
And of course it’s all open-source, so you’re more than welcome to take it, rip it apart, learn from it, or make something better out
of it.
In addition to the pension I get from my “day job” employer, I maintain a pension pot with a separate private provider which I top up with
money from my freelance work. I logged in to that second pension provider’s (reliably shonky, web-standards-violating) website about a month ago and found that I couldn’t do anything
because they’d added a new mandatory field to the “My Profile” page and I wasn’t allowed to do anything else until I’d filled it out. No problem, I thought: a few seconds won’t kill me.
If I’m lucky, I might be able to afford to retire this century.
The newly-added field turned out to be “Gender”, and as it was apparently unacceptable to leave this unspecified (as would be my preference: after all,
I’ll certainly be retiring after November 2018, when gender will cease to have any legal bearing on retirement age), I clicked the drop-down to see what options they’d provided. “Not
provided”, “Male”, and “Female” were the options: fine, I thought, I’ll just pick “Not provided” and be done with it. And for a while, everything seemed fine.
Leaving the field as the undefined “Select One” option wasn’t valid (I tried!) so I changed the value.
Over three weeks later I received a message from them saying that they hadn’t yet been able to action the changes to my profile because they hadn’t yet received hard-copy documentary
evidence from me. By this point, I’d forgotten about the minor not-really-a-change change I’d made and assumed that whatever they were on about must probably be related to my unusual name. I sent a message back to them to ask exactly what kind of evidence they needed to see. And that’s when things got weird.
I received a message back – very-definitely from a human – to say that what they needed to see what evidence of my gender change. That is, my change of gender from “not specified” to
“not provided”.
Fluttershy gets it.
They went on to suggest that I could get my doctor to certify a letter verifying my gender change. Needless to say, I haven’t made an appointment to try to get my GP to sign a document
that confirms that my gender is “not provided”. Instead, I’ve emailed back to ask them to read what they just asked me for again, and perhaps this time they’ll engage both
brain cells and try to think about what they’re actually asking, rather than getting tied up in knots in their own bureaucratic process. Let’s see how that goes.
Seeing as it’s almost Valentine’s Day and by way of proof that I’m not always so serious as to write about important topics like WordPress’s CAPTCHA implementation or
how I became a brony, here are some of the highlights of a conversation that Ruth and I just
had (tapping in to our inner 12-year-olds, I guess: some alcohol might have been involved) about song lyrics that are immeasurably improved if you replace the word “love” with “butt”.
Here are some of my favourites:
Greatest Butt Of All – Whitney Houston
Can You Feel The Butt Tonight? – Elton John
Shower Me With Your Butt – Surface
Eww.
Big Butt – Fleetwood Mac
I Would Do Anything For Butt (But I Won’t Do That) – Meat Loaf
Too Much Butt Will Kill You
“Torn between the butter and the butt you leave behind.” Yes, you can totally turn “lover” into “butter”, but it’s the addition of the word “behind” that made me snortle.
Thinking Out Loud – Ed Sheeran
“Will your mouth still remember the taste of my butt? Will your eyes still smile from your cheeks?”
Butt Song For A Vampire – Annie Lennox
Bleeding Butt – Leona Lewis
“Keep bleeding. Keep, keep bleeding, butt. You cut me open”
How Deep Is Your Butt? – Bee Gees
Addicted to Butt – Robert Palmer
“It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough. You know you’re gonna have to face it: you’re addicted to butt.”
One – U2
“Did I disappoint you, or leave a bad taste in your mouth? You act like you never had butt and you want me to go without.”
Lay All Your Butt On Me – ABBA
Butt Stinks – The J. Geils Band
Tainted Butt – Soft Cell
Can’t Help Falling In Butt – Elvis Prestley
Okay, now I’ve got that out of my system we can carry on as normal.
One of the most-popular WordPress plugins is Jetpack, a product of Automattic (best-known for providing the widely-used WordPress hosting service “WordPress.com“). Among Jetpack’s
features (many of which are very good) is Jetpack Protect which adds – among other things – the possibility for a CAPTCHA to appear on your login pages. This feature is slightly worse than pointless as it makes
it harder for humans to log in but has no significant impact upon automated robots; at best, it provides a false sense of security and merely frustrates and slows down legitimate human
editors.
