Where I live, Target currently has dancing sock monkey puppets in their clearance area. When you squeeze their left paw, these monkeys play some kind of horrible pop song and twitch spasmodically. They are quite loud, and run for about 30 seconds to a minute.

• Go to Target
• Locate these monkeys and take one
• Work your way up to someone standing amongst the clothing racks
• Ask the person politely if they will hold the monkey for a moment
• Hand the person the monkey, squeeze the monkey’s left hand, duck down below the level of the racks, and run away.

This will also work outside of Target, and seeing as the monkeys are now about two bucks each, there’s no reason not to hand them to people right before you jump back out of the elevator, or off the bus.

You are welcome world. You are welcome.

Unrelated. Please disregard

Oh dear me. I went out to pick up some mulch for the yard, but forgot my list, so I bought 200 pounds of grappa instead.  Then somehow the days flew by.  Enjoy these links from the last couple of weeks while I do something about this beard!

• This is indexr.  You just drop it into a directory on your Web server.  Whenever you drop anything else into that directory, it creates a nice link to that thing on a nice page.  If the thing you drop is an image, indexr also makes a thumbnail.  It’s pretty sweet.

• A gallery of the images used to indicate an anonymous poster on various sites.  Better than it sounds. (probably via MeFi).

• PCWorld article on what ink printer is the cheapest to run.  My suggestion is NEVER buy a printer that uses liquid ink, unless you have a professional requirement for it (By “professional” I don’t mean “you wear a tie to meetings.”  I mean “this piece of hardware makes you more money than it costs you.”)

• An excellent article on “The New Value of Text.”  The upshot here is the same as it has always been: Pouring shiny technology on things does not make them better things.  What we need is more better ideas, more better writing, more better thinking. There is not an app for that.

• This article is specifically about posters for scientific conferences, but most of it applies to poster design in general.  Also, it’s well-written and funny. Worth reading. (probably via MeFi).

• Do you remember a couple-few years ago, when goofy folks started talking about how you could get by with like, three hours of sleep a night and then a few short naps?  That wasn’t the first time that people have been gulled into the idea of polyphasic sleep (that means “a bunch of chunks of sleep instead of one or two big sleeps”).  Here is a great article by an actual scientist who actually knows how the brain works and studies sleep and memory. It does a great job of explaining what we know about sleep so far, how to make it work better for you, and why polyphasic sleep Just. Won’t. Work.

• Flux Machine is a tumblr of pleasingly creepy gifs.  You love them.  Admit it.

Q: What are you looking at under there? A: A book. Q: Oh. May I please read it next?

I was just about to type F.O. into something I was writing* and my mind wandered and I typed “cuckoo” instead.

I now hereby announce and lay claim to the term “netdudian slip,” which is the opposite of a Freudian slip.

*It was in context, hilarious, and in sign language.  Absolutely not gratuitous.

• Here is the answer to one of the great questions of the world:  Do big cats like catnip?

• Happiness is simple: Acquire shelled nuts (I prefer low salt mixed), dump them in a container with a lid.  Fire on a goodly whack of smoke seasoning (available online here or here, or if you live near a Trader Joe’s, they sell grinders of South African Smoke Spice).  Put the lid on, and shake to mix.   Try not to eat them all at once, I dare you.

• Have you ever tried to build a greenhouse?  It’s a pain innit?  You’ve got to build the thing, keep it fairly clean, keep the bugs out and the warmth in, and replace all the glass if I remember you have one late on a Saturday night…
Or you could just warm the SOIL instead of a huge mass of AIR.  Which is what this clever fellow over here did. Now, he went completely tech with the idea–not only does he maintain a constant soil temperature, he also rigged up a lid that closes automatically when the air temperature goes below 41.5 F.  That’s pretty slick, but not completely necessary, if you have legs and hands. (via Hackaday)

• A bit late posting this, but if you are the sort of person who spends a lot of time on clever ways to game Search Engine Optimisation, you probably just wasted a lot of time on clever ways to game Search Engine Optimisation.  Not that you probably weren’t wasting your time anyway.

• Here are two great posts by JWZ:

1) Timing is everything, and this might not be the time. There is new fibre backbone between Japan and the UK.  It cost about 1.5 billion real dollars.  Of course, it was put in with public for the good of the whole world, right? HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Yeah. That’s TOTALLY what it’s for.

