Monkinetic Weblog

Wonderful story from Jamie Zawinski (one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org) about the movie They Live (creepy as hell in 1988), grafitti artist Shepherd Fairey, and how he (Jamie) got Mozilla to invest in a constructivist/futurist brand identity that called on Soviet imagery to promote Free Software.

They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo

So conflicted. Thoughts later.

Twitter for [#appleevent](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/appleevent)

Brent Simmons, currently of Omni Software and long-time Mac developer, shares his thoughts on the Surface Studio. I agree with Brent (and many others) that it seems like Apple has forgotten/disregarded the people who use their computers to make things - the same people who stuck with and evangelized the platform during the Dark Times.

Tomorrow, Apple is going to show their new hardware, and I honestly cannot imagine liking anything I see more than I like this Studio PC. That makes me sad. I remember when Apple's hardware was worthy of the OS we knew and loved. Doesn't seem like that any more.

I am hoping that this lights a fire under Apple's hardware branch - pull them out of their floating white eggs and get them back in the real world, solving real user's problems, and giving us - their users - the breadth and depth of hardware Apple is capable of creating.

Never thought I'd be including "Microsoft Gets It" in a blog post, but here we are. Microsoft has been targeting "creatives" with their recent commercials (as seen continuously on the shows on Apple TV CBS app), and while the comparisons between the Surface pro and the Mac are a bit disingenuous, replace them with this product and the ads are dead on.

The Surface Studio is a new iMac-style PC from Microsoft (is this their first actual desktop product?) that captures the iMac spirit in an interesting, lays-nearly-flat design that includes touch/pen features in the screen.

Honestly if I saw this image without knowing who it was I'd half-expect to see it running Mac OS. It's got all the specs, and the Surface line has - so far - has had excellent industrial design and durability. It's good work, and Apple honestly needs the competition. The Mac line has stagnated for a number of years now, it's time for some new energy in the market.

Since I'm in a bit of the old design-mode here on the blog lately, was reading up on type anatomy on Fonts.com. Handy resource for those of us who might be getting rusty.

Back when I was mostly a designer, I discovered Colour Lovers, a great palette-sharing website that helped me brainstorm my way through a lot of site designs.

In redesigning this blog recently, I found it again and was reminded how much I love color. Some samples that I used to grab some colors for this site...

#5e5e5e;">#5e5e5e;" target="_blank">Color by #5e5e5e;" target="_blank">COLOURlovers

#5e5e5e;">#5e5e5e;" target="_blank">Color by #5e5e5e;" target="_blank">COLOURlovers

#5e5e5e;">#5e5e5e;" target="_blank">Color by #5e5e5e;" target="_blank">COLOURlovers

For a bit of variety, I decided to figure out how to generate a new front page header background and link colors whenever I rebuilt the blog (new posts, etc). This is still a static site, so no wizzy javascript stuff, I just wanted to do it in SASS.

This is what I came up with.

```sass $colors-list: ( // background color, link color #DAE076 #AD5C55 #A9C9C5 #4A676D #AD5C55 #5E7D68 #374768 #718A8A, ); $color-index: random(length($colors-list));

// Header description box
$colors: nth($colors-list, $color-index);
$header-desc-background-color: nth($colors, 1);
// Link color
$link-color: nth($colors, 2);

```

I may rework this as a map (dictionary) later on so I can add other theme-y things, but it was kinda fun to work out for now.

RT @ComedyForNiggas: America in a picture https://t.co/oVyPbiw42t

John Scalzi's new audiobook-only story is out (and FREEEEEEEE)! The Dispatcher is fantastic, a short listen (~2 hours), and is narrated by The Other Spock Zachary Quinto. It's really good, with an interesting core concept that is a pleasant departure from John's typical Sci-Fi fare.

> "Your face is always smug. You have resting smugface"

And dangit if Zach doesn't hit the narration out of the park. He brings each of the characters to life, subtle and unsubtle, whether noble, time-worn, or murderous. Can't wait to see (hear?) what else he ends up narrating.

(Resting Smugface is my next band name.)