Thanks, WordPress, for slowing me down with a CAPTCHA that a robot can solve more-easily than a human.
“Proving your humanity”, as you’re asked to do, is a task that’s significantly easier for a robot to perform than a human. Eventually, of course, all tests of this nature seem likely to fail as robots become smarter than humans
(especially as the most-popular system is specifically geared towards training robots), but that’s hardly an excuse for inventing a system
that was a failure from its inception. Jetpack’s approach is fundamentally flawed because it makes absolutely no effort to disguise the challenge in a way that humans are able to read
any-differently than robots. I’ll demonstrate that in a moment.
Don’t just disable this, though! Other “Protect” features make sense. If only you could disable just the one that doesn’t…
A while back, a colleague of mine network-enabled Jetpack Protect across a handful of websites that I occasionally need to log into, and it bugged me that it ‘broke’ my password safe’s
ability to automatically log me in. So to streamline my workflow – as well as to demonstrate quite how broken Jetpack Protect’s CAPTCHA is, I’ve written a userscript that you can install into your web browser that will
completely circumvent it, solving the maths problems on your behalf so that you don’t have to. Here’s how to use it:
Install a userscript manager into your browser if you don’t have one already: I use Tampermonkey, but it ought to work with almost any of
them.
From now on, whenever you go to a page whose web path begins with “/wp-login.php” that contains a Jetpack Protect maths problem, the answer will be automatically calculated and
filled-in on your behalf. The usual userscript rules apply: if you don’t trust me, read the source code (there are really only five lines to check) and disable automatic updates for it
(especially as it operates across all domains), and feel free to adapt/improve however you see fit. Maybe if we can get enough people using it Automattic will fix this
half-hearted CAPTCHA – or at least give us a switch to disable it in the first
place.
Update: 15 October 2018 – the latest version of Jetpack makes an insignificant change to this CAPTCHA; version 1.2 of this script (linked above) works around the change.
On this day in 2004… Troma Night XXI took place at The Flat. Six people were in attendance: Claire, Paul, Kit, Bryn, (Strokey) Adam and I and, unusually – remember that the digital cameras in phones were still appalling – I took pictures of everybody who showed up.
Cue exclamations of “didn’t we all look young”, etc.
Troma Night was, of course, our weekly film night back in Aberystwyth (the RockMonkey wiki once described it as “fun”). Originally launched as a one-off and then a maybe-a-few-off event with a theme of watching films produced (or
later: distributed) by Troma Entertainment, it quickly became a regular event with a remit to watch “all of the best and the worst films ever made”.
Expanding into MST3K, the IMDb “bottom 250”, and once in a while a good film, we eventually spent
somewhere over 300 nights on this activity (you can relive our 300th, if you like!)
and somehow managed to retain a modicum of sanity.
Copious quantities of alcohol might have been part of our survival strategy, as evidenced by these pictures from Troma Night V and Troma Night VI.
Troma Night XXI was among those captured by the Troma Night Webcam, streamed out to the Internet in 1-megapixel, 4 frames per second glory (when it worked).
In addition to running for over 300 weeks, Troma Night became, for many of us, a central facet of our social lives. The original attendees were all volunteers at Aberystwyth Nightline, but we were later joined by their friends, lovers, housemates… and by Liz‘s dates (who after meeting all of her friends, we usually never saw again). We quickly developed our own traditions and ideas, such as:
Pizzas like the Alec Special – a Hollywood Special (ham, pepperoni, beef, mushrooms, green peppers, onions,
sweetcorn) but without the onions and with pineapple substituted in instead – and the Pepperoni Feast particularly enjoyed by our resident vegetarian,
For those who – like me – insist that our regular Hollywood Pizza got greasier over this years, these photos from Troma Night VI.5 are pretty damning. Maybe it’s just that our tastes
changed.
Paul spontaneously throwing a sponge out of the window to mark the beginning of the evening’s activities,
Alec bringing exactly one more can of Grolsch than he’s capable of drinking and leaving the remainder in the fridge to be consumed by Kit at the start of the subsequent event,
A fight over the best (or in some cases only) seats in Claire and I’s various small (and cluttered) homes: we once got 21 people into the living room at The Flat, but it wasn’t
exactly pleasant,
Becoming such a regular customer to Hollywood Pizza that they once phoned us when we hadn’t placed an order in a timely fashion, on another ocassion turned up
with somebody else’s order because it “looked like the kind of thing we usually ordered”, and at least one time were persuaded to deliver the pizza directly up to the living room
and to each recipient’s lap (you can’t get much better delivery service than that).
