Drive-By Blogging

If people love calling you constantly, try Airplane Mode. Tell them you were underground or in the shower. Or tell them you just switched to T-Mobile.

— Marco

20 August 2008 • reblog: marco

stephanieho:

From Elena Filatova’s motorcycle journey through the deserted Chernobyl area. Old, but still incredibly fascinating (and kind of scary).

Thanks for this. I was horrified by the story of Chernobyl as a kid, and it still fascinates me today.

20 August 2008 • reblog: stephanieho • chernobyl history ukraine russia

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

— Merlin Mann on What Makes for a Good Blog? (via cubicle17)

20 August 2008 • reblog: cubicle17

Furoshiki: ‘How to carry groceries with a square of cloth’.

19 August 2008 • japan

Creating a password to convince yourself you have traveled back in time

This is your future self. The password is “argle the chemical puppy”. It is vitally important to the safety of the universe that you not press the red button…

19 August 2008

Timeago

Some nice Javascript that converts date & time strings into plain English fuzzy timestamps (via matthewb).

Marco shared some PHP code which does the same thing on the server side. Eager for a little programming distraction, I decided to convert it into Python.

def fuzzy_time(seconds):
    # Pythonised version of Marco's pretty_timespan():
    # http://tumblelog.marco.org/46559003/timeago
    """Convert seconds to a plain English fuzzy timestamp."""

    seconds, phrase = int(seconds), 'in %s'
    if not seconds:
        return 'now'
    elif seconds < 0:
        phrase = '%s ago'
        seconds = 0 - seconds

    units = ( (31536000, 'year'),
              (2592000,  'month'),
              (604800,   'week'),
              (86400,    'day'),
              (3600,     'hour'),
              (60,       'minute'),
              (1,        'second'), )
    for (max, unit) in units:
        if seconds >= max:
            num = int(seconds / max)
            return phrase % plural(num, unit)

def plural(count, noun, nouns = None):
    nouns = nouns or noun + 's'
    return '%s %s' % (count, count == 1 and noun or nouns)

19 August 2008 • reblog: matthewb • javascript php python code