I'm speaking as an Ex-Conservative, Ex-Republican who cannot abide what the party has largely become, and has lost affinity with the selfish, neo-libertarian outlook of that party, even before Trump came along. Trump represents the most horrid of personal, professional, and political behaviors and needs to lose by as large a margin as we can muster.

I'm voting for Hillary Clinton for President of the United States, and likely Democrat on most of the down-line races in AZ.


Still looking around for static asset host, and maybe a new domain? Monkinetic.com expired (it's a sad story involving blogger apathy and 2FA gone rogue).

RT @SciencePorn: https://t.co/tt6wsOQJsA

RT @bummedcass: retweet if you've drank hard liquor and didn't rape anyone https://t.co/0bK0cZBvH4

RT @clintasha: rt if you'd watch the black widow movie, im trying to prove a point to @marvel http://t.co/oK1dB9TwQt

RT @C_NyaKundiH: A farmer in Uttar Pradesh released 3 sacks full of 40 snakes in a gvt office after the officials asked for bribe. https:…

RT @WeNeedFeminlsm: female body hair is so forbidden that in razor ads a woman will be shaving an already bald leg...what does that tell yo…

Rachael Worthington is working on getting her blog set up as a static site built by Hugo, a new entry to the static-site generator field written in Go. She's having a few issues so I thought I'd write about a recent site I set up with Hugo and how that site is getting built/deployed.

I recently set up a static website for my father at

. His site doesn't change very often, and ought to load fairly quickly, so I figured rather than mess around with Wordpress or Drupal, I'd try Hugo. I'm pretty compfortable with Git so the site's source code is hosted on Bitbucket (free private repos, yay). And while I can manage git from the command line without always losing my cool, I tend to use Github Desktop which acts much like any source code management app and keeps me from having to remember how to do partial-file commits.

I looked into several continuous integration services: TravisCI, CircleCI, and Codeship, because I wanted to get the site built and deployed whenever I pushed code into Bitbucket.

TravisCI is popular among the open-source set because they have a free plan for open source projects, the next plan up is $129/mo and that's just not worth it for a couple of sites. CircleCI looked good but does not appear to support builds for Go-based projects.

Codeship supports Go, and I found this article about deploying a Hugo site using the service: Hugo Deployment via Codeship. My setup for is similar.

I connected Codeship to my Bitbucket account, and crated a new project for the repo. I created two build pipelines (described in the article above, I won't re-iterate here) - one builds off of the master branch and deploys to the main site. The other build pipeline builds from a feature branch (feature/responsive, for a responsive update to the site) and deploys to a subdirectory of the main URL.

My main build pipeline uses a "Custom Script" build with the following script:

# get hugo
go get -v github.com/spf13/hugo
# build
hugo --verbose
# deploy via ftp
lftp -c "open -u $FTP_USERNAME,$FTP_PASSWORD $SERVER; set ssl:verify-certificate no; mirror -R ${HOME}/clone/_site ."

So, yeah.... FTP. The site is hosted on a cheap GoDaddy account that I don't run, so there you go.

Hope this helps out, Rachael, and good luck on your blog!

Yeah, I've watched it about 55 times now. See for yourself:

Naturally I'm squueeeeeeeee-ing every time I watch, it, but I also have a few thoughts:

The music, oh my goodness the music. It's spare and starts as something not immediately recognizable as one of the SW themes, but it's simply gorgeous and flows into the John Williams scores we know and love.

The dialog is haunting, but also feels a bit like a reading of the character motivation notes:

> "I'm no one."

Rey (with Luke's "I gotta get off this planet" look)

> "I was raised to do one thing... But I've got nothing to fight for."

Finn.

> "I will finish... what you started."

Kylo Ren (crushing on Vader)

It already feels like Star Wars, more than the prequels ever did. SO EXCITE.

My Wife is currently fuming in the other room because she sent the wrong signup link to several business partners, because someone editing that the link did so in an HTML/Rich Text editor, and ended up editing the text of the link, not the source. So she sees the correct link in her editor/email, but in fact she's sending someone else's affiliate link.

I pretty much only use plain text email, and this is one reason - if it's not spam or phishing, it's simple ignorance.

RT @BabyAnimalPics: when people waiting on your downfall but you the GOAT 🐐 http://t.co/loVvtxRdCS