Tag: project idea

Categories
Art and Design Future Building Reuse Technology

Retrocycling as entry to creative reuse

Replied to Field Notes: Why It’s Time for “Retrocycling” – Immerse by an author (Immerse)

Over the past decades, I have explored different approaches for repurposing outdated technologies, including video game consoles from the 1970s; TVs and slide projectors from the 1980s; CD players…

Loosely skimmed the article but love the idea of retrocycling as a way of thinking about reuse and product lifecycles.

Could you host a workshop/ course to encourage hacking old tech?

An interactive event / pop-up space with old games and equipment?

A photography / documentary project where people could celebrate hand-me-downs by sharing their stories? Or a website where people could post their stories?

Categories
Meta

Classify WordPress tags with term meta data

Bookmarked Introducing Term Meta Data In WordPress And How To Use Them — Smashing Magazine (Smashing Magazine)

WordPress 4.4 introduced **term meta data** which allows you to save meta values for terms in a similar way to post meta data. This is a highly anticipated and logical addition to the WordPress system.
So far, the post and comment meta systems allowed us to add arbitrary data to posts and comments. This can be used to add ratings to comments, indicate your mood while you were writing a post, attach prices to product posts, and various other information you think is relevant to your content. As of the newest version of WordPress, **meta data can now be added to terms** which allows us to create features like default category thumbnails in a standardized way. This tutorial will show you how you can edit, update and retrieve these meta data for terms.

I add author as a tag to all my book reviews, and would like a way to see all the author tags in one spot. Adding term meta data to the tags sounds like a way to do that.

Added 12/8: David clarified that what I really need is a new taxonomy, so that author name would have its own field instead of being a tag. Then I could add term meta data to that taxonomy if I wanted to track, say, BIPOC or queer authors. Thanks David!

Categories
Reflection Writing

NaNoWriMo 2022 Day 3

Four hours of writing two days in a row, and I’m feeling it today! I slogged through a rough 650 word session early this afternoon, and kept putting off doing a second session through the afternoon and early evening. Finally I got back on after dinner and hammered through another thousand words, which felt much easier. I’m calling it good with only two and a quarter hours today — I met minimum word count, even if not 70k word count 😉

You know how they say don’t start running by running a 5k every day? NaNo is that for writing.* But at least you’re doing it alongside thousands of others 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♀️

I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again,** but breaking my brain back into intense daily writing is absolutely training. Writing is a heavy brain-draw, and even with building up my work endurance during Preptober, I have to adjust to go from writing nothing to writing two thousand words a day. It’s a balance of listening to my body and recognizing when I need rest and when it’s just resistance. Today was a little of both. (And I’m sure it didn’t help that I slept kinda crappy last night. NaNo is an important time to take care of your body!)

 

* There are some things about NaNo that I think are great for new writers, but I also sometimes worry that it’s harmful to people who it doesn’t work for. I don’t want people to feel bad and quit writing if the binge approach isn’t for them. (There’s probably something toxic “suffering for your art” mentality in this style of just do it.) There would be something to be said for stretching it out over a longer time period and starting with writing a sentence, then a paragraph, then a page, and working up to 2k words a day. Frankly, that would be a much healthier approach to building a healthy writing habit than NaNo, which is something that I (and many of my writing friends) have struggled with over the years. Hmmm…. Page Zero to 2k 🤔 I think this is actually a good idea…. that I really don’t have time for 😂

** Depending how this month goes, in the future I may be trying to work more intensive writing into my life throughout the year, rather than during one annual marathon.

Categories
Society

Darth Vader’s voice immortal

Bookmarked An AI program voiced Darth Vader in ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ so James Earl Jones could finally retire by Igor Bonifacic (engadget.com)

After 45 years of voicing one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, James Earl Jones has said goodbye to Darth Vader…That forced the company to ask itself how do you even replace Jones? The answer Disney eventually settled on, with the actor’s consent, involved an AI program.

Tally another one for “makes sense in this instance but ohhhhh the repercussions of this technology in unfettered capitalism” — ripe for exploitation of voice actors.

(Story idea: Little Mermaid cyberpunk retelling where she sells the license to her voice 🫠)

Categories
Websites

Watched Photo Posting And Presentation

Watched Photo Posting And Presentation – IndieWebCamp (DUS) (2022) from Internet Archive

Photo posting & presentation was a session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2022.

