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decktechon Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop

The air here is terrible. The environment seems polluted almost beyond redemption. I'm not sure it's worth it.

decktechon Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop

Mandarin will get you around, but Cantonese will make you friends.

decktechon Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop

As one data point, the air has been objectively better after the factories shut down for each holiday I've been here for over the last three months.

decktechon Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop

That SMT pick-and-place is pretty nice, Ian got it set up with Eagle [1]. It's a little sketch on the 603s and 402s though.

[1] http://dangerousprototypes.com/tag/pick-and-place/

decktechon Spark Core: Wi-Fi for Everything (Arduino Compatible)

I'm holding out for WiMAX.

decktechon Programmatic Art

I've heard that Andy's work (while amazing) isn't generative. I think he actually lays it all out by hand (in Illustrator or the like). Not sure if genius or crazy, maybe both.

decktechon CSS 3D Clouds

PPC? It seems that few are even supporting Snow Leopard any more.

decktechon Howdoi – Instant Coding Answers via the Command Line

$ howdoi program

Why do you need the Apple Developer Program Enrollment ID? I also tried to apply to the iOS Developer Program this weekend. I applied, I paid and I got my activation codes. But then when I tried to activate with my Apple ID I got an error saying (in my case) they "were not able to successfully verify my identity". In that error message there was an Enrollment ID# consisting of both letters and numbers, a total of 10 characters, that I was supposed to include when contacting the support regarding this issue. I have not seen the same Enrollment ID somewhere else in the process and therefore I assume it is some kind of internal ID for my signing up process and you should only see it/use it when you hit some problems during the process.

I'll figure it out one of these days.

decktechon Show HN: My first product. Thoughts?

Excellent! I'm moving to China in a few weeks and know no Mandarin, so this has already been a huge help. Obligatory feature request: I would love to be able to repeat a specific phrase. If I miss a character or want to hear the pronunciation again, I'd like to be able to fix it before moving on to the next phrase inside a lesson.

Thanks!

decktechon Pushing Nginx to its limit with Lua

I've been using Openresty (with Lua and Redis support) to collect a large amount of data from GET requests for a video sharing site. Having nginx push data directly into Redis is super fast, lends easily to real-time metrics, and makes it easy to batch everything up and push it into MySQL at the end of the day. Now that Redis supports internal Lua scripts, you can also do custom atomic functions and other neat things.

If you can get around the Redis SPOF, OpenResty + Redis is great for large-volume data collection. Thousands of requests/sec on an EC2 Small at < 10% load.

decktechon Trello is running on a diesel generator and may go down at anytime

NYU operates a CoGen plant under 251 Mercer that runs on natural gas and can fail over to diesel. It provides power, steam, and cold water for air conditioning to many of surrounding properties. The net result is that NYU servers frequently stay up during power outages, while their ISP usually goes down.

decktechon A circuit and PCB editor in the browser

Check out Advanced Circuits, they have a barebones PCB service that isn't too expensive for ordering test boards and one-offs. Turnaround is one day plus shipping. And they send you popcorn with your order for some reason.

http://www.4pcb.com/barebones-pcbs.html