Blog

First flush

On a whim, I decided to go for a bike ride today. I left my wallet and phone behind and spent a couple hours on the Grand River Trail. It's a great ride; I started at the Economical Insurance Trailway (point 13 on the above-linked map) and continued to Kolb Park, then turned around. It wasn't too …

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Making sense of "sense of place"

In Planning school, we're taught that an area's sense of place can make or break a neighbourhood. It's that elusive uniqueness that ties a place to its history while forging an identity of its own. We often explore this through design, where the use of visual elements is the go-to method for …

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Now it's easier than ever to fine-tune your Bandcamp players

Is your player not working? In October 2012, Bandcamp changed the way they handle layout files. If you created a custom layout prior to this time and it's not working, you'll have to make a new one, I'm afraid. Back in 2010, I created a handy little app to generate JSON code for the Bandcamp API. …

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"Arctic Ready" Shell website is almost certainly a hoax

A new website has popped up, purporting to be an attempt by Shell Oil to win over public support for drilling in the arctic. They've apparently set up a make-your-own-postcard tool to encourage people to share the message of "Let's Go". I was duped by it. I joined in the schaedenfreude and …

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