Que seráCrafts, Open Source, & General Geekery

Illusion knitting is a technique that allows you to knit hidden patterns or pictures into you knitting. When you look at a finished illusion knit project straight on you typically see stripes or a standard color pattern in contrasting colors however, when you look at it from an angle you will see the hidden design. The only skills required to knit most illusion patterns is the ability to knit, purl, change colors, and be able to read a chart. While the knitting itself is simple it does require a little concentration to keep your place in the chart.

This dishcloth has the hidden pattern of a Dalek and is based on the Exfoliate Dalek Cloth by Penwiper who has given permission to publish this pattern and modifications (thank you!!). It is best knit on smaller needles than your yarn recommends to keep the pattern tight and visible. The color changes are easily carried up the side of the cloth and I recommend using contrasting colors so that the hidden image shows clearly.

Click here to download the free chart or grab it here on Ravelry.

If you enjoy illusion knitting, these sites have even more great free patterns and information:

Wooly Thoughts – Illusion knitting patterns for many popular themes as well as a Mona Lisa!

Freshisle Fibers - Illusion/shadow knitting pattern links

What better way to honor your favorite sysadmin than through ThinkGeek!

In honor of SysAdmin Day (July 31st), we most proudly present ThinkGeek’s 2009 SysAdmin Pageant! Do you know a sysadmin King or Queen who saved the network from inevitable doom? How about the brilliant mail server admin who finally got those plighted African businessmen out of your inbox? Now you can finally say thanks in a way that he or she would actually appreciate: the title of SysKing or SysQueen, plus a $500 ThinkGeek gift certificate! And if your nominated sysadmin wins, you get a $250 ThinkGeek gift certificate, too. Hurry, our pageant ends July 24th – and we’ll announce the winner on Sysadmin Day – Friday, July 31st!

Nominate them now!

While finishing up the DVDs for season one and starting season two of Doctor Who, I knitted up a Police Box for my iPod Touch.

This was inspired by the TARDIS iPod Cozy. It looks really cool when I have it on and glowing through the stitches.

Yes, I am a fangirl. There is a bead on top for the ligh (and also to hold it closed) but you can’t see it in the photo.

CPU Graph as Art

I may print this out on a plotter and frame it. This CPU graph symbolizes not only the job I love but it also makes me think about my busy life and family. As a graph it is functional but if you separate it’s purpose you can then see it’s beauty. Who knows, maybe I just love what I do too much.

This week I started my Twitter purge. I have pretty much just stopped using Twitter because the noise levels were so high that it was no longer useful. When I ran the podcast at Alternageek.com I followed anyone who seemed to be a fan or had anything even remotely interesting to say back. It wasn’t long before I was following over a thousand people and many of those I really didn’t have anything in common with. Some of the new media people I would still like to stay networked with however, I don’t think Twitter is the place to do it. With all of these social network sites you tend to add all of the same people, but I don’t think that is the most efficient way to handle them.

I originally signed up at Facebook (when it was still closed to the public) because higher ed used it and I work full time in higher education. I have branched out my Facebook relationships, but I won’t add just anyone who adds me. I like to keep Last.fm to those I know or are interested in similar music. I use Ravelry to connect with knitters and crocheters. Now I do have overlap on some of these networks and that is pretty awesome but normally I don’t want to talk web 2.0 in a yarn forum. Specialized networks should be used for the specific types of relationships they foster to get the most benefit from them.

Back to Twitter static; I had to clean it up. I was missing messages from people who I really enjoyed reading updates from. One of the best tools to start my purge was Twitter Karma. Twitter Karma pulled in all my followers and friends and sorted them. First I could see who I follow but that doesn’t follow me. If you aren’t famous or a service, I would appreciate the follow-back. If you don’t follow me back, maybe you aren’t interested so I re-evaluate if I am really interested in your updates. Non-followbacks cut dozens of my follows out.

Twitter Karma shows how long ago user updated.

Next was the mutual relationships. I sorted these by Last Updated and cut everyone who hadn’t updated in at least the last 90 days then reviewed everyone who hadn’t updated in 30-60 to see if that was just their way of doing things before purging them.

I have cut hundreds of people and it’s sad I even let my account get to the point where I have to do that. The last phase of my Twitter purge is to watch my timeline and if I don’t recognize a friend or they tend to tweet things I am not interested in, I am manually removing them. It’s nothing personal, I am just not interested. There might be a few that get caught in the cuts that I want back, and I am sure I will find them again.

The moral of the purge is that it is easy to go to excess with social networks. If the network you are using isn’t teaching you something, connecting you with others, or benefiting you then either cut the site or figure out how to fix where it went wrong. I miss Twitter, hopefully this will get me back in gear again.

I disliked Ubuntu Gutsy when it was released and I have to say I dislike Hardy as well.

When I recently rebuilt my main machine, I installed Hardy hoping to give Ubuntu another chance. I used to be a huge Ubuntu fan unfortunately, the fandom stops with Feisty.

Bonus to Hardy, that annoying tracker does not install and hog my system by default. The most annoying thing? Lots of support for lots of hardware was dropped. Winfast & Hauppauge TV Tuner cards which have worked wonderfully in linux have all kinds of special issues in Ubuntu starting with Gutsy. MythBuntu equals a big pain in the neck.

I have heard from others who are leaving Ubuntu since the last few releases. Reading through the support forums and the bugtrackers, the community has reverted to the old standard of either not replying, treating people like they aren’t worth the effort to explain things to, or assuming their position on the issue is superior. This is why linux users have always been avoided, because they act like elitist.

Ubuntu is supposed to be user friendly and for new linux users. How can you possibly promote that if the community snubs the newbies.

One thread that struck me was about the fact that there was no GUI disk management installed by default.  The very first response to this posting was “no one should need to manually manage disks…” WTF? Seriously?

There are several cases when you need to manually manage disks: 1) the LiveCD does not mount local disks, 2) If you add a new disk to the system. How many people who aren’t major geeks know how to manage their disks from the command line? I know several people I consider pretty geeky who don’t even know how to do it in Windows.

There are apps you can apt-get to enable a GUI access like gparted, but you have to know what it is called & how to install it ~or~ the right search terms to google to learn how. How many newbies are going to know how to do this or not reach maximum level of frustration with this? Ubuntu doesn’t have a utility that kicks off on boot if you have added new hardware either.

Ubuntu is really losing it’s way, and I have to say I cannot recommend it anymore. I am back to vanillla Debian and maybe dabble some more in Arch. Do you have a particular distro you absolutely adore? Let me know what you are using and why you love it and I will give it a whirl.

The keyboard shortcut skins from Photojojo make working in Photoshop and other apps a breeze. Custom-fitted and color-coded, these key skins help you learn keyboard shortcuts for a variety of applications including Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, After Effects and Logic Pro. The skins work on a variety of Apple keyboards and will make you look like a veteran. Prices are reasonable starting at just $30 for a laptop skin and $40 for a desktop skin.

It’s a shame these are only available for a Mac.