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While on a short road trip and then recovering from surgery, I hand quilted and hand embroidered a linen lilypad quilt. And yes, I did make this little quilt for my Frinos plush from Hades II to have a nice place to rest.
Like so many other hat knitters, I've knitted the classic WWII watch cap, which is also known as Beanie no. 212, more than a handful of times. (You can find it on Ravelry here and here, respectively.) It's a charming, quick knit that's easy to resize, but I've never really liked the crown shaping on the original. I've knit a lot of these hats, and only one's had the original crown shaping for the decreases. I'm sharing two crown shaping variations I keep going back to below. I always knit this hat in the round, and my crown shaping patterns assume you will be knitting in the round, too. Alternate crown shaping 1 This alternate crown shaping follows the 6x2 ribbing of the previous section for the bulk of each round so that the ribbing continues throughout the entire hat. Written out: Divide stitches on 3 double pointed needles with stitches evenly divided among the three needles or mark out even sections with stitch markers if decreasing across 2 circular needles or with magic loop. (k1, ssk or skp, k if previous row was knit or p if previous row was purl until 3 stitches are left on the needle/before the next marker, k2tog, k) x3. Repeat step 1 until 4 stitches remain on each needle/in each marked section. Cut and draw yarn through the remaining 12 stitches 2-3 times. Tie off and weave in the ends. Alternate crown shaping 2 This alternate shaping both maintains the ribbing throughout the crown shaping and accentuates it by creating a sort of three-pointed star with 3 of the 2-stitch-wide purl parts from the previous 6x2 ribbed section. This shaping really only makes sense when making a size hat where the number of stitches is evenly divisible by 24, so I typically only do it on size "small" hats (cast on 96 stitches). You could adjust the needle size and gauge for a yarn that works well at that gauge to make this work for different sizes. Written out: Stop the last 6x2 ribbed row 1 stitch early and divide stitches on 3 double pointed needles with stitches evenly divided among the three needles or mark out even sections with stitch markers if decreasing across 2 circular needles or with magic loop. Ensure that each needle transition or marker has a single purl stitch on each side. (p1, ssk or skp, k if previous row was knit or p if previous row was purl until 3 stitches are left on the needle/before the next marker, k2tog, p) x3. Repeat step 1 until 4 stitches remain on each needle/in each marked section. Cut and draw yarn through the remaining 12 stitches 2-3 times. Tie off and weave in the ends. Additional project notes Needle: US 7 - 4.5 mm Gauge: 19 stitches and 24 rows = 4 inches in stockinette Hats made for me should generally be a small (cast on 96 stitches), and hats made for my partner Matt should generally be a medium (cast on 104 stitches). Footnotes Either of these will create a left-leaning decrease, use whichever one you prefer.↩ Ibid.↩
After five different drivers, including a school bus driver, aggressively close-passed me in Midwood last night and two of them threatened me just for being on the street, I realized there's a huge gap in educational outreach about bike rules in NYC: drivers. I decided to make a mini-zine that demystifies the behavior of law-abiding bicyclists like myself and helps drivers better understand what to expect when sharing the road: All text and illustrations in the mini-zine are my own. Many thanks to Matt Denys for help proofreading! This zine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, so you can copy and distribute this zine for noncommercial purposes in unadapted form as long as you give credit to me. Gas stations, car dealerships, auto repair shops, rental car offices, parking lots, book shops, restaurants, coffee shops, and other commercial establishments are welcome to give out these zines, too - as long as the zine itself is free! Check out the NYC Bike Rules for Drivers mini-zine on the web or download the pdf to print here!
Here's how to fold a mini-zine, featuring my mini-zine So you want to make a public comment! Fold the printed mini-zine page in half, then half in again, and then in half again as shown. When you open the piece of paper, each of the pages should fit fully within a set of folds. With the mini-zine page completely open, fold it in half with short ends touching ("hamburger style") so the text is on the outside. Using scissors, cut a across the dotted line. When you reopen your paper, there will be a slit in the middle of the sheet. Fold the paper in half lengthwise with long ends touching ("hotdog style"), hold the paper at either end, and fold the sheet into itself to form an 8-page booklet. Make sure the cover is on the front!
More in programming
The Ware for October 2026 is shown below: Another contribution from FETguy and Renew Computers! I found this board to be interesting mainly because I always wondered how these things worked. The construction reveals a trick which ended up as a surprise, at least to me! A couple of administrative notes – I am counting […]
The Ware for September 2026 is a tire pressure monitor from a late 80’s to early 90’s model Porsche, made by Bosch. According to the submitter: Kind of a crazy piece of hardware for the late 80’s – this would be pretty cutting edge for the time. Nobody quite got what the part was – […]
I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit. I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community. I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either. I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s. It’s profoundly lonely. But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon. Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them. We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit. My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes. So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s. It has been, once again, quite lonely. Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on. Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller. I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself. Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position. So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon. My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes. I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country). That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else. I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you. Everyone deserves to be part of a community. And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.
