Follow the Friendly Robot!

a knitted robot with its arm held up in greeting by a human hand

Just a quickie: If you, too, are learning to code, I strongly recommend following @NatashaTheRobot on Twitter. She posts a consistent stream of links of interest to students of programming. She’s also written a book about how to learn this stuff, How To… Learn To Code. Get Your Dream Job. Change Your Life (which—confession—I bought but haven’t read yet), and she has a fine blog, Natasha The Robot.

Photo: Robbie by Jeff / mr_jeffreed; some rights reserved.

How the studying is going

Striped cat standing on the keyboard of a laptop

It’s been about a month since I came out of the closet as a desultory Python studier, and I’ve been thinking that I should have included in my plans a commitment to post about what I’m learning, at least once a week. I’ll try to do that, going forward. Less sweeping saga, more this:

I started this blog as a sort of “developer notebook”. If you look back at the first ten or so posts, they are titled “Weekly Noise”. I was interested in learning Node.js (the hotness at the time) so I just wrote about what I learned each week and what I was planning to do next week.
—Matt Swanson, “Do things, write about it,” August 11, 2013 Continue reading How the studying is going

The option that wasn’t

Kobo advanced settings

One of the things I like—a unique feature, as far as I’ve seen—about Kobo’s e-reader software for iPhone OS is that it gives you a choice between vertical scrolling and traditional pagination. Because, really, what do pages mean on a digital reader where the text can reflow according to user preferences? Great. So, I selected vertical scrolling.

Problem is, even if you choose this setting, you will still run into page breaks:
Continue reading The option that wasn’t

PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB

These are my cats, hanging out in the tub.
The following is the first draft of my thesis proposal, more or less as posted to ITP’s internal project database on Thursday morning. I wrote this in haste and have (still) not had the stomach to reread it, so be hereby forewarned that it may be incoherent, ridiculous, or, of course, both.

Thesis Statement

Every newspaper article on ebooks, in tweet form:
Article: ‘Ebooks might be okay?’
Comments: ‘PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB’
—Liza Daly (@liza), 7:11 PM Dec 15th, 2009

Continue reading PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB

Product of a RESTful night

reading in bed

For this week’s homework in Understanding Networks, our assignment was as follows:

REST assignment. Communication in not-so-realtime. Deliver information to the user through the browser from somewhere else. Update the information they’re seeing while they interact, preferably based on input from multiple sources.

As I mentioned last week, I wanted to work with the newly released Wordnik API. Continue reading Product of a RESTful night

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