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natevw

10 karma · joined October 30, 2010

Maps from scratch, multitouch interface design, lengthy speeches touting the virtues of CouchDB — pick any three.

Also aquaponics and printing plastic and balloon aerial photography.

And/or I build products for people for pay. http://exts.ch

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natevw··on Project Bloks: Making code physical for kids
At first glance, seems a lot like http://littlebits.cc/ only not shipping yet. Might have a bit more emphasis on programming though when it's released?

Their own list of "prior art" https://projectbloks.withgoogle.com/research shows some even older "block-based" electronics kit projects.

natevw··on Delicious is finally dead
Yeah, I made the mistake of continuing to collect links via the site while its been slowly getting more broken. Been too busy to write my own simple self-hosted version.

Now I realize — obvious in retrospect — that I should have simply jumped to Pinboard as soon as I had managed to export my bookmarks a few weeks ago. (Or years ago when Delicious got "sunset" for the first time, and Pinboard first came out and everyone else but me switched over…!)

natevw··on Reprojected Zoomable Raster Tiles
Years ago I wrestled against similar problems trying to make a completely visual map-based photo organizer, with only partial success: http://calftrail.com/mercatalog.html

So I can tell you that what Jason Davies has been doing in this realm recently is 1) really hard, 2) really legit and 3) really exciting. While Mercator was a great choice for tile maps due to its local properties, at medium and global scales it'd rarely be one's first choice.

Now, it doesn't have to be.

natevw··on Amazon Glacier
I'm not seeing this at all for my use case. Unless I've figured it wrong, if I were to use this for an offsite backup of my photos, my ISP's Acceptable Use Policy limits my rate enough that I'm seeing only about a 10% penalty beyond normal transfer costs. See http://n.exts.ch/2012/08/aws_glacier_for_photo_backups for some sample "real-world" numbers.
natevw··on We're in an icon-sharpness limbo
I've always wondered if adding something like "font hinting" would cover most use cases. Although I suppose for e.g. icons sometimes at the smaller sizes the actual graphic is pretty much a completely different image, rather than just a hand-tweaked rasterization.
natevw··on Building a single page app with Backbone.js, underscore.js and jQuery
Care to explain what you mean? Given that...

- Crockford originally thought it worthwhile to emulate classical inheritance

- so many, many other frameworks (and technique essays) provide various flavors of class-based inheritance

and that:

- even embracing true prototypical inheritance requires additional helper functions (or at least did in EcmaScript 3)

...I'm a little confused that you disagree that "there is no self-evident approach" for dealing with JavaScript's 'conflicted' (as the linked article correctly states) way of being a so-called prototypical language.