Recent Notes

Cork band Emperor Of Ice Cream were dropped by their label Sony before they got to record their album and subsequently broke up in 1995. They got together during lockdown to re-record everything and their accomplishment is now out to purchase. Well worth a listen.

Yellow Screen or The Sodium vapour process used by Disney and made famous by Mary Poppins (1964) used a specially coated prism in an old three-strip Technicolor camera. They were able to film technically brilliant mattes even with transparency. There was only one camera with this unique prism. Nobody was able to replicate it, and it was only ever for 35mm film. Blue Screen was developed for larger film formats at the time like 65mm, Ben Hur in particular.

This is super helpful when doing all your updates in Craft CMS in via composer. The composer plugin prestissimo, downloads packages in parallel to speed up the installation process. To install use a global require.

These days Cloudflare is in front of a lot of large sites I work with. This little tip in invaluable for checking on the cached status of a page. Add the custom header of cf-cache-status to your Network tab. Simple as that.

Inspired by the Windows 95 era PowerToys project, this reboot has some nice features for your workflow. Download the preview here. I'm loving FancyZones already.

Pixel & Tonic release Craft CMS 3.5 RC1. Very exciting. Highlights include New Field Layout Designer and custom UI elements based on site templates. Full 3.5 changelog

While the rest of the family made a trek to Ballysrisode beach today, I was left at home "working". It's a great little beach in West Cork, Ireland. It's divided into two parts, and on the second part, there is an unusual grouping of stones.

There are two different stories to these. The first is that of a local pirate that had a battle on the beach and that they are gravestones. The second that it is the remains of a Bronze Age Fulacht Fia. Both a fascinating read no matter which one is correct.

Using Blender Mike Pan helped generate thousands of images to train an AI network that successfully sees transparent objects. Read the full article here.

Enabling machines to better sense transparent surfaces would not only improve safety but could also open up a range of new interactions in unstructured applications — from robots handling kitchenware or sorting plastics for recycling, to navigating indoor environments or generating AR visualizations on glass tabletops.

A useful collection of twig tips & tricks from {{craftSnippets}} that will help you with creating better Twig templates. Recently Updated.

New Blender tutorial series from Andrew Price on how to make a high-quality couch model using cloth simulation and cloth brushes.

Nice deep dive from CSS Tricks into using dark mode in the context of websites. Did you know for example that it helps to preserve battery life for devices with OLED screen where brighter colours consume more energy?