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Re: Simple Beret Pattern (a Free Knitting Pattern)

tychoish — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:09:44 -0000

This page and this pattern has become somewhat popular, as I can tell from my handy webstats.

I keep meaning to post an updated version of this pattern, which is clearly still an alpha release.

That day isn't today, I must say, but I thought I might say that: if you're going to knit this pattern make sure the number that you increase to ends up being a multiple of eight. I need to play around with the math to make sure that it's really as simple as I thought it was initially.

The other thing to note is that, even a very funny looking hat, prefelted, can look almost normal, post felting, so don't fret.

If anyone has knitted this pattern, I'd love to hear your experiences. Email em on to me. tycho -at- tealart -dot- com

Re: 5 Things that __________

tychoish — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:44:31 -0000

:) a good guess

Re: home again

tychoish — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:34:29 -0000

Fixed! I think that I don't make that typo about one time in ten. Sigh.

The story, and the other ones I've been talking about are in a volume called The New Space Opera Edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. I'd heard about it for a while and finally picked it up at borders or some such, so it's not that far off the beaten path.

Re: back and forwards

tychoish — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:21:45 -0000

I'm a big fan of the steeking, and you're right that is not a big deal at all. I'm rushing to finish knitting a sleeve off of a steek that I cut a week ago as a sort of teaser, and people seemed to take it pretty well.

Regarding the plying: my first attempts at plying were navajo, and it all worked out find, for some reason, this is one of those things that is just a bit weird. I tend to do alright with regular old two ply, and I suspect I can just go back to that with this yarn (and spin the singles a little bulkier and still get the same result. I want to be able to get nice smooshy three ply though, and I'd love it if I didn't have to fuss over getting multiple bobbins all the same relative length. In the end, I think this speaks to the reason that I'm a knitter and not a weaver.

Re: Fall of Space Opera

tychoish — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:58:06 -0000

Hey, got the LJ fix, sorry about that,

This might get me into sticky ground, but I have to say that I really don't like gibson very much, and I think he's an ass. Many male SF writers are, I've found, but whatever.

I think the problem with this is that, Gibson seems to think that it's new. Automatic transmissions, commercial air flight, jet engines, early computers, and the civil rights movement which were mainstays of the 1970s would have been just as absurd to the editors in the 1930s and 1940s, as the 2000s would have looked in the 70s. SF is progressive by virtue of staying ahead of this curve, not by running back wards. But then I suspect that this kind of Elegy for the genre is pretty common historically as the "giants" age...

Re: Readjustment

tychoish — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:04:30 -0000

it seems to have worked fine... lets just blame it on LJ and be done with it ;)

thanks though :)

Re: Brain Check

tychoish — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 00:02:53 -0000

wow, I need to not blog when I'm in a rush. that last sentence so wasn't (fixing now...)

Re: append function

tychoish — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 09:44:39 -0000

Ah,

For starters, you don't need quotes at all. just type and go for it. I think there's some encoding problem with the curly quotes and bash, and in any case, I wouldn't worry about it.

Second off, admittedly I've only tested this with TextMate, and I tend to forget that TextEdit does plain text stuff--I try and restrict my usage of it to RTF files...

The 'n- ' part of the echo statement just makes a new line in the text file and begins the new line with a dash, so that if you append more than one line to the same file they look discrete. Also, the dash will convert to a bulleted list if run through markdown, which is my default markup scheme.

Cheers,
tycho

Re: Anyone up for a Sweater Knit Along?

tychoish — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:49:33 -0000

Responses to Miss Knotty who had sizing and economy concerns:

Ah, well that makes more sense :)

I too am a very frugal knitter, so allow me to share my secrets:

HD Shetland from webs (under weaving yarns). It's 17 dollars a cone, discountable, so 20% off if you buy sixty dollars, 25% if you buy 120. I promise if you buy two cones of each color, you'll have enough (more on this in a second). That runs 54.40 + shipping (6ish USD?) and you'll have leftovers for at least one pair of socks, and probably two or three.

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The yarn that I'm using (Domy Heather) is a bit finer (so you need more by yardage and less by weight, and thus might affect my projection) and run 475 yards/4ounces. I made a 43-44 inch coat that was thirty inches from shoulder to bottom hem out of a touch more than 6 skeins, and that's 7.95 a skein, and there's bulk pricing though that doesn't hurt. Again, under sixty dollars.

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there are a couple of light blue and grapefruit 2/8 shetland colors that webs is selling for 15 a kilo (2 lbs) in combination with a pound of a color of HD, that puts the sweater at just about 50 dollars. And leftovers out the wazoo.

