A few years ago, inspired by a post by Khoi Vinh, I started keeping track of my favourite new music - stand out tracks I came across throughout the year, by both new artists and previously known. The first year was retrospective, but since then it's been an ongoing project. At first it was just for fun - a chance to make a playlist with a range of genres - but now I enjoy looking back to see when I first listened to an artist, and watch as my music tastes change.

I make the playlists manually, although I use Last.fm it doesn't provide an easy way to pick out music you've found (or gone back to) over a given period. What it is good for, though, is pulling out the past 12 months of listening history. So, before I launch into a personalised mixtape here's a glimpse of my music listening habits last year. The table is a bit odd - I've tried to include my ten most played tracks too, bear with me.

The Top Artists and Tracks of 2011

No.	Artist	Plays	Top Track? (No.)
01	Emancipator	1242	First Snow (1) Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Build Fires (3) Nevergreen (7)
02	Ludovico Einaudi	863
03	The National	818	Wake Up Your Saints (10)
04	Beirut	652	Santa Fe (8)
05	Bon Iver	591	Perth (9)
06	Bonobo	551
07	Iron & Wine	535	Jezebel (5)
08	Andrew Bird	534
09	Nujabes	528	Reflection Eternal (4)
10	Tycho	509	PBS (2)
11	Radiohead	452
12	Ólafur Arnalds	436	Erla's Waltz (6)

Of these Einaudi, Bonobo, Andrew Bird, and Radiohead stand out: clearly I listened to them a lot, but no single track was compelling enough to listen to repeatedly. Unlike Emancipator who I apparently fell in love with. To give you an idea of how much I listened to Emancipator, here's a snapshot of the first few months of 2011 rendered by LastGraph —

For just under a month I listened almost solely to Emancipator. This isn't uncommon for me: after being introduced to a new artist I like I'll listen to them at the expense of all other music. The graph highlighted other external influences I'd forgotten about - there are two lulls where I listen to very little when a) I was on holiday, and b) when my laptop got stolen. You can also spot surges where new albums were released (Bon Iver, The National, Fleet Foxes, Beirut). Enough of that though, here's the playlist.

The 2011 Mixtape

No.	Artist	Track
01	Radiohead	Supercollider
02	King Creosote & Jon Hopkins	John Taylor's Month Away
03	Evenings	Still Young
04	Bon Iver	Minnesota, WI
05	Souleye	Predestined Fate
06	Sam Amidon	How Come That Blood
07	Mattafix	Living Darfur
08	King Seven	Hidden
09	Fleet Foxes	Helplessness Blues
10	Iron & Wine	Jezebel
11	Nujabes	Reflection Eternal
12	Explosions in the Sky	Postcards from 1952
13	Beirut	Santa Fe
14	Tycho	PBS
15	Ólafur Arnalds	Erla's Waltz
16	Emancipator	First Snow

Octopuses (or octopodes, if you're feeling particularly pedantic) have long caught people's imagination: they squeeze through tiny gaps, occassionally display bizarre behviour, and change the colour of their skin. The latter, which I've taken for granted since childhood, appears to be more complicated than previously thought:

But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

As fascinating as I find this, perhaps you shrug and brush it off as an interesting but unremarkable physiological trait. Perhaps behaviour is more your thing —

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

Either way, it appears octopuses are not to be underestimated.

Source: Orion Magazine.

What follows is a recipe that should be in everyone's cookbook. The short version is: take a shoulder of lamb, rub some tasty Moroccan spices all over it, cook for six and a half hours, gorge yourself. The slightly more verbose version goes something like —

Preheat your oven 220°C/gas mark 7. Put a large shoulder of lamb in a baking tray.

In a dry frying pan toast

• 1 tsp cumin seds
• 1 tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp fennel seeds
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1/2 a cinnamon stick

It'll take around 4 minutes for them to cook at medium heat, stop when they smell incredible. While they're toasting add to a bowl

• 1 pinch cayenne pepper
• 1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tsp sweet paprika
• 2 large sprigs of rosemary, leaves picked and finely chopped
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Once the seeds are toasted grind them to a powder in a pestle and mortar. Add that to the bowl and mix well. Rub half the mixture over one side of the lamb, making sure to get it in all the crevices. Pop that in the oven for 30 minutes. Your kitchen should now be a heady place. Take the lamb out and use the back of a wooden spoon to rub the remaining spices over the lamb. Add around 100ml of water to the baking tray (take care not to wash any of the spices off the meat), cover the tray with tin foil, and stick it back in the oven at 120-130°C/gas mark 1-2. Return in 6 hours to claim your prize.

