Laughter, da best medi-sin

Don't go gentle . . .

I am fascinated by the fact that human beings laugh; they are the only animals to do so. They are also the only ones who know they are going to die.

~Umberto Eco (in an interview by James Runcie, 1989)

And don't forget tears:

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.

~William Hazlitt

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Create 'Fake Identity Generator'-style email addresses and passwords in Excel

Last week I needed to compile a list of several hundred fake customer names with fake (but verifiable) email addresses and passwords to test a client's eCommerce site. Fake data generators At that time, I knew of only two online identity generators: Fake Identity Generator (FIG) and GenerateData.com (GD). By accepting three user-specified parameters (country, gender, age range) FIG outputs a lot of nice fake data, including disposable (but accessible) YopMail email addresses and relatively easy-to-remember passwords. However FIG doesn't provide free bulk identity generation so I had to generate and copy-paste identities one at a time – a very slow process – along with manually creating accounts using these fake identities at the client site (I had no access to the client content management system so I couldn't bulk register the fake identities). On the other hand, GD allows bulk generation of identities (up to 100 at a time) for free (and with more paramete...

Make a quick-&-dirty repeating pattern in Inkscape (using hexagon base)

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on January 29, 2016 . I am making it available here to add to the Inkscape pattern tutorials.] This is based on a tutorial for making hexagonal tiles for David White’s “The Battle for Wesnoth”, but you can skip the 72×72-pixel requirement. You can make your base hexagon in any size that looks good at 100% zoom. First, make a hexagon using the “Create stars and polygons” tool. Press the CTRL key while you’re dragging the cursor to make a proportioned hexagon like this: You may have to move the cursor around to have the hexagon lie on its side. Next, with the hexagon selected, remove the outline by holding SHIFT and left-clicking the ‘X’ swatch in the color palette: Replace the hexagon’s color with what you want by left-clicking the color swatches in the color palette – almost black, in this case: Next, add your main decoration. I just dropped-in a dragon I found at Wikimedia Commons: Group the hexagon and the object (selec...

Baybayin Fonts

[Blogger] I didn't set out to do Baybayin fonts in the first place but one thing led to another so . . . Here they are so far (shapes done in Inkscape and assembled in Fontforge ): Note: the newer ones do not follow the Lopez cross virama but the 'J' shaped 'pamudpod' introduced by Antoon Postma and adapted by the Mangyan Hanunoo. I also use the Bikol 'Ra' and—purists may cringe—I use extra kudlit on the newer fonts to indicate 'i' and 'u' from 'e' and 'o.' Traditionally, the double kudlit was used to double the e/i or o/u syllable. Baybayin Electric (download from this link ): Originally aiming for a more 'runic' feel that's easy to read in small sizes. Ended up with this: Baybayin Electric Monospace version (download from this link ): Baybayin Hilig (download from this link ): "Hilig," in Tagalog, means "passion, favorite thing/activity;" in Bisaya it means "slanting, oblique, ...

Man On A Street

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