Decisions about how Claire and I would lay out our furniture were eventually influenced directly by maximising the efficiency of our seating plan. This picture, from Troma Night IV,
makes it seem quite spacious and relaxed compared to later nights.
And I still enjoy the occasional awful film. I finally got around to watching Sharknado the other month, and my RiffTrax account’s library grows year on year. One of my reward card accounts is still under the name of Mr. Troma Knight. So I suppose that Troma Night
lives on in some the regulars, even if we don’t make ourselves suffer of a weekend in quite the
same ways as we once did.
To pre-empt any gatekeeping bronies in their generally-quite-nice society who want to tell me that I’m no “true” fan: save your breath, I already know. I’m not
actually claiming any kinship with the brony community. But what’s certainly true is that I’ve gained a level of appreciation for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that certainly goes beyond that of most people who aren’t fans of
the show (or else have children who are), and I thought I’d share it with you. (I can’t promise that it’s not just Stockholm syndrome, though…)
Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash. Their friendship is magic, and yours can be too.
Ignoring the fact that I owned, at some point in the early 1980s, a “G1” pony toy (possibly Seashell) from the original, old-school My Little Pony, my first introduction to the modern series came in around 2010
when, hearing about the surprise pop culture appeal of the rebooted franchise, I watched the first two episodes, Friendship is Magic parts one and two: I’m aware that after I mentioned it to
Claire, she went on to watch most of the first season (a pegasister in
the making, perhaps?). Cool, I thought: this is way better than most of the crap cartoons that were on when I was a kid.
? Chortle at the kooky… snortle at the spooky… ?
And then… I paid no mind whatsoever to the franchise until our little preschooler came home from the library, early in 2017, with a copy of an early reader/board book called Fluttershy and the Perfect Pet. This turns out to be a re-telling of the season 2 episode May The Best Pet Win!, although of course I only know that with hindsight. I casually mentioned to her that there was a TV
series with these characters, too, and she seemed interested in giving it a go. Up until that point her favourite TV shows were probably PAW Patrol and Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, but
these quickly gave way to a new-found fandom of all things MLP.
No ponies were harmed in the staging of this apparent massacre.
The bobbin’s now watched all seven seasons of Friendship is Magic plus the movie and so, by proxy – with a few exceptions where for example JTA was watching an episode with her – have I. And it’s these exceptions where I’d “missed” a few
episodes that first lead to the discovery that I am, perhaps, a “closet Brony”. It came to me one night at the local pub that JTA and I
favour that when we ended up, over our beers, “swapping notes” about the episodes that we’d each seen in order to try to make sense of it all. We’re each routinely roped into playing
games for which we’re expected to adopt the role of particular ponies (and dragons, and changelings, and at least one centaur…), but we’d both ended up getting confused as to
what we were supposed to be doing at some point or another on account of the episodes of the TV show we’d each “missed”. I’m not sure how we looked to the regulars – two 30-something
men sitting by the dartboard discussing the internal politics and friendship dramas of a group of fictional ponies and working out how the plots were interconnected – but if anybody
thought anything of it, they didn’t say so.
JTA and I’s local is among the most distinctly “village pub”-like pubs I’ve ever visited.
By the time the movie was due to come out, I was actually a little excited about it, and not even just in a vicarious way (I would soon be disappointed, mind: the movie’s mediocre at best, but at the three-year-old I took to the cinema was impressed, at least, and the “proper”
bronies – who brought cupcakes and costumes and sat at the back of the cinema – seemed to enjoy themselves, so maybe I just set my expectations too high). Clearly something in the TV
show had sunk its hooks into me, at least in a minor way. It’s not that I’d ever watch an episode without the excuse of looking after a child who wanted to do so… but I also
won’t deny that by the end of The Cutie Remark, Part One I wanted to make sure that I was the one to be
around when the little ‘un watched the second part! How wouldStarlight Glimmer be defeated?
? My little popcorn, my little popcorn… ?