---

The way the meat falls of the bone once cooked begs to be eaten with minimal cutlery. In my house we typically have some warm flat breads or pittas, some salad, houmous, a couscous-mint-raisin medley, and possibly some baba ghanoush. It's exceptional.

The recipe and resulting meal works for me on a number of levels. I'm inclined to think the tastiest food is that which takes the longest to cook and prepare: bread that you've let rise three or four times, a stew that's been bubbling away all afternoon, or a roast like this one, that takes the best part of a day. Something about the anticipation, or the effort that's gone into it (certainly that's the case with bread), makes it better. Then there's the eating. Getting messy fingers while picking at lots of different dishes is fun, and feels like how food should be enjoyed.

There is a danger North Korea is letting its 1984 fascination get carried away.

Televisions are set to receive only government stations. International radio signals are routinely jammed, and electricity is unreliable. Freestanding radios are illegal. But every North Korean household and business is outfitted with a government-controlled radio hardwired to a central station. The speaker comes with a volume control, but no off switch.

Source: The Atlantic.

N.B.: I meant to make this the first post but (typically) took ages to finish it. Since starting it in early February there's been a growth in interest towards static sites. The motivation appears to be speed: having your site linked to on Daring Fireball, for example, will punish an uncached dynamic site. Luckily (hah) for me that's not an issue, and was not my motivation, but it's nice to see people exploring their options. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

When I was a child, building things out of Lego was always more fun than playing with them. I'd build a spaceship, fly it around for an afternoon, and then decide that what this mission really needed was a sort of agile tank thing with big wheels. So I'd break up the spaceship and start again. That's what it's been like with blogging too; over the past few years I've probably tried more blogging platforms than I've written posts. First it was Wordpress, then Habari, Textpattern, and finally Tumblr. I think I even flirted with ExpressionEngine at one point. Much like changing pens won't make you a better, or more prolific, novelist, changing blogging engines won't help you post more.

By the beginning of this year it was beginning to look like there was little point in having a domain at all. So I made a decision: either post to the blog or get rid of it. Do something, at least, to reduce the black hole of money it had become: I was paying £10 a month for something I didn't use.

Getting rid of it entirely seemed a little drastic. I'd like to develop my writing and a blog is a fantastic, low-friction way to do that. If I wasn't going to delete the thing entirely I needed to find a way to make it cheaper. Enter NearlyFreeSpeech and Jekyll.

Nearly Free

With most web hosting companies you pay a fixed monthly rate for a set package. This usually includes a fixed amount of bandwidth, a certain number of MySQL databases, a fixed amount of disk space for your site and so on. While this is great, and must work for lots of people, in my case even the smallest packages on offer are far more than I need. The traffic to my site is low, I only store text files and the odd image, and even when I was running a database based CMS with Mint I was only using 2 MySQL databases.

Which is where NearlyFreeSpeech, who provide a pay-as-you-go system, come in. You are charged only for the bandwidth and storage you use, and the costs scale. Other services, such as PHP, MySQL, and DNS resolving, cost a fixed amount per day and can be switched on and off as needed. On a site such as mine the monthly cost of hosting can easily be as low as $1 a month.

I'm surprised I hadn't heard of NFS before. I've enjoyed constant uptime (as far as I can tell), their site management backend is custom and much easier to understand and navigate than what I'd previously been using (cPanel), and they're cheap.

At the same time as finding NFS, I came across Jekyll. Jekyll is a Ruby powered "blog aware, static site generator"; which means it takes Markdown formatted text files and spits out a blog of flat HTML files. I'll be the first to note the irony of lamenting my constant switching of blogging tools, only to switch again. In defence of this move, however, I'll assert it's in the interest of bringing the cost of my hosting down: on NFS hosting static files is cheaper than having a dynamically generated site. There are other benefits too: the site has much higher portability, since it's just a folder of HTML files; backing up is easier for the same reason; there are no security issues; and it's much, much faster.