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Yardage concerns:

I can make a 39-40 inch sweater that's 24-26 inches long out of a touch more than a pound of HD shetland. It's really close I buy two cones because I'm neurotic about these things, but I can't imagine that you'd run out of yarn if you got four cones. Also you can buy HD in skeins, and I've never had real dyelot issues with their stuff, so you could buy the two cones (34) to get started, and then go back and buy a skein or two (I think it's 7-8 for a 3 oz skein?) if needed.

Regarding the sizing. I did the math for someone else today and here's what I came up with:

Resizing is possible. 344 stitches is the zimmerman-ish key number. Divide this by your gauge. 6 sitches per inch = 57.3 inches, 7 is 50 inches, 8 is 43, and so forth. And these are all reasonable guages to knit the sweater at, depending on yarn choice. If your desired gauge and size don't match, the pattern repeat is pretty small and we can add/subtract multiples of 16 stitches if that'll help the situation...

If you're getting 7.5 stitches per inch you'll be able have a sweater that's 46 inches around. And that's a pretty reasonable gauge for HD shetland. Also, it wouldn't be difficult at all to work in darts/other shaping, either by increasing or decreasing along the sides, or in the center pattern... So more tailored shapes are defiantly possible. I've clearly not worked these things out yet, but it can be done, I'm confident.

No deadline for signups. I've cast on and worked the first inch or so, and I'm almost done with getting the charts ready for download. So people can start whenever, I'm going to be knitting it anyway, I might as well have company.

Cheers,
tycho

Re: Anyone up for a Sweater Knit Along?

tychoish — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:51:56 -0000

Response to Joan:

Answers:

Sweater/Pullover, at least that's what I'm making, I'll probably talk about cardigan options in the blog a bit, but I've just gotten off of a 3 cardigan streak, and I mostly wear pullovers, so yeah.

I'm thinking I need a ravelry group for this.

Sigh.

More details forthcoming.

cheers,

tycho

Re: Anyone up for a Sweater Knit Along?

tychoish — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:14:24 -0000

In response to Mel's comments mostly about color patterns.

Re: shading, yeah, that's totally an option, actually I really like the way that Meg's Gordian Knot pullover is shaded, it's subtle, and adds depth without being bold and overwhelmingly horizontal. Since all the patterns repeat after 16 rounds, (and I figure there'll be 14-16 ish repeats, a number that I'm totallly pulling out of my ass, so don't trust that) you could do a color repeat of more than 16 rows so that you weren't changing colors constantly, and add a bit more interest.

On the other hand, a color shading pattern will likely distract from what I hope to be a pretty strong vertical line of the sweater, which I quite like, but everyone's entitled to their own sensibilities.

With the whole colorblind thing, color isn't really my forte and I just choose two colors and am happy with this. If you or anyone wants to design a color sequence, I'd be happy to post it and collect it with the other project materials.

Re: Anyone up for a Sweater Knit Along?

tychoish — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:07:10 -0000

Response to 11. by joan:

There are two colors, and only two colors. Though if you want to change/add multiple stripes to the color pattern, there's no reason why you can't. Color choice is something I leave entirely up to you. I'm going pretty muted/subtle with this one, but you needn't. I'd recommend that your darker color be the squares that don't have dots in them, but that's just personal preference.

I believe some version of the following information is in the readme file which highly recommend ;) :

There are squares that either have a dot in them or don't, the color of the squares signify other things (the white squares are a single repeat, the grey is just another repeat and some change, intended to give you all a context to see how the pattern fits together.

The green stitch is a "turning stitch" so where as you have to repeat the chart forwards and backwards (as this is only half of one side of the sweater) you only want to knit the green stitch once. conversely, if you're reading off of the conventional and mirror charts then the green stitch would be printed twice, and is shown in a second color so that you don't knit it more than once.

Re: Sweater Project Clarifications

tychoish — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:34:26 -0000

It would work, for sure.

The usual stuff about knit-purl patterns applies: you have to knit at a tight gauge than you would for a regular pattern, and generally use a fimmer-twist yarn in a lighter color than you might otherwise be prone to. Then yes.

Also, I think, a stitch count or gauge issue: gauge in single color knitting is different, the stitches are shorter and wider (or maybe it's just that their wider) so more adjusting is needed, but yeah, it'd work. Not an issue.

Again, I've never done a sweater like this, and if you were going to do it, I'd go for 1x1 rib, not 2x2 like I would in colorwork, but it'd work for sure.

Rock on.

Re: Knitting for “Real Women”

tychoish — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:22:30 -0000

yep, it's a rowan book.

Re: Johnson or Bush?

tychoish — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:12:45 -0000

But in the '60 election kennedy was the liberal and johnson was the moderate brought in to make the ticket seem more balanced.

