September 2009
7 posts
go stormchasing →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
drink nothing but water for 30 days →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
climb a big wall →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
lead 5.11s →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
go rock climbing →
Iain Lowe completed this goal (worth it!)
Go ice climbing →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
grow my own vegetables →
Iain Lowe completed this goal (worth it!)
July 2009
1 post
Enable bash color prompt in Ubuntu
This little script will enable a colored PS1 in bash.
#!/bin/bash
X=`mktemp`; cat ~/.bashrc | sed "s/^#force_color_prompt=yes/force_color_prompt=yes/g" > $X; mv $X ~/.bashrc
May 2009
16 posts
build an iPhone app →
Iain Lowe adopted this goal
“How do you stop a VMWare Workstation from sending through “beeps” to...”
– Turn off the PC speaker “beeps” in VMWare
“If you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest...”
– John W Powell : The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers
“Not every service that is built on Amazon EC2, for example, is a spoke to it....”
– Thinking Out Cloud: Hubs, Spokes and Islands in the Cloud
“List the features you want to see in your program, and then cull it down to...”
– Version Numbers and You - The Fishbowl
“Excla.im is a jabber bot that allows you to update your twitter status very...”
– Welcome :: excla.im
“The idea is simple: Find tweets that contain this phrase, parse out the location...”
– Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data | blprnt.blg
“Git has a rebase command which allows you to take a local branch and change its...”
– DVCSAnalysis - support - Analysis of Git and Mercurial - Google Code
“What does it take to succeed? A positive attitude? Well, sure, but that’s hardly...”
– 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything - Stepcase Lifehack
“It’d be great if everyone on every other microblogging service switched over to...”
– How to Keep Track of Your Twitter Community After Switching to Identi.ca | Oh, Identi.ca!
“With a growing number of new specifications being published by first-time...”
– Hueniverse: On Versioning Specifications
“What Loopt — and now Google — are asserting is this: when you tell your friends...”
– Google Latitude to Cops: ‘I Don’t Remember’ | Epicenter
Custom Twitter Backgrounds →
Just updated my Twitter background in accordance with good advice.
April 2009
35 posts
Hacking the Tumblr queue
OK, I noticed something kind of cool about the Tumblr queue: you can actually queue up posts that need to appear as if they were posted previously. Again, slowly: you can queue up a post dated from yesterday morning to be published tomorrow.
Why would you want to do this? When I go to the country, I usually take a bunch of pictures while out walking on our land. The resulting photo-essay...
3 tags
Tweenbots - Simple robot interactions →
Kacie Kinzer has created a great little project to explore how we interact with the space and objects around us. One part of the project involves the creation of simple robots that move around and share space with us. A film clip shows how strangers help the robot accomplish it’s goals.
1 tag
I heart TimeCert
I’m working on integrating TimeCert in Tumblr so I can protect all my million-dollar ideas from the sharks.
The TimeCert website says
TimeCert is a service for timestamping content. This provides evidence that something existed at a given time. TimeCert will give you the timestamp for when someone first referenced a given digest.
There are just so many cool things you can do with this.
I...
1 tag
Pre-paid credit cards
Pre-paid credit cards: what a cool concept; I mean, it’s amazing that online merchants and the banking system in general need to leave it up to the credit card companies to come up with a proper way to move money around. Too bad you need to acquire debt to do it.
But with pre-paid cards, you can interact with online merchants and most other services as if you had a “real” credit...
Celebrating 3 Years of Amazon S3 with 3 Months of... →
RPX: Instant OpenID and Data Portability →
This is fantastic; more and more people are looking to provide centralized services that leverage distributed mechanisms that let us keep control of our data. RPX lets you build your site to handle…
Turning the interview around
Turning the situation around in an interview can be a very empowering experience. In fact, it can make you a much more attractive candidate. Many people advise you to research the company at which you are interviewing, or to try to find out as much as possible about the people you will meet. I suggest that, in addition, you go into that interview with a number of questions for them.
Informational...
Shepherd's Pie Remix
AKA Pan-seared tartare de boeuf with colored corn salad and cheesy potato cake
Ingredients:
1lb. tartar steak
2 cobs of colored corn
four yukon gold potatoes
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp coarse salt
3 tbsp lemon juice
4 tbsp capers
1 onion
1 tomato
8 tsp olive oil
1.5 tsp raspberry vinegar
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp dijon mustard
1/4c fresh grated parmesan
1/4c finely...
“Consistent application of market pricing during an emergency would minimize the...”
– Emergency Economics
On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving... →
The On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics contains material on weaving, basketry, lace, and related subjects. The documents on this site come from a variety of sources….
Moving to micro/nano blogging
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of all these different tools that overlap on 70% of their functionality. I’ve done pretty much all of them: blogs, links, etc. I’ve rolled my own and I’ve used other peoples’. At the end of the day, I just want all the stuf rolled into one. I don’t want to be switching all over the place.
Now, I understand the...
Compare Rate Plans in Montréal & Area, Quebec |... →
Shows a break-down of rates for cellphone services in the Montreal area.
The mechanism fades into the background
You are given a business card; the entire time you hold it before putting it in your pocket you hold it in such a way as to cover the phone number.
Ridiculous.
Normally, you hold a card in one of the blank spots so that you can see all of the contact information. The card is specifically designed, in fact, to convey the contact information in as rapid and succint a manner as possible.
...
“This is superdistribution — content moving from friend to friend through the...”
– Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers « Clay Shirky
“The function of prices, from the point of view of a shopper, is to let the...”
– Nick Szabo — The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments
The death of the Knowledge Worker
Learning as an apprentice
It used to be that you went to a venerable master (or at least somebody close by) to learn your craft. 7-10 years would have been about normal for an apprenticeship. During that time you worked for free, toiling to fill your master’s pockets with your oafish attempts at your trade. As the days and weeks and months passed, your master would have whispered the...
“Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy. It...”
– Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
“One cannot tell users that they need to place a monetary value on something...”
– The Case Against Micropayments by Clay Shirky | O’Reilly Media
“In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments,...”
– The Case Against Micropayments by Clay Shirky | O’Reilly Media
“It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry,...”
– Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Digital Conceptions Canada - VoIP 9-1-1 Services →
These guys will supply affordable 911 VoIP services for providers; there is an initial $35 fee and then $50/mo minimum (which covers the first 25 DIDs).
Year Supply-Basic Food Storage Unit For One →
13-6 Gal Super Pail Buckets
3- Hard Red Wheat 1-Pinto Beans
2-Hard White Wheat 3-White Rice
1-Small White Beans 1-Black Beans
1-Instant Milk 1-Quick Rolled Oats 6-#10 Cans
1 can Shortening Powder
1…