Dr Jekyll

As well as the above benefits there is something rather pleasing about having your website as text files. I swear by the combination of Simplenote, Notational Velocity, and Dropbox; having my website as a bunch of text files seems like a natural extension of this. Being able to effectively track changes using Git is nice too. Additionally, I'm reasonably comfortable with Ruby, much more so than I am with PHP, which means I've got a decent idea of what Jekyll is doing; Wordpress's PHP was always a bit of a black box to me. Not feeling constantly at sea with my blog's code is pleasant.

Making the move to Jekyll was relatively painless. I referred a lot to Paul Stamatious's post on his switch from Wordpress, which helped a great deal. In fact, this site is generated with his fork so as to make use of his MultiViews addition. I also added Henrik's mod_rewrite magic to my .htaccess file, which not only keeps the root of my server tidy, but also allows me to have a a sensible URL structure.

Talking of URL structure, something I've noticed in quite a lot of Jekyll powered blogs is that the URLs break too easily. For example, on the venerable Tom Preston-Werner's blog a post URL might look like http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html. Fine, but this suggests that http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008 is a valid URL. Nuh-uh. Jekyll has a flexible permalink structure which can be changed on a whim. This is fantastic, and allows you to fashion your blog as you'd like; however, a side effect are these brittle URLs.

There's an easy workaround though. URLs for this blog are structured like this: http://double.plus.gd/archive/git-bash-aliases. Which means Jekyll is creating a folder called 'archive' and placing all the generated posts in it. So, to create a sturdy URL instead of having an archive.html file for the archives nest it, like so: archive/index.html. Jekyll sees there is a folder called 'archive' and merrily pops all the generated posts along with the index file in it when it creates the site. This means the user can visit http://double.plus.gd/archive and be served up the index file; or a specific post URL, and be served up the correct post. Awesome.

If you're interested in seeing the code for this blog it's over on Github. The Rakefile may be of particular interest since it contains deployment code, and some rake tasks for creating template posts.

Bells and Whistles

As I mentioned above I'd planned on having a flat site on a static server to keep the costs as low as possible (PHP costs an extra $0.01/day). Eventually though I got sick of Google Analytics and have moved back to Mint (adding another $0.02/day for MySQL). It's not ideal, in the sense that it would be nice to keep this setup as sparse as possible, but it doesn't add too much to the hosting cost. Indeed, you could easily host your dynamic site on NFS for peanuts; although you wouldn't get all the benefits of a static site like Jekyll provides. Having PHP enabled also lets me play around with little projects like this from Shaun Inman.

Closing Thoughts

This is by no means a setup that would work for everyone, but I'm very happy with it. The code base for Jekyll is only around 2000 lines long, so it's easy to get to grips with; I can edit my posts in Textmate (I love me some IR_Black); and it's fast, stable, light, and portable. I finally feel like I can stop fighting with the blog, and just get down to writing. Let's see how it goes.

Most people know that elephants are smarter than your average bear, but I didn't realise this:

Elephants ... show a keen interest in the bones of their own kind (even unrelated elephants that have died long ago). They are often seen gently investigating the bones with their trunks and feet and remaining very quiet.

To the extent that relatives of a shot elephant moved bones from the discarded carcass back to where they were killed.

Currently floating to the top of Reddit is an 'IAmA' post from someone with 51 hours left to live, offering to answer any questions people might have.

As part of my preparations I've ended my pain medication and am trying to regain what little dignity and clarity I can. Who I was doesn't matter. I'm in pain, I'm tired and I'm finally being granted a small shred of respect. Feel free to AMA if you're so inclined.

Regardless of whether it's true or not, perhaps the most tearjerking part of the thread is this set of comments. Hundreds and hundreds of people chose to check in from their place of residence, letting the original poster know they were thinking of them.

The more time I spend on Reddit the more I am impressed by the community that frequent it. Often I come across heartwarming stories or, better yet, heartwarming comments to stories. It's very rare that I come across something genuinely abusive or offensive.