jodoherty

This is why I've completely switched to using "Ctrl+[" instead of escape. The escape key placement on a lot of keyboards is too inconsistent, plus it's just so far away.

This is the running premise behind the book Art and Fear, which basically concludes that iteration with quality feedback is the best way to develop your abilities and produce your best work. That is, quantity is the best path to quality.

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fear-Observations-Rewards-Artmaki...

One has debugging symbols and the other was compiled with -O2 optimizations enabled.

Nope, but then my sense of smell has been broken for years, so I don't take it for granted that you can just sniff things.

My main concern was finding a way to keep the things that end up in the back of the fridge from staying there for weeks and weeks. I waste more food than I care to because I'm the opposite of what you're attacking me for being -- I'm the guy that puts stuff away and forgets about it the next time I go to eat. That, and it's hard to coordinate with my fiancee on meals when she works midnights.

Anyway, I'm sorry for offending you with my ideas. I just think a smart fridge could actually be handy for wasting less food without having to be obsessive compulsive about tracking and without being a great judge of freshness with my nose. You just glance at the fridge and pick out things to eat before they go bad.

It'd be great if the refrigerator could track the expiration dates of the items inside using RFID, then notify you if anything was getting old.

For made at home items and non-tagged items, they could also make RFID stickies, where you scan them when you put the item in the fridge, give it a name or take a snapshot with the built-in camera, set your own expiration date, and it tracks how long it's been in there.

If you focused enough on usability, you could make the whole thing feel streamlined and natural. The fridge itself could dispense the RFID tags, and you could just reuse them by reloading it with the old ones, for example.

Wayne Bickley did a pretty cool electric conversion on his C4 Corvette:

http://www.ndneyes.com/

I originally read about it on Corvette forum (I used to be a C4 vette owner and was always looking for interesting tips or projects).

If you're mechanically and electrically inclined, it's more than feasible.

LTS as in Long-Term Support:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_support

The basic idea is that once released, the LTS version of the compiler would continue to receive fixes and updates for several years (at least two according to Wikipedia), no matter how many new versions are released during that time.

Hi there,

I see GZIP optimization and fingerprinting in your deployment overview on the homepage, but do you include any built-in support for avoiding render-blocking CSS and JavaScript? And if so, then what about handling load order and dependencies between the asynchronously loaded pieces?

It looks like your homepage actually fairs pretty poorly on PageSpeed Insights:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

I realize PageSpeed scores can be something of a red herring in a lot of cases, and I'd like to know if you think it's not worth addressing. I know for my place of work, if it influences SEO to any significant degree, then it's important to my boss.

Currently we use Middleman, which from the description I saw of Cactus, would be the Ruby equivalent using Sprockets and Padrino instead of Django. We had to make a custom template with special helpers to address various PageSpeed issues. It'd be nice to have a tool that has features addressing these things out of the box though.

Anyway, great work! I think tools like this are really the future as far as content on the web is concerned.

I think the trends the author is seeing may only be regional. Out here in Oklahoma and on some of my trips around the midwest, every little kid who sees my car knows the difference between a new base model Mustang and a Mustang GT and gets excited to hear a real 420HP V8. Lots of young guys I've met -- in college, through friends, in the military, etc. -- have also had their share of fast cars or tuners. A good number have even done a restoration or two.

As for the women, plenty of college girls and other young women notice what I'm driving and give me complements. A nice car definitely still gets attention from the ladies. Quite a few I've know even enjoy driving stick and like to go pretty fast.

I'll admit, young people may be more practical and economical with their vehicle purchase decisions, but car culture is still very alive and strong here.

I've always been interested in the Starting Strength program, but was intimidated by gyms and the equipment, so I did this recently. I'm not too far from Wichita Falls, so I was able to find a personal trainer who was very familiar with Rippetoe and his work and had even been trained by him before.

It was definitely a worthwhile investment. After a month and a half of coaching with a personal trainer, I feel a lot more confident with going to a gym or using my own equipment now. I'd still be going to the same trainer if I could fit it into my schedule.

Do any of these USB stick devices have GPIO pins? Honest question, since part of the appeal for me was being able to interface hardware more directly.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks. Hope it spreads, because it's nowhere near my region yet.

I'd much rather have my packages delivered to a secure, conveniently located facility that notifies me of the delivery and that I can visit to pick up my package at my leisure. But then, I'm more concerned with completely offloading the stress over when my package might be delivered, whether or not it might get stolen, and whether or not I have to be there to sign off for it.

Still, this appears to be a useful step up from having packages delivered at random times throughout the day.

