Original Reference Material

Ugh. I hate bookmarks. They suck. They are painful to search, messy and I happened to have them scattered across multiple backup files.

Original reference material* is a curated home for little ideas, tips and tricks that are yet to make it into my long-term memory. I guess they are a cross between ‘gists’ and bookmarks. Little snippets or ideas that are not formed enough to warrant a whole blog post.

Art:

1041uuu – Japanese style gif art.
MathGifs – Gif art generated by mathematics.
The Creators Project – Intel funded blog covering creativity, arts and technology.
Wanella – ‘Tech Noir’ gif art.
We Make Money not Art – An Art blog.
Yoshihito Nakanishi – Tokyo based artist that develops interactive art and musical instruments.
Russell Anderson – Australian kinetic artist, designer and maker. Some of his installations are at the bogo road precinct.
Bruce Munro – British artist that does large-scale light installations. Used optic fibres to light up an area around uluru.
Studio Drift – Amsterdam based studio that creates interactive sculptures. Often kinteic light based stuff.
Tega Brain – Australian environmental engineer / artist that creates ‘eccentric engineering’.
Elsa Hansen – Embroidery inspired by 8-bit computer game characters from the 80’s.
veilluminescence – detects and displays a camera’s field of vision.
School for Poetic Computation – Artist run school in new york. Explores the intersection of code, design hardware and theory.
nucl.ai – conference for artificial intelligence in creative industries.
arts at cern – Art and Science programme, fosters the creation of new expert knowledge in the arts by extending artists' practice in connection with findamental research.
Carole Collet – biolace by carole collet (roots of a living plant embroidered into lace).
Computer Programming as an Art – Donald Knuth, communications of the ACM, 1974.
Zimoun – Swiss sculptor that creates platform of sound from commonplace industrial objects (cardboard boxes).
Gilberto Esparza – Sculptor from Mexico city. Creates urban parasites, robots that live in an urban environment. Nomadic plants that can move themselves around.
Adrien M & Claire B – Combination of movement and digital arts.
Tony Oursler – Made trees at Dark Mofo in Tasmania talk. Was excellent.
Michael Johansson – Stacks everyday items together like tetris.
Brian Moore – Made this awesome escape room ‘Escape Your Parents’ Basement'.

Backyard Manufacturing:

Nomadic Research labs – Different portable workshops by Steven K. Roberts.
Michal Zalewski – Security researcher who also has awesome guides on Robotics and CNC.
Precious Plastic – home made machines that enable anyone to recycle plastic.

Climate Change:

Design:

The Amazing Staircase – A neat combination of bookshelf and staircase combined in a small space.
BecauseWeCan – Awesome Oakland based, design-build architecture studio. Won our squirrel Coffee Table from them.
ColourLovers – Collections of colours, palettes and patterns.
DesignBoom – Archictecture, Design, Art and Technology blog.
Design Milk – Architecture, Art and Interiors blog.
Dezeen – Architecture, Interiors, Design and Technology.
EcoGeek – A blog about new technology designed for the environment.
How Products are made – Seven volumes on how different products are made. Products like materials (Acrylic Plastic), right through to complicated stuff like Jukeboxes.
Interior Design (reddit) – The Interior design subreddit.
Open Source Ecology – Open hardware designs for everything you need to kickstart civilisation.
Panic Status Board – A custom status board built by panic software.
Subtle Patterns – A collection of subtle patterns that can be used to add texture to websites / designs.
Virtual Crash Course in Design thinking – A ‘MOOC’ from Stanfords ’d.school' on design thinking.

DNS:

Check DNS records in OSX:

$ dig google.com

Docker:

How to free space in docker:

# Deletes all containers.
$ docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

# Deletes all images.
$ docker rmi $(docker images -q)

Setting your environment after spinning up Docker Quickstart Terminal: $ eval “$(docker-machine env default)”

FFMPEG:

# Generates a 1080P MP4 from a series of images.
ffmpeg -f image2 -start_number 4963 -i DSC_%4d.JPG -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf scale=1920:1080 -preset slow -crf 20 test.mp4

# Transcode to OGV:
ffmpeg -i movie.mpg -c:v libtheora -qscale:v 7 -c:a libvorbis -qscale:a 5 movie.ogv

# Transcode to WEBM:
ffmpeg -i ../Desktop/holland-tunnel.mpg -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis holland-tunnel.webm

Furniture:

Narrow Coffee Table – A narrow coffee table / low set hallway table, with two drawers and a shelf.
Walnut Bench – A modern bench with a nice butterfly in a split.
Floating Bed – Bed with a large overhanging base. Looks like it is floating.
Project table for kids – A kids project table with plenty of supplies storage.
End grain storage box – End grain plywood storage box. Used for storing a drone.
Tilt-out bin cabinet – A tilt-out cabinet for storing rubbish and recycling.

Electronics:

Ethan Zonca – Developed PicoBuck LED driver under the banner ‘protofusion’. Also made a kick arse walnut Vacuum value amplifier.
Dangerous Prototypes – Open source hardware projects released every month. Started by Ian Lesnet in 2009.