At least part of the appeal is probably that the show is better than most other contemporary kids’ entertainment, and as anybody with young children knows, you end up exposed to plenty
of it. Compare to PAW Patrol (the previous obsession in our household), for example. Here we have two shows that each use six animated animals to promote an ever-expanding toy
line. But in Friendship is Magic the ponies are all distinct and (mostly) internally-consistent characters with their own individual identity, history, ambitions, likes and
dislikes that build a coherent whole (and that uniquely contributes to the overall identity of the group). In PAW Patrol, the pups are almost-interchangeable in identity
(and sometimes purpose), each with personality quirks that conveniently disappear when the plot demands it
(Marshall suddenly and without announcement stops being afraid of heights when episodes are released to promote the new “air pup” toys, and Chase’s allergy to cats somehow only
manifests itself some of the time and with some cats) and other characteristics that feel decidedly… forced. MLP‘s writing isn’t
great by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to the other things I could be watching with the kids it’s spectacular!
Seriously, Zuma: what are you FOR?
And compare the morality of the two shows. Friendship is Magic teaches us the values of friendship (duh), loyalty, trust, kindness, and respect, as well as carrying a strong
feminist message that young women can grow up to be whatever the hell they want to be. Conversely, the most-lasting lesson I’ve taken from watching PAW Patrol (and I’ve
seen a lot of that, too) is that police and spy agencies are functionally-interchangeable which very-much
isn’t the message I want our children to take away from their screen time.
Not all lessons are good lessons. I’m talking to you, Rarity.
It’s not perfect, of course. The season one episode A Dog And Pony Show‘s enduring moral, in which unicorn pony
Rarity is kidnapped by subterranean dogs and made to mine gemstones (she has a magical talent for divining for seams of them), seems to be that the best way for a woman to get her way
over men is to make a show of whining incessantly until they submit, and to win arguments by deliberately misunderstanding their statements as something that she can take offence to.
That’s not just a bad ethical message, it also reinforces a terrible stereotype and thoroughly undermines Rarity’s character! Thankfully, such issues are few and far between and on the
whole the overwhelming message of My Little Pony is one of empowerment, equality, and fairness.
If Mr. Labrador had a Twitter account, this episode of Peppa Pig would have put him at the receiving end of a whole Internetload of feminist complaints.
For the most part, Equestria is painted as a place where gender doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, which is fantastic! Compare to the Peppa
Pig episode (and accompanying book) called Funfair in which Mummy Pig
is goaded into participating in an archery competition by being told that “women are useless” at it, because it’s a “game of skill”. And while Mummy Pig does surprise the
stallholder by winning, that’s the only rebuff: it’s still presented as absolutely acceptable to make skill judgements based on gender – all that is taught is that Mummy Pig is
an outlier (which is stressed again when she wins at a hammer swing competition, later); no effort is made to show that it’s wrong to express prejudice over stereotypes. Peppa Pig is
full of terrible lessons for children even if you choose to ignore the time the show told Australian kids to pick up and play with spiders.
Princess Luna knows what I should have been doing instead of writing this post.
I probably know the words to most of the songs that’ve had album releases (we listen to them in the car a lot; unfortunately a voice from the backseat seems to request the detestable Christmas album more than any of the far-better ones). I’m probably the second-best person in my house at
being able to identify characters, episodes, and plotlines from the series. I have… opinions on the portrayal of Twilight Sparkle’s character in the script of the movie.
Also, it might be the case that I own more than one article of geeky My Little Pony-themed clothing.
I don’t describe myself as a Brony (not that there’d be anything wrong if I did!), but I can see how others might. I think I get an exemption for not having been to a convention or read
any fanfiction or, y’know, watched any of it without a child present. I think that’s the key.
For anybody who’s
worried, Ruth is fine: mostly it’s only her pride that’s been injured, although she’s looking to be growing some badass-looking bruises.
Luckily today is a work/study-from-home day for me, so I was able to go out and rescue her (she hadn’t even gotten out of our estate).
Do you remember how earlier this year, half of the Internet went nuts about the fact that – based on the emoji they’d drawn – Google didn’t know how to make a cheeseburger? It was a fun distraction from all the terrible stuff
happening in the world, which was nice, but it also got me to thinking: how many other emoji are arguably “wrong” in their depiction of whatever-it-is they’re supposed to be
showing.
