Firefox, LJ, science, music, dice, aliens and games - linkspam time...

[matgb]

K, in no particular order...

• Scotland's interesting message to alien life


• Miss Freddie is talking about dice and music:

Been reading about indeterminacy (think John Cage), and I just had a thought. Dice Music. Assign each note to number on a D12(?). Roll. A lot. Assign lengths of notes, dynamics, other markings, to different dice. Even assign the choosing of instruments to the dice. Brass, Woodwind, Strings, Voices? Then Trumpets, Trombones etc...

What sort of dice can you get? D20s, D6... what else?

Interesting comments thread there, with some daft suggestions as to where to go next.

• wpts has launched a Does my web site suck checklist, the bulk of which I agree with wholeheartedly (and some of you will have read the draft of my forthcoming rant about flash sites and navigation already - Vincent agrees)


• dm_of_the_rings has the most recent episode upDwarven Diplomacy. If Gimli is to be comic relief, at least he can be cool comic relief. And yes, that feed address is just for the comic, the full feed is 20sidedtale, but I'm a little feeded out at the moment so I used my mighty Wordpress fu to just syndicate that category.
• On the other hand, just reading the comic feed means missing out on stuff like this review of the Fate Diablo II clone:

Fate is one game where I think the “clone” moniker is deserved. Fate is more or less a straight-up Diablo clone. It duplicates the mechanics and play style of Diablo II right down to having the same windows with the same information that are opened with the same hotkeys.

On the subject of Diablo: play_diablo, set up by theweaselking, I have every intention of joining in properly once I've gotten myself a decent connection speed.

• davidnm has decided to abandone pretence of being a serious scientists, and explains how we could be descended from alien colonists:

It goes like this. Suppose you want to colonise a planet, but you want to avoid either the War of the Worlds scenario (bumped off by native life) or the 'terraforming by accident' scenario (your intestinal flora or whatever outcompete everything else on the planet). Basically, you need to make your proposed colonists fit in with the local environment.

So, you find some local dominant species to use as a template.

OK, he's not being serious, but still...

• Some official communities are starting to show ads. I have nothing further to add to that statement, but isn't it great that they started doing so just before the annual State of the Goat on news?


• Was going to write this up properly but I doubt I'll ever get around to it so, lj_nifty: Using Firefox 2 to quickly add RSS feeds to your LJ account:

Firefox 2 has a nifty feature for easily subscribing to RSS feeds

Since discovering this feature hack, I've added over 50 new feeds to various filters. Hence me being a little feeded out; I keep meaning to cut down but, y'know, they're all so cool. I'm not sure if non-paid users can use it to discover new feeds, but if not, or if you want something set up, it's so easy to do I'm happy to oblige.

Phew, that was a longer one; question: Would people prefer I cut this sort of thing, or is having all the links there easily more preferable?

Comments

[raksaksa.livejournal.com]

The entry didn't swallow up my friends page, so I don't think a cut is necessary.

[el-staplador.livejournal.com]

I'm not overly bothered by long text entries where all the content is likely to be of interest to someone or other. (Interminable quizzes are a different matter, of course.) I would have said that this was of a perfectly reasonable length and didn't need cutting. Besides, what else is the scroll button for?

[matgb]

I tend to be of the opinion that anything more than a page long out to be cut, simply because that's my preference and how I do it, plus people looking at, for example, my frontpage will see the whole entry even if they're going past to something else.

But OTOH, this is a lot of links with brief descriptions, there's no clear cut, and a lot of it is stuff I could've done as separate entries over the last week or so.

I dunno, I'm still tempted to cut the lot anyway, might do it later or in a few days...

[rho]

I find it deeply ironic that that webpagesthatsuck page has a bunch of godawful popup images on mouseover for links.

[matgb]

I thought he'd disabled them. I hate snap previews, but so many people seem to like them; Wordpress.com just put them into beta, and stupid bloggers are queinq up to be included, I turned them off instantly, such a bad idea.

But yeah, he has posted on it a bit. The posts may have been in response to comments made by, um, certain users not a million miles away. I just don't get the appeal.

[rho]

I've never seen them before. And hope I never will do again. They actually remind me a lot of the completely random java applets showing weird swirly graphics that you'd get on crappy personal webpages in the late 90s. They're just saying "Hey, look at this new technology we've got! Isn't it cool!" and not actually doing anything useful. You can't (or at least, I can't) discern anything useful from the little images. They just sit there and get in the way. Grr.

[matgb]

You can set a cookie at the snap site to turn them off for as long as the cookie is live, and yes, pretty much, they add very little value to content. It's very unusual that I agree completely with Lorelle, but on this one even her analysis of the problem is spot on (normally she's a little mis informed at best, and completely off base at worse).

Stoopid web designers. OTOH, my new idea got allowed through at suggestions, this is good.

[rho]

I would go and find the option to turn them off but quite frankly I can't be bothered. I think I'll just not bother reading any site that uses them instead.

[foxfirefey]

Nononono, this is what NoScript is for. Nobody can spring dumb JavaScript cruft on you without you telling them they can!

[davidnm.livejournal.com]

It's good to know that the Scots have the right attitude to crop circles. I can still remember the first time I heard someone say 'cerealogy' as if they were actually being serious (I haven't managed to shake the horrible suspicion that he might have been ... meep).

[matgb]

Oh, I've met my fair share of loons that like such things. Some of them seem cogent and rational as well.

I mean, it is of course possible that some of the circles are landing patterns. It's also possible that the moon really is well disguised green cheese.

A fair few of the more interestingly touched can be found attending Exeter SciFi meetings from what I'm given to understand...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

Aaaaah!! The linkspam of dooooooom!!!

[matgb]

Meaning? Your doom, someone else's?

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

It's the end! The end is nigh!!!

[matgb]

I thought it was endis ni?

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

No, that's Miss Ni.