It seems a lot like the good that happened under Johnson's watch was stuff that he sort of grudgingly assented to, not stuff that he was predisposed to pushing. I sort of think that given the status of the cultural moment in 64'-ish that any president would have had to pass the civil rights bill, and johnson was just in the right place at the right time.

Re: Writing Gay Characters

tychoish — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:00:39 -0000

I do think think that straight/etc writers can write queer characters, for sure. But I think they need to think about the implications of what it means to grow up gay. I mean writers are always writing from beyond their experience, that's almost part of the fun. Men write women characters (and fail at it so often,) and I write straight characters a fair bit, and I think I do pretty good at this. Or something.

But I don't think you can just add gay characters in the background for diversity, where the only difference between the straight and the gay characters is the pronouns/names of their lovers. Because that's just bad writing.

Re: Git Mail

tychoish — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:27:43 -0000

So after some more thinking about it, you could also wire this up backwards, a la:

Have a bare repository on the centralized server, and then either: run fetchmail in a cron on your local machine and sync the changes upstream (kinda lame, because you have to have fetchmail and procmail running in the same way on every machine that you check your email on, conversely you could wire up a post pull/push hook that syncs up your procmailrc in the repo with your mail folder, but it's still lame.)

The second option, is that you run a script in cron that syncs (pull, then push) the repository where procmail sorts your mail to to the bare repository thats elsewhere on the server. The main downside is your local check mail script doesn't definitively tell you if you have new mail, because the new mail cron might not keep the repository that you're pulling from completely up to date. While your remote server likely has the capacity for more than one copy of your mail folder, it feels sort of wasteful. This option would also run faster locally, as you're just doing a pull, where as, right now, you're locally doing a lot of magic.

The second option might make more sense if you had more than two computers working on this system, because I think the push/reset command might get a little harried otherwise, but probably not...

Re: You Can’t Hack your Way to Freedom, or “Why Open Source isn’t about Freedom.”

tychoish — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:41:11 -0000

So this, as an over arching feature of open source, fails around projects like open office, which is--though developed in the open with community involvement, and free software license--a product of sun microsystems, and evolved from a number of very early word processing programs (including StarWriter, or somesuch, I think) that were not open source.

So open office is sort of anomaly. I think you could make the same sort of argument about firefox, which is sort of similar, but I think in firefox's case that's more about the nature of the browser space, and increasing role as an application runtime itself.

Back about office software though, I'd be so bold as to suggest that the WSIWYG word processor editing paradigm is on it's way out, because the 8.5x11 page metaphor is on it's way out. I think the mac program Scrivener designs a word processor around the writing process better than just about anyone else has done, and people who are very serious about paper output are going to start using more specialized tools for that (Adobe products and LaTeX for instance), or programs that use that kind of workflow.

but you're right that is interesting, and that open office is a bloated monster of suck.

Re: You Can’t Hack your Way to Freedom, or “Why Open Source isn’t about Freedom.”

tychoish — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:02:24 -0000

LaTeX has a lot of overhead, but it templates really well, so for instance, once I got it set up right, I could generate perfect APA (or whatever) format papers in 15 seconds, without needing to worry too much about formating when I was actually writing. Dare I say, it's sort of like HTML only for PDF, and better?

Regarding the move away from GUIs, I think you're right, but I think it's been longer coming, but vista hasn't hurt anything in this direction.

Re: You Can’t Hack your Way to Freedom, or “Why Open Source isn’t about Freedom.”

tychoish — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:43:44 -0000

In reply to Linda:

Oh, I don't want to come off as a protester of Open Office, or GNOME, because I think they're really important projects, and given what they are it's amazing that they're as good as they are.

In a certain sense Open Office, is an exception simply because of it's history and because of the kind of niche that its trying to fill. Office software is unsurprisingly a commercial invention, and most of my complaints are with the genre as a whole, and not with any particular application. It's just awkward to go on a long spiel about the political implications of open source, and a particular kind of open source, when a program like open office is, is such a glaring exception.

And re: GNOME.

There are a couple of big issues, in my book: one, is that it's not economical with screen space. I buy laptops with smaller screens, because I'm used to OS X, which has a design sensibility (at least in the apps that I use) for very slim very effective use of pixels. Combined with the window manager (expose, and to a lesser extent, spaces) having a smaller screen doesn't matter.

When I run GNOME in full screen on the virtual machine, I can work with one or two windows, in OS X? I can cope with a lot more. 14 at the moment.

This is of course a problem which is partially mitigated by a larger screen, and a good selection of a theme (which is hard to find, but still)

Second issue:

It doesn't have it's own identity as a user interface, so the design always feels to me like a window user whose jealous of the mac UI. This is a personal taste thing, but I think if gnome could just stand up on it's own and do it's own thing it would be fine, but the cheap mimicry I think just confuses things. Again, it's great, and particularly if you know what the internals are doing, even on the most basic level, but the design needs some attention and some innovation.

