Pat Dryburgh

I recorded a cover of Shapes by The Long Winters. I’m a big fan of the band’s singer and songwriter, John Roderick, who not only sings the coda to my favourite song of all time, Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie, but also happens to be one half of my favourite podcast, Roderick on the Line.

Anyway, this acoustic rendition of Shapes I first heard on a bootleg recording of a show he played with Jonathan Coulton dubbed Live at the Double Door. In it, John takes a guitar lick from the original studio recording’s intro that requires picking, hammer-ons, and pull-offs to achieve and uses it as a melodic rhythm over which he sings. It took me 3 days of practice to finally nail signing over this intricate guitar pattern and I’m really proud of the outcome.

I’m planning to do some more of this. Follow me on Instagram to be notified of new recordings right away.

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I’m a website. I’ll be gone soon, and that’s okay.

You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.

A hilarious yet beautiful concept for a website. Really nice design, too.

via Kottke

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I’ve pushed a few minor updates to my site this week.

I played around with the inertia of the scrolling animation on the homepage to behave better on larger screens.
I’ve worked out how to group posts by day and to sort posts within a day from oldest-to-newest (while days continue to be presented newest-to-oldest). The intention with this change is to make reading through a day’s posts feel more natural, as often on days when I do publish more than one post, they are often connected in some way. If there’s interest, I might write up a post about how I accomplished this.
I’ve refined how I’m handling dark mode on the site. Instead of creating separate style sheets for each theme and swapping out the link rel="stylesheet" tag for each theme, I’m now using CSS Variables and setting a data-theme attribute on the HTML element. Switching between themes now feels instantaneous.
I’ve removed the lazy loading for images. While lazy loading makes for faster loading speeds, it also means that people who don’t have JavaScript enabled can’t see any images. I decided the minor cost of speed is worth the improvement to accessibility.
Less important to you than me, I cut the time it takes for this site to build by more than 50%. I did this by removing some unused code and reducing the number of include tags in the default.html template that is used to generate every single page of this site. What once took anywhere from 20–30 seconds to build is now taking 8–9 seconds which makes iterating and publishing new changes so much more enjoyable.

On an unrelated note, this post and the post from earlier today were both scheduled using Alex Johnson’s excellent Heroku Scheduler job for scheduling Jekyll posts. Unfortunately, I’m still using my multi-app setup for publishing posts from my phone though I do intend to dig into IndieKit by Paul Robert Loyd which I was introduced to by Boris as a way of setting up a Micropub endpoint on Heroku. Still have to work my way through some configuration before that’s ready to go.

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If you’re into fantasy and/or music and haven’t watched the visual experience for Mappe Of’s The Isle of Ailynn, I recommend you do so. Once you have, go watch this video of Tom, Edward, and Kristyn discussing the painstaking process and the technical limitations they faced during the creation and filming of the production. There are some technical difficulties at the beginning of this video, so the link should take you to where the action begins.

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I’m glad I deactivated my Twitter and Facebook accounts back in early March. According to the Hedometer which tracks emotional sentiment across Twitter, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought Twitter’s happiness to an all-time low. As Jason Kottke writes:

The day they identify as the unhappiest is March 12, 2020, which is the day after Americans finally took Covid-19 seriously. Within the space of a few hours on March 11, the NBA announced it was suspending its season, Tom Hanks revealed that he and his wife Rita Wilson had Covid-19, the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, Donald Trump went on primetime TV to address the nation, and the DJIA closed down 1400 points (it would drop another 2350 points on Mar 12).

March 12 was a day or two after I deactivated my accounts, and yet I remained informed of all of this news through national, international, and local media sources via the Apple News app on my phone. I’ve kept in touch with my family and friends through various messaging apps. I’ve maintained my Instagram account and my Reddit account and am obviously still posting to my blog. For the most part, no one but me has noticed the change.

While I’m deeply concerned about how this virus affects the world, I am feeling less anxious than I expected when the words coronavirus and COVID-19 first entered public consciousness. I suspect this is because unlike the apps I continue to use, Twitter and Facebook are optimized to reward constant interaction and attention with all those tiny hits of dopamine, which in a time like this can open you up to repeated exposure to a steady stream of unfiltered negativity.

Not to say that I feel awesome. Just a little less anxious than I could be.

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When I read Manton Reece’s announcement that the Micro.blog apps would be swapping out Avenir for default system fonts, I wanted to see what a redesigned landing page designed with Apple’s San Francisco font would look like. This design was not solicited by nor has it been shown to anyone on the Micro.blog team.

The idea for the photo in the header would be to solicit photos of Micro.blog community members holding a device displaying their blog. The photo would change on each page refresh to promote the diversity that makes up the Micro.blog community.

The rest of the content has been left as-is or with minimal editing for clarity and effect.

Would love to hear what you think 😊

Unsolicited Homepage Design Exploration for Micro.blog

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Mappe Of is an avant-folk artist who last year released a concept album called The Isle of Ailynn. To explore the world that had been created, visual artist Kristyn Watterworth and filmmaker Edward Platero spent months painting and filming Ailynn in Virtual Reality. Every blade of grass, every leaf, and every creature on and around the island was drawn in VR using Google Tilt Brush.

The result of this undertaking is this album-long, forty-four minute music video that is the most breathtaking thing you will see today.

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Jon Fingas writing for Engadget:

[Github’s new mobile app] unsurprisingly won’t let you edit code…

I’m surprised. Very surprised, in fact. I’ve been using Working Copy—a git client for iOS—since 2017 to publish blog posts from my iPhone. It saves files, has a built-in code editor, and commits new code that then triggers a rebuild of this site on Github Pages.

When I first heard Github was releasing a mobile app, I was excited to see how it compared to Working Copy. Now that I know it doesn’t let you commit code, I see no reason to even download it.

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For the past several months, I’ve woken up almost every morning with back pain. Not sure whether I need a new mattress or if this is simply another symptom of my doctor’s diagnosis that I’m “just fat and lazy.”

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33 years ago today, U2 released their fifth studio album, The Joshua Tree. 20 years ago, the album’s namesake fell. Today, you can bring the tree back to life on your phone.

To view the tree in Augmented Reality, head to the AR page on thejoshuatree.earth and tap the tree.

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This Website Will Self-Destruct →

A few small updates

Unsolicited redesign of the Micro.blog homepage

The Isle of Ailynn