I was never so offended by the fact that the cheese was underneath the burger as I was by the fact that the cheese was depicted as having somehow been melted… by the bun.
I’ve got a special kind of relationship with emoji to begin with. I wouldn’t even call it love-hate, because that would imply that there’s something about them that I love. But I
certainly think that they’re culturally-fascinating, and I wonder how future anthropologists will look back on this period of our history: the time that we went back to
heiroglyphics for a while! It’s great to have a convenient, universal, lazy icon set that anybody can use… but it’s unfortunate that people use them for literal rather
than figurative meaning (such as sharing the [?️ | reminder ribbon] icon with somebody because it’s pink and you’re doing a breast
cancer awareness fun run… without realising that the ribbon is only pink on your model of phone), or for figurative meanings that depend on specific iconography (such
as sending the [? | aubergine/eggplant] emoji to somebody to tell them that you’ve got an erection… which is apparently a thing –
I’m out of touch with youth culture… without knowing that their LG phone is going to render it as super-bent).
These two are both emoji for “ATM”: the former, by Microsoft, shows a cash machine. The latter looks like a corporate headquarters for a company called “ATM”. If you’re using a
picture because it has a specific meaning, you perhaps ought not to use emoji!
Emoji can be a way to accentuate a message, but they aren’t and shouldn’t be the message themselves because the specifics of their display are not so much a standard as a loose
collection of standards implemented by some… imaginative… graphic artists… And some cases are particularly bad:
This isn’t what juggling looks like, Apple.
Apple seem to think that three-ball juggling involves all three balls being in the air at the same time. And also, for some reason, wearing a bowler hat and a bow tie.
The most-common three-ball juggling technique is to throw from the inside, catch on the outside.
The idea that three-ball juggling routinely involves multiple balls in the air at once is a common one, but it’s (mostly) false. As the animated GIF above shows, there are two stages to
juggling. The first is the stage where one ball is held in each hand and a third ball is in the air. The second is the stage where the juggler throws a ball from their hand in order to
free up space to catch the descending ball. This latter one is the only point when there are multiple balls in the air, and even then it’s only two of them (specifically, for
conventional N-ball juggling, the number of balls in the air is usually N-2 and occasionally N-1).
Apple’s emoji also places the balls in very unlikely places: consider the two lowest-down balls: they’re both further out than the centre of the juggler’s hands! This means
that the juggler is throwing the balls away from himself (presumably out of panic that he’s somehow been hired as a juggler despite not knowing how to juggle).
Who’s even seen a camera like this, let alone tried to use one to capture a speeding vehicle?
Yes, yes, I get it: icons should be symbolic rather than representative, and with that in mind Apple’s icon isn’t too bad. Especially not when you compare it to some of the
other options.
This is what Google (left) and Samsung (right) think that juggling looks like.
Both Google and Samsung’s emoji have the same problem: that all the balls are bunched up in the same path, like they’re being fired from a shotgun at an unsuspecting children’s
entertainer. They form an arch over the juggler’s head like a rainbow of mistake, all rocketing from the juggler’s right hand to their left which is clearly going to be incapable of
catching them all at once. What we’re seeing, then, is a split second before the moment of photographic perfection: the point at which all the balls are in the air and
you don’t have to wait and see what a disaster happens when they all come down at once.
Also, Google: you too? What’s with the bowler hat and bow tie? Is this what jugglers are supposed to wear? Have I been doing it wrong my whole life?
Facebook has a picture of… disembodied hands spinning a three-coloured ring with balls on it?
Facebook’s “juggler” emoji is even worse. For a start, it doesn’t actually show a juggler, it shows juggling (and this isn’t a consistent style choice: Facebook’s emoji
for e.g. snowboarder, mechanic, farmer, teacher etc. all show a whole person or at least a person from the waist upwards). Secondly, the motion of the balls most-closely represents
circle-juggling, which is a way to juggle but isn’t what you normally see jugglers doing: compared to conventional juggling patterns, circle juggling is both harder to
do and looks less-impressive!
But even then, it’s confusing: why is the blue ball turning a corner of its own accord to try to avoid the hand? Perhaps this is some kind of magic available only to people who are
missing a finger from each hand, as this unusual “juggler” seems to be.