Disclaimer: KDE isn't better, Awesome (the thing I've been using in linux) isn't for everyone, and Windows and Mac both have their flaws, it's just an ongoing problem.

Other comments:

I totally get the wanting home/play computers to work, and indeed my long Mac tenure has really been maintained by the "it just works, and I don't have to mess with it," ethos of mac. And it does, and I really like that. My newfound interest in linux and open source, is mostly work/academic related, so it's to an end.

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I remain convinced that linux isn't quite ready for prime time on laptops most easily accessible laptops. It works really well in the virtual machine on my laptop, but the VM is handling most of the laptop functions (wireless, mouse, keyboard stuff). The fact that wireless is so hit-and-miss is sort of the center-stone of this. The exceptions are some of the fancier ones (like Lenovo) or ones put together by linux companies.

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Anyway, thanks for the inspiration (and excuse) to yammer on more about this.

Re: On Pseudonymity

tychoish — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:17:11 -0000

I'm not sure that there was any sort of a-ha moment/argument, just a hard to articulate obervation/note on the connection between gender and pseudonyms. Let me clarify in any case:

A lot of women, though out history, have used pseudonyms to gain purchase into the publishing world. 18th Century society ladies, early novelists in the 19th century (the bronte's etc.), and science fiction writers across the 20th century. (Tiptree, any number of women who use/d initials, etc.)

And there are of reasons why this is sort of screwed up politically, women having to pretend to be men in order to achieve status isn't the way I at least would like the world to be, but at the same time it's an inspiring tradition: "drags" of this sort indicate how incredibly unstable gender really is, if people can change it--in effect--by using their initials, or changing their name, not to mention the fact that some really incredibly women have identified themselves in this way.

While it's true that, my largest reason for using the pseudonym at first was to de-link my blog from the name that was on my resume/cv, the aforementioned tradition has been a great influence and motivator. The only problem is that I'm a guy, and so in a certain sense this pseudonym amounts to me pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. Which I think gets lost. And maybe that's a good thing.

cheers, tycho

Re: The Mutt of IM

tychoish — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:21:33 -0000

I know what you mean. I am 'happily' using Pidgin - I don't like
it, but I can't quite put my finger on the reason why.

My current theory is that it all rests on tabbed IM window and minimal window padding. That's subject to change, but it works for now.

I twittered the other day that I thought the best innovation of OS
X/Leopard was that individual windows didn't waste lots screen space
with padding and menu bars and the like (opting for the central menu
bar and shadows). I find this to be generally anoying in GNOME, (hence
my love of awesome) but I think it's really important in the case of
IM where the windows are sort of "background processes," and we don't
need them eating lots of screen space to know/see what's going on.

Wanting tabs are part of wanting IM windows to be minimalistic, and
small, and maybe it helps me to concentrate on more conversations by
forcing me to only focus on one conversation at any one moment, and
trusting that I'll get to the next window when I get there. shrug

I've tried to broaden my range of options to include pure xmpp
clients, but as you say, the transports to networks where less
enlightened people reside have turned out to be not really reliable
enough (yet?).

With AOL's whole "openAIM" thing, (what allowed google add AIM support
to Gmail Talk) you'd figure that they'd be able to cook up some jabber
solution that would really work. I'm convinced that the transport
method doesn't work because it's too complex, and requires all sorts of
background info to bounce off, your jabber server, the jabber
transport, and the network server, and that if one thing goes wrong, it
slows down or doesn't work.

In email if we have an alias or forward set up, and it takes a little
bit longer (and we're just talking about seconds,) it's probably not
something we'd even notice, but in IM it ruins the alusion of "push" and we feel its flakey.

Or something.

Re: The Mutt of IM

tychoish — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:13:13 -0000

yes. we'll pretend that I figured that out on my own. this makes it better, or at least more like adium, but it's still no mutt.

Re: XMPP Microblogging Thoughts

tychoish — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:01:00 -0000

I've been treading around this topic for a while, though you're more clearly thought out on the subject. Actually I had a conversation with bear on IRC right after identi.ca launched about something like this, which turned into [this blog post](http://www.tychoish.com/200......

I'm so *there*, though.

Re: Open Source Work

tychoish — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:39:04 -0000

Or, somewhere between software-as-service, and custom coding at any rate. I think, depending on what people actually do. But indeed, it was an omission.

I suppose I should have been more clear, I didn't mean to say that that people deriving money from open source did one of 4 things, but that there were four basic exchanges that happen. Consultancies provide service, customized solutions, and training, right?

I'm totally willing to be wrong on this though.