GIT Tricks:

Create a git repository with group read/write permissions

Configure your server.

$ ssh myserver.com
Welcome to myserver.com!
$ mkdir /var/git/myapp.git
$ chgrp grpName /var/git/myapp.git
$ chmod 775 /var/git/myapp.git
$ chmod g+s /var/git/myapp.git
$ cd /var/git/myapp.git
$ git --bare init --shared=group
Initialized empty Git repository in /var/git/myapp.git
$ exit

Add the remote repository to your existing local git repo and push

$ cd ~/Sites/myapp
$ git remote add origin ssh://myserver.com/var/git/myapp.git
$ git push origin master

Goaccess:

Displaying website traffic stats from the command line

$ goaccess /var/log/nginx/access.log -c

Select ‘Common Log Format (CLF) with Virtual Host’

Golang Snippets:

Size of a C struct: ˜ C.size_t(unsafe.Sizeof(C.struct_type{}))

Javascript:

$0 – Selected element that is currently inspected.
Browserify – How to untangle your Javascript with Browserify.
d3 scales – Details on how scales work in d3.js.
debugger; – Can kick start the debugger from the console.
Gulp – Automate front-end workflows.
Gulp + Browserify: The Everything Post – FAQ for getting started with gulp and browserify on the front end.
“use strict” – Turns all warnings into errors.

Linux / Operations:

Move a running process to Background

$<ctrl> + z (stop program)
$bg (run program in background)
$disown -h (make sure the progress isn't killed when terminal closes)
$exit

Neural Networks:

A brief history of neural nets and deep learning.

Photography / Film:

Depth of Frame – The importance of Depth of Frame. Compiled by wowzabob on reddit.
Infagram DIY filter pack – Cheap filters for near infared photography.
Light in Cinema – How light is used in cinema. Compiled byu wowzabob on reddit.
Planet Panoramas – How to create little terrarium style pictures from panoramas.
Jeff Seal – Jeff Seal, the self-proclaimed idiot who hops freight trains to montauk.
Anime movies to watch – List of anime movies that I haven’t seen.
The Selby – short little documentaries / ads. Has a good little film on Tom Sachs.
white balance – understanding white balance and colour temperature.
Davinci Resolve Tutorial – Tutorial on colour grading with davinci resolve lite.

PostgreSQL:

Backing up and restoring databases:

$pg_dump -Fc --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -U postgres <DB-name> > backup-file.dump
$pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres -W -d SHB-375Hz weds_health.dump

List largest tables:

SELECT nspname || '.' || relname AS "relation",
pg_size_pretty(pg_total_relation_size(C.oid)) AS "total_size"
  FROM pg_class C
  LEFT JOIN pg_namespace N ON (N.oid = C.relnamespace)
  WHERE nspname NOT IN ('pg_catalog', 'information_schema')
    AND C.relkind <> 'i'
    AND nspname !~ '^pg_toast'
  ORDER BY pg_total_relation_size(C.oid) DESC
  LIMIT 20;

Total security in a PostgreSQL database – Notes on PostgreSQL security settings.

Upgrade PostgreSQL Database:

$pg_upgradecluster <old-ver> main
$pg_dropcluster <old-ver> main

Security:

HTTPOnly – If set. A cookie cannot be accessed through a client side script.
HTTP Strict Transport Security – opt-in webserver enhancement, once the header has been sent it prevents any communications occuring over HTTP.
Little Snitch – Mac OSX tool for controlling outgoing private data.
Qualys SSL test – Tests a deep analysis of your configuration for any SSL web server.
Repsheet – A reputation engine for profiling HTTP requests inbound to a webserver.
SecureFlat – If set, A cookie won’t be transmitted over HTTP.
TripWire on Ubuntu – How to configure and use tripwire on Ubuntu.
Visual Cryptography – A visual cryptography system. Align two random images to reveal a secret.
Servo font – Font created from servo motors.

Typography:

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – Maps typographic concepts from the classic text ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ to CSS.
Firefox OS Typeface – The fira font developed for Firefox OS.
The league of Moveable Type – Free and open-source fonts designed for the web.
Mind your En And Em Dashes: Typographic Etiquette – Some typography style opinions / etiquette.
Type set in the future – Long format posts diving into the fonts used in science fiction.

Web Performance:

WebPageTest – Measure the load times for websites from different locations and browsers.
Progressive JPEGs – Gif style progressive loading for JPEG images.
BPG – The PNG equivalent of JPEGS. Coming soon to a browser near you.
wickedly fast – how to inline images into HTML.
[https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7#.tm6ouwbqj](10 things i learned making the fastest site in the world) –

Workspaces:

Control Panel Flickr Group – Photos of different control systems / pannels and buttons on Flikr.
Joe Walnes Workbench – Electronics workbench built / used by Joe Walnes.
Soundwave Portable Electronics Workstation – Neat portable electronics workstation built in Melbourne. Based on soundwave.
A Humble Shed Becomes a Multipurpose Retreat – North London Shed converted into a home office and recording studio.

* Thanks to The Streets for naming inspiration.

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