Author: Neil Mather

Is there a way to automatically install and configure a list of Firefox plugins? e.g. when setting up a new box.

I don’t particularly want to use Firefox Sync.

UPDATE: Oh yeah – there’s a whole bunch of Ansible playbooks if you search for them.

When I was younger, mid-teens to mid-twenties, I had really debilitating social anxiety disorder (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/social-anxiety/).

To the point that I often did not want to leave my room. I found it difficult to be in a room with other people, eat in public, stand in line at the supermarket. It really affected my mental health and development of relationships.

I still have remnants of it now, in that I’m fairly quiet in social situations and not the most gregarious. But it has mostly gone away, to the point that I can go to events, even do occasional public speaking, and not really worry about it.

So I guess I wanted to say, if you currently have it, or know someone who does – you can definitely overcome it.

#SocialAnxiety #MentalHealth

Social Anxiety

This is a book of gorgeous photographs of repair workshops in the South West of England.

Visible mending: Everyday repairs in the South West:
‘The project was inspired by an attraction to the aesthetics of these workplaces, but also by an interest in what the practices of fixing, mending, repair and renewal could reveal about the way people value things, and each other.’

http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/visiblemending.php

#CultureOfRepair #VisibleMending

We had a great social last night – a talk about repair and conservation in museums (https://bridgetharvey.co.uk/writing), and a board games hacking workshop (https://www.beesness.games/).

We learned about the components of mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics in games. Me and Panda hacked the mechanics of Surakarta (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surakarta_(game)) to turn it into a game of cooperation and swapping, rather than a game of battle and capture. We only had chance to play it once with the new rules, but it worked surprisingly well and induced more high-fiving than the original (which induced none.)

Went to my first Dorkbot this evening!

Really liked Annie Tådne’s sonification of physical objects (https://tadne.se/) and Deerful’s indie synthpop livecoding (http://deerful.com/)

‘Dorkbot is a group of affiliated organizations worldwide that sponsor grassroots meetings of artists, engineers, designers, scientists, inventors, and anyone else working under the very broad umbrella of electronic art. The dorkbot motto is "people doing strange things with electricity".