2) You have iPhone. You use iPhone for boarding pass.  You probably have a security problem.  There is a slick solution in the comments though.

• This is an  excellent piece on sensation inflation–the need to make a story more spectacular or personal than it already is, in order to get broader attention. (I can NOT remember how I found this, so I am being a jerk and not attributing that)

• The Daily Mash is sort of a British version of the Onion, only meaner.  They usually crack me up about five times a week.  I scared the cat with how loud I laughed at this article:  Diet industry and homeopaths to collaborate on biggest load of bollocks ever.

• Did you know that you can tell Google to block any site you want from your search results?  It’s true–they do a lot more than photograph people through their windows over there at the Googles!

• And finally, have you ever been called into work when you just weren’t dressed for it?  Happened to these guys. (via Metafilter)

I am really enjoying JWZ’s posts about the Annual Gathering of People Playing Those Goddamn Awful Short-Scale Fender Basses, which somehow ends up with the acronym “SXSE.”  It’s a funny old language, isn’t it?

If you take a lot of pictures of things close-up, or you would just like a consistent background (perhaps you sell stuff on Etsy, or you are just really proud of your awesome Gundam paint jobs), you might like this Instructable on how to make an overhead camera mount. The person who wrote the Instructable calls it a “Tripod,” but a tripod has three legs. That’s why it’s called a tripod.

On the other hand, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of building all that, you might want to know that there’s a lot of old drum hardware out there with the same thread on the end as a camera mount.  And old drum hardware can be had cheaply–almost as cheaply as old drummers.  Cymbal stand. Bewm. Job done.

WHAT? It’s THAT easy to make caramel?  Oh no!  This means that I am probably going to die from caramel! (via Lifehacker)

The Turkish Football Association banned flares from football matches. This was a problem, because Turkish football fans really like bringing flares to matches.  This lead to what must be the most epic troll of the year. (via MetaFilter).  The link explaining Rage Faces from a previous post of mine might come in handy for some of you here.

This is quite an excellent piece on E.B. White and the problems with sponsorship in media. It’s on Brain Pickings, of which I am becoming a bigger fan by the day.

OH LORDY I WANT THIS AUTOMATED STORAGE SYSTEM!  (via Hack a Day)

It has a very nice personality

According to this article, 51% of the traffic on the Internet is non-human. That must include whatever the hell comments on YouTube and news stories. (via /.)

Rightclearing is an organisation through which you can make your music available for licensing, or find music to use in your project, license it, and be on your way very quickly. This is a neat idea.  I haven’t read through the site completely yet, but I like the concept a lot.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking.  Is this some kind of sick joke?  This just gets better and better! (via Metafilter)

These little desktop speakers in mason jars are just incredibly cool.  Space for you to bitch about the sound quality for playing back mp3s from your phone is provided between these two lines:|| (via Howtogeek)

Man.  Is copyright ever broken.  Dude writes book, publishes it in 1937.  75 years later–and almost 30 years after the dude died–some jerks threaten legal action against a pub themed on that book. And they can get away with it.  Because copyright is broken.

Took me a while to get to this one, but it’s still worth noticing:  Some retailers have realised that being extremely annoying does not help sales, and have reduced the number of emails they send customers,  Note: This does not include The Gap.  We signed up one of my spam-only addresses to their list and get a desperately clingy amount of email from them.  Like, so much that you would swear you can smell wine coolers and clove cigarettes and hear Joni Mitchell when another message arrives.  I’d unsubscribe, but I’m afraid they’ll boil our rabbit or something. (via Consumerist)

Despite the fact that I seem to link to a lot of stories about how bad e-books are, I actually have nothing against them at all.  In fact, I think that they are a good idea for a lot of people.  Oh, by the way–here’s another article about what sucks about e-books right now

It really bugs me that one of these isn't straight

How hacking works. Ha!  I like this comic.  And, while I usually find it funny, I see something based on this premise—pointing out the vast differences between how things are portrayed in fiction and how things really are—at least once a month, always in a forum aimed at people who specialise in the field that some piece of fiction misrepresented.

The tiresome practice of yelling “That’s not how it really works” at the screen while watching a movie is something of which I am repeatedly and unforgivably guilty. It’s silly.  Of COURSE things that happen in fictional entertainment aren’t always accurate! That’s the point, sort of.

