Some weeks ago, I wrote about how I made blinking MishMash bubbles. Today, I wanted to see if I could create more variations on this and make a longer animation. This was inspired by the dynamic RITMO emblem, which reconfigures itself once in a while: That is a video, though, and was made manually back in 2018. Now, I would like to know if I can get agential help creating dynamic GIFs from SVG files. ...

Many musicians rely on basic tools in everyday life, including a tuner, a metronome, and a keyboard. I support the kids in a marching band, and I see that they rely on numerous poorly developed apps that differ between iOS and Android devices. Many of them also include ads, and some even play video ads in the middle of a tuning session. I wanted to see if I could develop some web-based apps to solve the problem. ...

While part of the group that developed the Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix (NOR-CAM), I strongly advocated for the development of an “automagic” CV system. This was based on the fact that I (and many other researchers) spend too much time working on formatting our CVs for new templates. All funders have their own CV templates, which often change from year to year. Copying and formatting the same information over and over is (literally) a waste of time, so there is room for improvement. ...

Now that we have the MishMash “bubble” illustration as an editable SVG image, it is time to start playing around with how it can be modified dynamically. The first experiment was to try to make it blink. Here, I describe two approaches, using CSS and a GIF. CSS Hover Blink The CSS version is based on this code: .blink-eye-thumb { display: block; transform-origin: center; will-change: transform; } a:hover .blink-eye-thumb, a:focus-visible .blink-eye-thumb, .blink-eye-thumb:hover, .mishmash-bubbles:hover .blink-eye-thumb { animation: bubble-eye-blink 850ms ease-in-out 2; } @keyframes bubble-eye-blink { 0%, 12%, 40%, 100% { transform: scaleY(1); } 20%, 26% { transform: scaleY(0.08); } 48%, 54% { transform: scaleY(0.14); } } The animation compresses the image vertically on hover/focus. To ensure it works everywhere, it targets: ...

While preparing for a concert yesterday, I needed to copy a bunch of scores (in PDF format) over to a pad. They were all from different sources, and some had been scanned upside down. They looked fine on my computer, so I couldn’t understand why they ended up being shown upside down on my pad. After some investigation, I realized that it was because the rotation was written into the metadata of the file. This worked fine on my laptop but not in the score reader program on my pad. If you want a file to be truly rotated by 180 degrees, you should rotate and then flatten that rotation so the orientation is baked into the PDF. ...

Some weeks ago, I wrote about how I modified the SVG image of the MishMash “bubbles”. Today, I got around to doing a similar process with the MishMash “cube”, an illustration summarising how we want to work in MishMash. The cube The idea of the cube is to present the work packages that structure the organisation, the perspectives that are central to all our work, and the approaches which describe the methods used. One of the aims of MishMash is to enable true interdisciplinary collaboration, and the idea is that the cube will assist us with communicating the multidimensionality of such an endeavour. ...

I have previously written about the MishMash emblem and how I cropped it in a text editor. This was based on the fact that an SVG image is a “vector image” in which all elements are described programmatically. So what appears as an image on screen: is, in fact, an XML file with information. Ever since I discovered this, I thought it could be fun to script changes to the SVG. However, when I opened the file to inspect the content, I quickly realised that it wasn’t as easy as that: ...

A little while ago, I wrote about how to prepare a document for multi-page printing using the terminal. Today, I had to find a solution for printing a PDF in “booklet” mode, meaning that pages are printed so that, after folding the printed sheets in half and nesting them, the page order reads correctly. On Linux (Ubuntu), I use the pdfbook2 command — a wrapper around pdfjam that reorders pages for booklets. See the pdfjam documentation on CTAN (https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfjam) and the TeX Live distribution (https://tug.org/texlive/) for installation; on Debian/Ubuntu it’s usually available via the texlive-extra-utils package (https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=texlive-extra-utils). ...

Today, we had an engaging fNIRS workshop at RITMO. One of the tasks we explored was “hyperscanning,” a term that confused several of the non-psychology people present. I was also bewildered when I encountered this term for the first time, so here is a short blog post to explain what it is. What is Hyperscanning? The short answer is that hyperscanning is the simultaneous recording of neural or physiological activity from two or more people to study interpersonal brain dynamics. ...

It feels somewhat old-school to write a blog post about printing, but this is mainly a note-to-self and a reminder for others who want to print a poster with an A4 printer. I don’t print very often, but I had to print an A2-sized poster from home, where I only have an A4 printer. I couldn’t find any options to print across multiple pages in the Ubuntu printer dialogue. Testing on a Windows computer didn’t help either. But of course, there are terminal solutions. ...