Twitter changed their “juggler” emoji in September 2016 from the one on the left to the one on the right.
Twitter used to have many of the same problems – circle juggling, balls that randomly change direction in flight, no juggler – until they revamped their emoji collection last year. Now
they’ve still got most of those, plus the “all the balls in the air” problem and the most disinterested-looking juggler I’ve ever seen. As he stands there, shrugging,
it feels like it needs a speech bubble that says “I have no feelings about what I’m doing whatsoever.” At least he’s not wearing a bowler hat and bow tie, I suppose.
Also: why do we have an emoji for juggler, but not for magician?
The short of it is: emoji have a lot to answer for.
For the last eight winters, we at Three Rings have sent out Christmas cards – and sometimes mugs! – to our clients (and to special
friends of the project). The first of these was something I knocked up in Photoshop in under an hour, but we’ve since expanded into having an official “company artist” in the form of
our friend Ele who each year takes the ideas that the Three Rings volunteer team have come up with and adapts them into a stunning
original design that we’re proud to show off to our clients.
Our first Christmas card, in 2009, was knocked-up quickly and printed only a couple of days before the Christmas posting deadline, but it kicked-off a tradition that’s grown every
year since.
This year’s card is still winging its way to some of our more-distant customers, as Three Rings is used in six countries, and so it doesn’t yet appear on our gallery of previous cards. But here’s a sneak peek:
Last week, I helped stuff a little under 400 of these into envelopes and put stamps on them all for delivery to our UK customers. (Our international customers needed slightly
more-careful attention.)
For most of Three Rings life, our server’s been hosted by the awesome folks at Bytemark. We had a brief dalliance with Amazon Web Services for a while but had a seriously unsatisfying experience and we eventually came crawling back to Bytemark (complete with a
conveniently-timed Valentines’ Day message expressing our love for them and our apologies for our mistake). What I’m saying is that we’ve made a habit of sending seasonal greetings to
our buddies at Bytemark – and this Christmas was no different – but what surprised us was what we received from them this year:
Bytemark sent us not only a Christmas card but a fancy-looking fruitcake! Thanks, Bytemark!
Not only did Bytemark send us a delightful Christmas card (with a pixel-art picture of Sana literally burning the logs) but they included a fabulous-looking fruitcake. Thanks
for bringing a little bit of extra cheer to our Christmas, Bytemark!
When I first started working at the Bodleian Libraries in 2011, their websites were looking… a little
dated. I’d soon spend some time working with a vendor (whose premises mysteriously caught fire while I was there, freeing me up to spend my
birthday in a bar) to develop a fresh, modern interface for our websites that, while not the be-all and end-all, was a huge leap forwards and has served us well for the last five years
or so.
The colour scheme, the layout, the fact that it didn’t remotely work on mobiles… there was a lot wrong with the old design of the Bodleian Libraries’ websites.
Fast-forward a little: in about 2015 we noticed a few strange anomalies in our Google Analytics data. For some reason, web addresses were appearing that didn’t exist anywhere on our
site! Most of these resulted from web visitors in Turkey, so we figured that some Turkish website had probably accidentally put our Google Analytics user ID number into their
code rather than their own. We filtered out the erroneous data – there wasn’t much of it; the other website was clearly significantly less-popular than ours – and carried on. Sometimes
we’d speculate about the identity of the other site, but mostly we didn’t even think about it.
How a Bodleian Libraries’ website might appear today. Pay attention, now: there’ll be a spot-the-difference competition in a moment.
Earlier this year, there was a spike in the volume of the traffic we were having to filter-out, so I took the time to investigate more-thoroughly. I determined that the offending
website belonged to the Library of Bilkent University, Turkey. I figured that some junior web developer there must have copy-pasted the
Bodleian’s Google Analytics code and forgotten to change the user ID, so I went to the website to take a look… but I was in for an even bigger surprise.
Hey, that looks… basically identical!