Where it gets interesting is when you try to establish a fixed demarcation between verisimilitude and absurdity

Whoops!  Sorry—I sounded smart there for a sec.  I’ll start again…

Where it gets interesting is when you discover the point at which you stop buying into what you see on the screen (or in the book, or at half-time, or whatever), and start calling bullshit.   If you look at any entertainment from the right angle, you can find absurdity, inconsistency, or just plain bulllshit in it.  If you are looking at one particular facet (be it computer use, armory, historical or medical accuracy, or whatever), you can usually find flaws of fact or interpretation.  At the same time, you can also find flaws in behaviour or thought or emotion in the characters.

The art of any fiction lies in how it draws you in, so that you don’t particularly care that we have left reality behind. You might notice, but you don’t care.  If I wasn’t afraid of sounding smart, this is where I would use the term “Willing suspension of disbelief.”

This is hard enough for an entertainer to pull off with normal folks, but if you’re a specialist, you will notice the details of your specialty.  If you are a computer nerd, it’s not enough for you to hear a story teller to say “…and then he did something with a computer and found the puppy!”  You have to know what the story teller did, and if it doesn’t make sense, that bugs you.

This means that anyone lucky enough to NOT care about computers has a better chance of enjoying the story than you do.  Luckily, you can wreck the experience for them as well, simply by not shutting up.  At least, that’s how I’ve successfully wrecked many movies for people.

But I wonder: Is it really worth wrecking an entertaining fiction for someone just so that they will know some meaningless detail is incorrect?  Is it more important that they know I’m right than that they enjoy a few minutes of innocent entertainment?

Well, of course it is.  It’s more important that I’m right than ANYTHING.

A few years ago, I was talking with a clever and insightful friend of mine about some incredible story that I had read in a newspaper.  The actual story is unimportant here—something about trees, I think.  I was really impressed with how things had unfolded in the story, and how whatever problem the story was about had been solved.  And my friend said “Well, maybe it didn’t happen that way at all.”

I was kind of taken aback by this, and pointed at the page, showing how the story had been reported.  And he said “Look–when you read a story in the newspaper about something you know a lot about—computers or music or whatever—how often does the writer actually get the facts right? How often do they ACTUALLY sound like they know what they are writing about?”

And I said it was a very small percentage of the time.

And he said “So what makes you think that they do any better with things you DON’T know a lot about?”

Hmmm, eh?

Maybe it’s OK if impossible or implausible or just plain dumb things happen in fiction, as long as it’s supposed to be fiction. Maybe I should just calm down a little about that. Voluntary suspension of disbelief is where the fun starts, after all.  That’s no excuse for just plain artlessness and bad work, but if we can’t go along for the ride, at least we can let others enjoy it.

Maybe it’s better to yell at the screen louder when impossible things happen that AREN’T supposed to be fiction. When someone obviously skips several steps in the narrative of how things came to be, or how they will cause them to be something else. Or when they create false narratives in order to make a story seem more interesting, or someone in it seem better or worse.  Or when they quote “studies” non-specifically, or use generalisations about groups of people. Or when they avoid speaking plainly and hide behind “you know what I mean.”

Do more of that when it matters, and less of it when it doesn’t.

By golly, if I was a smart person, this is where I would use the term “Involuntary suspension of disbelief.”  I believe is more plausible for someone like me to end this with “Monkey bum.”

I am interested in this hugelkultur gardening business for many reasons.  Where I live, it rains heavily, and then not at all for periods of time. We also have a lot of crap trees that have to be removed and then something needs to be done with them.  My yard has a really dumb slop to it at one end that makes it pretty much useless. I HATE watering stuff.  I hate having a lawn.  I like the idea of not stooping over to work on stuff. Yup.  This is an interesting idea.

You know when the cool Int4rneb kids make a funny using a cartoon face, but you don’t get it because you don’t know what the face means, so you are all like “Derp?”  Here is an article that explains to you what those faces mean, sort of. (via Boing Boing)

I have been thinking of trying out YWriter, because it sounds like a great idea.  Basically, it’s a word processor that allows you to move and rearrange chunks of text much more easily than most. And it’s free software.  It’s only made for Windows, which means I might have to actually start up a Windows machine though. Dunno if I have any of those that work. Say, I know–YOU should stry YWriter, and then tell me if it’s any good.  Yes.  I like that idea.

