I haven't made any cool crafts or programs to show off on my blog in a while, so I thought I'd make a post about things that I'm up to, and things that are coming up this year. In short: Oxford, science, business plans, science, running, science and rubik's cubes. Read on if this intrigues you.
Continue reading The anaconda rubik's cube, and other stories.
Do you use bookmarklets? They're little bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks, that do something to the page you're on when you click on them. Today I made a bookmarklet to change the formatting on any Project Gutenberg HTML book.
To see it in action, drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Format Gutenberg - then go to any Project Gutenberg book as an HTML page - try this one to begin with - then scroll down to the main text and click on your bookmarklet.
A bit of background:
I read and wrote a lot of fanfiction as a teenager, and (I suppose largely out of nostalgia) have some particular preferences about text formatting. Nowadays, I find 13px Verdana on a white background, with minimal margins and no indenting, to be the easiest to concentrate on. People talk a lot about how it's difficult to read from a computer screen (hence the rise of e-ink) but personally I suspect it's easier for me to read fiction when it's just another tab on my browser. Project Gutenberg is a massive online library of out-of-copyright literature.
I'm moving house this weekend, my exams start this Wednesday and in general, I'm pretty stressed out. I'm having a quiet evening watching comedy with my brother Pete and, as usual when I'm under pressure, obsessively coding. I've always thought bookmarklets were pretty cool (if fairly mysterious), so I had a look at some source code and had a go at working it out (I'm sure there are lots of tutorials on the internet, but I was looking for a puzzle).
My general strategy and some code: Continue reading Adventures in bookmarklet land
Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I've spent a lot of time on trains. Apart from reading, naturally I have also been knitting. These little Christmas stockings are from my own pattern. I've been knitting them for a couple of years, and I seem to change the pattern each time I make them. The pattern below requires stocking stitch and short rows, using two straight needles. I have been working on one version in the round, but it still needs a bit of tweaking.
The knitted "paper" chain is a nice, easy thing to knit in front of the TV. My amazing friend Astrid showed me how to make them when I last visited her (in between feeding me lots and lots of food, introducing me to lovely people and beating me at Lego Rock Band). Essentially you cast on 30 stitches, knit four (or six, if you fancy) rows in garter stitch, bind off, and sew the ends together.
Apart from knitting, I've been reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which I have reviewed briefly here, writing some cool programs, making aubergine involtini (thanks, Nigella!), getting into Oxford for a PhD in Systems Biology next year, and doodling polar bears. I know, right? Polar bears are awesome. Now I will leave you only with my extremely classy electronic Christmas card.
Continue reading A Very Knitted Christmas