Whoah! The web design of a British university was completely ripped-off by a Turkish university! Mouth agape at the audacity, I clicked my way through several of their pages to try to
understand what had happened. It seemed inconceivable that it could be a coincidence, but perhaps it was supposed to be more of an homage than a copy-paste job? Or perhaps they
were ripped-off by an unscrupulous web designer? Or maybe it was somebody on the “inside”, like our vendor, acting unethically by re-selling the same custom design? I didn’t believe it
could be any of those things, but I had to be sure. So I started digging…
Our user research did indicate that putting the site and catalogue search tools like this was smart. Maybe they did the same research?
Menus are pretty common on many websites. They probably just had a similar idea.
Tabs are a great way to show opening hours. Everybody knows that. And this is obviously just the a popular font.
Oh, you’ve got a slider too. With circles? And you’ve got an identical Javascript bug? Okay… now that’s a bit of a coincidence…
Okay, I’m getting a mite suspicious now. Surely we didn’t independently come up with this particular bit of design?
Well these are clearly different. Ours has a copyright notice, for example…
Oh, you DO have a copyright notice. Hang on, wait: you’ve not only stolen our design but you’ve declared it to be open-source???
I was almost flattered as I played this spot-the-difference competition, until I saw the copyright notice: stealing our design was galling enough, but then relicensing it in such a way
that they specifically encourage others to steal it too was another step entirely. Remember that we’re talking about an academic library, here: if anybody ought to
have a handle on copyright law then it’s a library!
I took a dive into the source code to see if this really was, as it appeared to be, a copy-paste-and-change-the-name job (rather than “merely” a rip-off of the entire graphic design),
and, sure enough…
In their HTML source code, you can see both the Bodleian’s Google Analytics code (which they failed to remove) but also their own. And a data- attribute related to a project I wrote
and that means nothing to their site.
It looks like they’d just mirrored the site and done a search-and-replace for “Bodleian”, replacing it with “Bilkent”. Even the code’s spelling errors, comments, and indentation were
intact. The CSS was especially telling (as well as being chock-full of redundant code relating to things that appear on our website but not on theirs)…
The search-replace resulted in some icky grammar, like “the Bilkent” appearing in their code. And what’s this? That’s MY NAME in the middle of their source code!
So I reached out to them with a tweet:
My first tweet to Bilkent University Library contained a “spot the difference” competition.
I didn’t get any response, although I did attract a handful of Turkish followers on Twitter. Later, they changed their Twitter handle and I thought I’d take advantage of the then-new
capability for longer tweets to have another go at getting their attention:
This time, I was a little less-sarcastic and a little more-aggressive. Turns out that’s all that was needed.
Clearly this was what it took to make the difference. I received an email from the personal email account of somebody claiming to be Taner
Korkmaz, Systems Librarian with Bilkent’s Technical Services team. He wrote (emphasis mine):
Dear Mr. Dan Q,
My name is Taner Korkmaz and I am the systems librarian at Bilkent. I am writing on behalf of Bilkent University Library, regarding your share about Bilkent on
your Twitter account.
Firstly, I would like to explain that there is no any relation between your tweet and our library Twitter handle change. The librarian who is Twitter admin at Bilkent did not notice
your first tweet. Another librarian took this job and decided to change the twitter handle because of the Turkish letters, abbreviations, English name requirement etc. The first name
was @KutphaneBilkent (kutuphane means library in Turkish) which is not clear and not easy to understand. Now, it is @LibraryBilkent.
About 4 years ago, we decided to change our library website, (and therefore) we reviewed the appearance and utility of the web pages.
We appreciated the simplicity and clarity of the user interface of University of Oxford Bodlien Library & Radcliffe Camera, as an academic pioneer in many fields. As a not profit institution, we took advantage of your template by using CSS and HTML, and added our own original content.
We thought it would not create a problem the idea of using CSS codes since on the web page there isn’t any license notice or any restriction related to
the content of the template, and since the licenses on the web pages are mainly more about content rather than templates.
The Library has its own Google Analytics and Search Console accounts and the related integrations for the web site statistical data tracking. We would like to point out that there is
a misunderstanding regarding this issue.
In 2017, we started to work on creating a new web page and we will renew our current web page very soon.
Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and apologies for possible inconveniences.
Yours sincerely,
Or to put it another way: they decided that our copyright notice only applied to our content and not our design and took a copy of the latter.
Do you remember when I pointed out earlier that librarians should be expected to know their way around copyright law? Sigh.