They don’t recycle glass bottles where I live (Where do I live? Apparently, I live in the 1980′s). And for some reason, they have outlawed the second most popular thing to do with glass bottles where I live (get drunk and throw them as high as you can).  Luckily, there are a lot of cool project-y things you can do with old bottles. You can make them into drinking glasses or storage vessels, light fixtures or art pieces.  But really, none of those things are as cool as this method for cutting glass bottles with string and fire and household chemicals.  (via Lifehacker)

I don’t normally care about Precision basses, but Oh Boy Is This One Cool!

I used to spend a lot of time going sideways through search engines and indexes (like Yahoo! used to be).  I’d search for something that interested me, hit one of the results, and hop from links on one site to links on another.  It was great back when there were quite a few engines and indexes, because you would get different results from each.  You could get a really well-rounded view of a topic that way.  Think critically. Draw your own conclusions.  Learn.

Search and indexing on the Web keeps getting worse and worse.  Once the focus moved from cataloguing information to simply repeating the most popular results, and people started using just one source as their authoritative guide to the Web, it started to get harder and harder to go sideways.  Add to that SEO, paid search results, and results based on your past preferences, no-one wanting to look at anything more than the first 10 search results, and searching the Web pretty much sucks any more, if you actually want to learn stuff.

It is now much easier to be told what a bunch of people who didn’t know anything considered useful.

Now pretty much everything I link to I arrive at from something I read in an RSS feed. I still go sideways from there as much as I can, though.

I have about 10 feeds from conventional news sources–CBC, BBC, Reuters, stuff like that.  These feeds add a LOT of stories every day, though a lot of the same stories appear in multiple feeds.  I don’t have any commercial US news feeds.  I live in the US Midwest, where there is really good television news coverage….for about 10 minutes a day.  There are also approximately infinity hours of utterly worthless television news entertainment. Seeing this dreck is pretty much unavoidable if you own a television or go anywhere that more than 50 people pass a day.  Popular US news is like Guns ‘N’ Roses: You will hear more of it by accident than you will ever want to hear on purpose.

You can learn a lot more about a story when you find out how the outside world sees it, and that’s why I stick to RSS feeds from other countries, or raw news feeds which deliver a lot of stories without a lot of editorialising.  I don’t like to be told how to think about a story.  I like to see it from as many sides as I can.

Commercial news sources concentrate on the kind of news that sells well–they HAVE to.  That means mostly crime, mass-marketed products, stories involving well-known people or companies, politics and other big disasters.  The fact that these sources try to make space for arts, or technology, or the odd human-interest story underscores the more important fact that they have to MAKE space for that kind of story.  It’s not their stock-in-trade, it’s a purposeful inclusion of things outside their stock-in-trade.  They make their money as big-story generalists. There’s nothing terribly wrong with that, as a commercial venture. You can make money at it, but producing that kind of stuff takes the kind of money that you can only generate from a large audience and lots of advertising.

In the main, that’s not what I look for online.  Because of their need to deliver stories for a mass audience, and my oddball weirdohead, the stuff I find really interesting doesn’t filter out to these sources for at least a few days after it’s been talked about on the Web or the TwitBooks or whatever, if at all. It’s rare for me to find anything in conventional news feeds that is worth comment or repeating–maybe ten stories a week, so I read a lot of other sources.

As with conventional news, there are a lot of sites/feeds that just link to the same stories as other sites/feeds, or repost them without adding any information, insight, or at least some funny.  I follow links back to the original content and read that, and usually, that’s what I link to. Sometimes I link to the site where I first saw the content mentioned, and always try to do so if secondary site has added anything interesting

Quite often, I find things by following a link on another site, then kind of skipping sideways or searching somewhere, or I find supporting information that’s more interesting than the original topic/page I was researching.  It is sometimes difficult to figure out how to attribute anything to the site that started the trip that ultimately lead to the link, so I often haven’t in the past.

I’ve sometimes been bit of a jerk about attribution, just to save time and confusion.  I’m lots of other kinds of jerk, not OK with being that kind of jerk.

Luckily, the very hard-working person who compiles, writes and curates Brain Pickings (which is one of my RSS feeds, and is very good) has co-authored a Curator’s Code for the Internet.  It mostly boils down to either stating where you got the link, or giving a tip of the hat to whoever lead you to find the link.

