technonaturalist

Dearest Apple

I hear you’ve won your most recent case against Samsung regarding rounded corners on rectangles. Please forgive me for not jumping up and down in excitement over this little victory, as I happen to think the whole thing was pretty fucking stupid (pardonnez mon français) and a massive waste of time, effort and resources that you could have spent doing stuff like making your existing products better and maybe even inventing something new (or at least a new take on something old).

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Because I don’t blog it nearly as often as I should.

7yo’s reading is now well and truly away. He reads everything from street and shop signs that we’re passing to books. His current favourite book is his Pokemon Black & White Handbook that Sprat bought for him. It’s not unusual for him to wander around the house with it, have it open on his lap while watching tv, and sometimes he’ll be multiscreening, watching tv, playing Pokemon White on his DS and have the book open beside him for reference. I’ve known for a while and I think both 7yo and Josh are discovering that he can actually parse what he considers large blocks of text when he wants to.

The kids watched many Pokemon dvds while we were on Christmas Island. I have a Pokemon fanfic sketched out in my head which I don’t give a lot of time to as it’s a very occasional diversion from working on AR. This is sketch of my OT (that’s “Original Trainer” for those that aren’t versed in Pokemon fanfics) and two of her Eevees; Amber (combining cliches, she is an abnormally large shiny mutant, and female!), and Lightfoot (perfectly normal male). They’re hunting whatever might be good eating probably somewhere in the Kanto region.

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Recently, in a mad jumble of chaos and confusion well coordinated and executed attack, my sister and I surprised our parents for their 60th.

I took a bunch of photos but didn’t put them on my laptop due to the constant dramas I’ve been having downloading photos from the camera (keep losing connection, and the closer I get to finishing the import the more it breaks) and also the internet connection on Christmas Island is so agonisingly slow that photos would have taken aeons to upload anyway. So now having gotten back to Perth and back onto my desktop, after struggling with importing 227 photos for the last two hours, I’m going to do one of those big long photo posts that is going to exasperate my sister.

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My plans rarely go according to plan. They do usually result in a desirable (and sometimes even the desired) outcome though.

The latest one worked a charm, considering how many factors, unknowns and randoms got involved.

My parents are 60 this year. When we were up for Christmas in December, I made some noises about attempting to come back for the big birthday bash they had planned in the middle of the year if I could scrape the money together.

“Where is the Green Sheep” is a picture book by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek. It’s been a favourite for all three kids and it’s pretty easy (repetitive sentences with one-two word variations). In the interests of LOTE

I decided to translate it into lojban for them.

Unfortunately, I completely destroyed the lyrical rhyming thing while doing so.

Happily it seemed like a mostly straightforward task (which means I’m slowly getting better or conversely I fubared it and don’t realise it yet). I can’t find a word for “clown” and I don’t think {sakli} is the right thing to use when describing playground equipment.

That would be Blender the open source 3d application not the kitchen appliance.

2012-06-22: I want to split out the Lightwave viewports and have one view on the big screen so I can see a big picture of what’s going on and work on smaller zoomed in sections on my Cintiq. Lightwave can’t do that. Wonder if Blender can because it’s all open sourcey and whatnot and it’s statistcally improbable that I’m the only person on the planet that would want to do such a ridiculous thing. Find out it can, download. Messed around a little with menus (most important thing was change the rotation thing from turntable to trackball so it would move in a way I was used to) and made a mutant cube.

Because my wonderful husband is an impatient git (whom I love very much by the way), the photos are unprocessed so may be a bit dark on some monitors. These are WiP shots of the skate ramp that’s being built in the front yard. Not so many photos as I was kind of keeping an eye on 5 kids at the time and also I need to get a photo of the state the thing is in right now as I don’t have one for some reason, thought I did.

My head. It’s so full of stuff that I have a very mild persistant headache. The cold isn’t helping either, it makes my shoulder hurt. I’m glad I don’t live somewhere that’s actually cold.

Following is a thought dump so I can work out what I’m doing and so anyone that cares can now know why techno was gone for the last month and why I’ve been in such a ridiculous distracted foul mood.

Fairly straightforward. Mostly here as a reminder for how to do webforms; (example has a theoretical nid of 1 and a theoretical form field called “message” and the “submitted” part stymied me for a bit).

template.php

<?php 
function mytheme_form_webform_client_form_1_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
    $form['submitted']['message']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = t('Type your message here...');
} 
?>

Could also use a switch in hook_form_alter(). One of these days I’ll think about finding out if there’s any difference performance-wise in using a big switch with many form alterations or several smaller hook_form_form_id_alters.