They’ve now started removing evidence of their copy-pasting such as the duplicate Google Analytics code fragment and the references to LibraryData, but you can still find the unmodified
code via archive.org, if you like.
That probably ends my part in this little adventure, but I’ve passed everything on to the University of Oxford’s legal team in case any of them have anything to say about it. And now
I’ve got a new story to tell where web developers get together over a pint: the story of the time that I made a website for a university… and a different university stole it!
Yesterday, Ruth and I attended a Festive Breads Workshop at the Oxford Brookes
Restaurant Cookery and Wine School, where we had a hands-on lesson in making a variety of different (semi-)seasonal bread products. It was a fantastic experience and gave us both
skills and confidence that we’d have struggled to attain so-readily in any other way.
I am the Master Baker! The Bread Winner! (Okay, so everybody got one of these certificates…)
The Oxford Brookes Restaurant is a working restaurant which doubles as a place for Brookes’ students to work and practice roles as chefs, sommeliers, and
hospitality managers as part of their courses. In addition, the restaurant runs a handful of shorter or day-long courses for adults and children on regional and cuisine-based cookery,
knife skills, breadmaking, and wine tasting. Even from the prep room off the main working kitchen (and occasionally traipsing through it on the way to and from the ovens), it was easy
to be captivated the buzz of activity as the lunchtime rush began outside: a large commercial kitchen is an awesome thing to behold.
Working in our kitchen at home I often have less space than my entire work area in this, the smallest room of the Brookes’ kitchens.
By early afternoon we’d each made five different breads: a stollen, a plaitted wreath, rum babas, a seeded flatbread, and a four-strand woven challah. That’s plenty to do (and
a good amount of standing up and kneading!), but it was made possible by the number of things we didn’t have to do. There was no weighing and measuring, no washing-up:
this was done for us, and it’s amazingly efficiency-enhancing to be able to go directly from each recipe to the next without having to think about these little tasks. We didn’t even
have to run our breads in and out of the proofing cupboard and the ovens: as we’d be starting on mixing the next dough, the last would be loaded onto trays and carried around the
kitchens.
Start from the right and weave to the left: over, under, over. Repeat.
The tuition itself was excellent, too. The tutors, Amanda and Jan, were friendly and laid-back (except if anybody tried to short-cut their kneading of a wet dough by adding more flour
than was necessary, in which case they’d enter “flour police” mode and start slapping wrists) and clearly very knowledgeable and experienced. When I struggled at one point with getting
a dough ball to the consistency that was required, Jan stepped in and within seconds identified that the problem was that my hands were too warm. The pair complemented one another very
well, too, for example with Amanda being more-inclined than Jan towards the laissez-faire approach to ingredient measurement that I prefer when I make bread, for example.
It looked a little lopsided at this point, but Ruth’s challah looked among the best of all of them among the final products.
The pace was fast and Ruth in particular struggled early on to keep up, but by the end the entire group – despite many hours on our feet, much of it kneading stiff doughs – were
hammering through each activity, even though there was a clear gradient in the technical complexity of what we were working on. And – perhaps again thanks to the fantastic tuition –
even the things that seemed intimidating upon first glance (like weaving four strands of dough together without them sticking to one another or the surface) weren’t problematic once we
got rolling.
Having great equipment like large hot ovens, a proofing cupboard, and an endless supply of highly-active live (not dried) yeast might have helped too.
Our hosts, apparently somehow not having enough to do while teaching and supervising us, simultaneously baked a selection of absolutely delicious bread to be served with our lunch,
which by that point was just showing-off. Meanwhile, we put the finishing touches on our various baked goods with glazes, seeds, ribbons, and sugar.
It looked a little lopsided at this point, but Ruth’s challah looked among the best of all of them among the final products.
And so we find ourselves with a house completely full of amazingly-tasty fresh bread – the downside perhaps of having two of us from the same household on the same course! – and a whole
new appreciation of the versatility of bread. As somebody who makes pizza bases and, once in a blue moon, bread rolls, I feel like there’s so much more I could be doing and I’m looking
forward to getting more adventurous with my bread-making sometime soon.
Tired-but-proud would be a pretty good description of Ruth here, I think.
I’d really highly recommend the Brookes Restaurant courses; they’re well worth a look if you’re interested in gaining a point or two of Cooking skill.