I like this basic idea, and I hope it catches on.  I tried using their bookmarklet and the symbols they are trying to standardise for these two types of attribution, but those symbols seem to get messed up by WordPress’ annoying text cleaning elves when I save drafts. I hope that changes, but in the meantime I will at least stick to the idea of attribution and hat tips.

This will leave me more time to be the kind of jerks I know I can be.

I use bypass loop pedals all the time in my pedalboard.  I have two double loops made by Loooper which are just great–he does excellent and tidy work.  If you don’t want to build your own stuff, I highly recommend getting one made by Loooper.

I wanted to build one of my own, and added a wrinkle I had seen before and wanted.  On this box, Pedal 2 is the loop switch. Pedal 1 feeds some of the output of the loop back to the input of the loop. The big ugly knob controls how much output is fed back.

I’m not the first–or even the 100th–to make a pedal like this. I used a schematic from the excellent Beavis Audio site, to which I would link, but the dude who runs it let the domain expire.  Today. This is an excellent resource for DIY stuff, and I’m going to donate to help keep the thing up.  You can find similar schematics all over the Web, but this one was extremely clear and well-drawn.

This is a very simple circuit–all it does is route your guitar signal one way or another, not actually create any effect–but bypass loops are extremely useful.  It’s also the first pedal I have built from scratch.  I’ve fixed lots of things, and built the odd channel switch and whatnot, but not really tried building anything audio passes through from the get-go.

There are several reasons why this one worked out so well:

• I went PAINFULLY slowly, measuring, cutting, cleaning up, and continuity testing after every step.  I don’t want to be this slow forever, so the more I learn with each build, the better.  I don’t mind learning from mistakes, but avoiding them is even better.
• I built it in my lovely prototype box, which as you can see is an old Vox channel switching pedal. What you can’t see is that this box has about 10 holes drilled in it from various prototyping things I have done previously. Putting this in a box I ultimately didn’t want to use pretty much ensured the pedal would work perfectly.
• After I had drilled the hole for the LED, I decided to change the switch positions around. And that is why you can’t see the LED.  It works, but it’s still inside the box.  Very proud of that. Yep.

I planned to get the circuit working, and then move it into a nicer enclosure, but I have a fondness for good things that look bad, so it might end up staying where it is.

Here’s what I learned from this build, which might be useful to anyone else who is starting out building or repairing circuits like this:

• You will be much happier if you have lots of different colours of wire.  Really. You won’t remember which bit of wire is which the moment you close the box, so if you have to troubleshoot a mess of say, white wire, you will hate life.
• Really get to know the circuit. Figure out how you want to do the build BEFORE you start melting any lead.
• Look for points where multiple bits of wire need to connect to the same place. Figure out ways to do that as neatly as possible BEFORE you melt any lead.
• Lay out all your components, measure where they should go.  Make sure that there is room to actually fit all the components in your enclosure, that nothing touches that shouldn’t, and there is room for the jacks to fit into the plugs without wrecking anything.
• Drill and test-mount EVERYTHING before you start melting any lead.
• Label your jacks!  I just wrote what they did (in, out, send, return) beside them in pencil inside the case. This WILL save you time.  Make sure you turn the box over, so that you are looking at it the same way you will be using it when you label things.
• Go through and tin all your components. If you don’t know what that means, look it up.
• Measure your wire. Measure it again.  Then cut it, then tin it.
• Soldering should be the fast part of the job.  By the time you actually start melting lead, all your thinking should be done.
• If you are using a switch with lots of poles, plan the order in which you are going to connect things, so you don’t end up getting in your own way.  You will probably want to connect the inside poles first.
• If you are using a two-part box like this one (Bonus hint: Don’t use a two-part box like this one), you might need to leave the wires a bit long so that you can put the box back together without ripping any connections out.  It’s OK to go back later and shorten/redo the wires later, but start with them long so that you can get the thing working and check the circuit without wondering if you broke it by building it.
• Make really sure you know what side you want the LED on.  I mean, what kind of IDIOT doesn’t do that?

I tested this with my beloved DOD Phasor 490.  With the feedback knob set just right, it made a completely excellent whooping noise, which is pretty much unusable in any context in which I currently play.

That made it all worthwhile.