My perspective watching: thinking about a new project to post old nature photos

Questions from Tantek:

  • When do you post photos? (real-time / contemporaneously, or retrospective)
    • I think this is my mental hangup for this project idea, because I always post photos within a few days or at most a few weeks — but I feel like that mentality falls into the trap of valuing newness too much
  • What motivates you to put a photo on your website?
    • For this project idea, I’m motivated by sharing photos I like that I haven’t had a chance to share before, rather than being buried on my hard drive — I’ve been thinking lately about my things and creations as a childfree person and it sparked a realization that once I die (hopefully another 30+ years from now 😉) all my content will just be deleted, so the only value they’ll have is now, if I share them

👉 Another benefit of good alt text for IndieWeb – others can use the alt text in their page excerpt/quote rather than duplicating the image itself

Examples:

  • I like David’s “masonry” style photo page (flex grid?)
  • Also like the Instagram duplicate (I assume) grid by Max Dietrich

Session notes

Categories
Reflection Websites

Life lesson: buy the domain

It’s a cheap way to hold onto an idea so you don’t kick yourself later when you want it.

Lost out on two .com domains that were available when I thought of them but now have been bought. Wasn’t ready to do anything with the ideas yet but now if I do I’ll have a shitty url 🤷‍♀️

Categories
Getting Shit Done Learning

Personal Process Improvements

Since an exchange with Ray a couple months ago, I’ve been thinking more about my personal processes, and how ad hoc they are — and how ad hoc everyone’s personal processes are. There are all these basic tasks that we each figure out how to do our own way.

Some of that probably makes sense — that we figure out a system that works for the way we think and what we need to do — but also, probably a lot of us could have processes that work better? I certainly realized, in explaining my process for writing posts on this digital garden, that the process I’ve developed is… more steps and more complicated than it needs to be. What other processes do I have on auto-pilot that, frankly, suck?

Many systems have been developed for time and task management, and for email* — if you seek them out. How many people do?

And what about for everything else? Sure, there is no one answer that will work for everyone, but how many of us have created Rube Goldberg workflows unintentionally?

We focus so much on which tools to use that we often overlook how we use them in the big picture. There are tutorials on how to accomplish XYZ task using a tool, but not so much piecing it together into a whole process. (Or maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs.) (I do recall noticing Photo Cascadia sharing some photography workflows.) I’ve included a few of my favorite “mental tools” (e.g. kanban, travel binder, card ) tangential to my processes on my “uses” page.

Continue reading “Personal Process Improvements”
Categories
Fun Music

Listen through your favorite band’s catalog

Bookmarked In Praising of “Listening Through” (Every Album By Your Favorite Artist) – Kevin Smokler by Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)

Why you should listen to every album by a band you love

Sounds fun!

Categories
Music

Owning my music data

At Homebrew Website Club on Wednesday, GWG challenged me to explore owning my scrobbles, pointing me to Jan’s implementation (GitHub). I said I listen to way too much music and I’d need to do a separate WordPress install on a subdomain dedicated to tracking listens, so I ruled it out.

Except then I came across ClassicPress and am curious about trying it out.

And I decided to port my playlists from Spotify to Tidal and got correspondingly irritated about walled gardens and data portability and losing the full record of some of my playlists because Tidal doesn’t have rights to some of the songs. And I came across kandr3s’ online playlists where his playlists are recreated in order with links / embeds to play the songs.

So now I’m thinking about it 😂 #idontneedanotherwebsite

Not making any promises…but pondering what my goal would be with the data. Would it be just a backup of Last.fm that I owned, or would I be able to manipulate the data more than I could there?

Keeping accessible format playlists has some appeal, although potentially a lot of manual work unless I found some way to transform the csv files I downloaded from Exportify into a blog post. The files do include the Spotify URIs for the tracks, albums and artists so I’m sure there’s a way that I’d just have to figure out. Although, I’d want to give more thought to what I would use the playlist for, to make it a useful format.

I feel like there should be a micropub client for listens, really, where you had (later searchable and sortable) fields for track, artist, album, and year the album came out. Something like indiebookclub, except indiemusicclub 😎

Actually, this type of listening library is another type of personal library for me to get ideas about at the upcoming Personal Libraries Pop-Up.

Categories
Art and Design Fun

Community photo fest

Bookmarked The Wow Waikawa! Photo Fest: community and heart by Miraz JordanMiraz Jordan (miraz.me)

In a nutshell: we applied for and were granted funding, then ran a basic photo skills workshop, and invited submissions of photos that celebrated Waikawa Beach. A key factor was that this was not a competition about photographic skill or technique. It was a celebration, sharing what’s wonderful about this place…We received 120 photos and selected 32 for printing at various sizes as Walldots…

This sounds like a fun pop-up community art project!