I'm kind of surprised. My dad is an over the road truck driver who isn't too tech savvy. The most I've ever been able to teach him to use on a computer is how to browse the web with Google Chrome. When he left to go back over the road, I got him a Samsung Chromebook with the built-in 3G and he loves it.

He plays his online Texas hold'em (flash based), looks up unfamiliar destinations on Google Maps to see the satellite imagery, and checks the weather radar regularly to avoid storms. He's also able to better keep in touch with us now that he can shoot off e-mails whenever he wants.

It's actually a handy, useful tool for him.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone try to get things done with a tablet? With the exception of pen-based note taking and drawing, all the activities I do on a tablet are consumption based (reading, web browsing, etc.) and easy to accomplish using Windows 8's metro interface. With that in mind, I think the added keyboard shortcuts really help clean up the interface for tablet users while giving desktop and notebook users a fast way of getting things done.

But to answer your question, I think the real plan is that you don't try to do your work on a Windows 8 tablet without a keyboard. Instead, you get a lightweight, convertible Windows 8 tablet. That way, you can have your cake and eat it too.

The trackpoint always auto-calibrates itself when you let go of it. If you begin to get a drift, let go for a few seconds and it'll fix itself.

Given a multiple choice True/False test with the statement “people turn food into energy”, I would have had to spend some time deciding on what to answer, not because I have to question whether or not the statement is true, but because I'd have to wonder in whether or not the test writer understands the nuanced implications of that statement.

The way I see it, people don't turn food into energy -- they simply move energy around and transform it by breaking the chemical bonds in the food and forming other chemical bonds using enzymes to keep the activation energies low enough to make a net gain despite losses to heat. So based on the conservation of energy, people don't turn anything into energy. The energy was already there -- they simply transformed it.

But then with the conservation of mass-energy, we know that some mass is converted to energy when chemical bonds are broken. So technically the statement is true in a sense. But the amount of energy created from mass is so small it can't even be measured or detected, so for all practical purposes, the statement is false. You have to be breaking nuclear bonds before you see that.

The article's author says the statement is true, using it as an example of a statement that's consistent with our preconceived ideas, but instead of explaining it, he simply does some pseudo-scientific hand-waving -- digestion, respiration, metabolism, and all that. This suggests the author somehow considers energy as something that is created and used up on a regular basis.

Which makes you wonder, what if the writer of the statement was an expert biologist whose major focus isn't understanding the concept of energy or the chemical underpinnings of microbiology? What if they also saw energy in the same way as the author of the article? What if the answer on the answer key is true, despite being arguably false? In that case, the answer is true in the sense that that's what the writer of the test wanted you to answer.

I think a better test would give the option of adding a statement or two to qualify or explain your choice on the test. I know that would allow me to finish such a test sooner, especially if it was computerized and I could type my explanations.

That's a photo of the ground with the rover's shadow projected onto it by some backlighting, suggesting that the specific camera that took that photo is facing away from the sun and down towards the ground. Because there's no sky present in that shot, the exposure is set so that the ground is bright and the shadow is darker.

Meanwhile, if you look at the other photos with the horizon present (e.g. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=RLA_39750... ), the ground is dark because in order to capture the details in the bright sky, the exposure has to be adjusted so that less total light is captured (usually by using a faster shutter speed). Otherwise, you'd blow out the sky and get no details there.

It looks like the dynamic range of these cameras is limited, so keep that in mind when looking at any photos that come out of them. Something that's bright in one shot might be extremely dark in another, depending on its relative brightness compared to other parts of the scene. Take a look at the last few rear camera shots with the sun in them:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=0

The sun causes all the sky detail from the previous rear camera shots to appear black, since its overwhelming brightness requires the exposure to be extremely brief.

Anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea of what to expect from these cameras and how to interpret the photos.

The offensive content problem may even have something to do with the appearance of their "monster" character being confusingly similar to typical portrayals of the devil (red character with horns), which itself is can be an offensive image in many cultures regardless of context. That's why feedback is so important in these review processes, especially with something so subjective.

As an aside, the devil thing isn't isolated to non-Western countries either. Linda Branagan famously recalls one instance of where the BSD "Daemon" mascot, which also looks devil-like, nearly got her into real trouble in Texas: http://rmitz.org/freebsd.daemon.html

I realize this isn't the same thing, but a lot of Mac apps are scriptable through Apple's Open Scripting Architecture [1], so it's more than possible to use Python [2] or Ruby [3] or any other language with an OSA bridge to access and reuse application functionality or to automate tasks. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Office 2008 supports OSA, so it's worth investigating with Microsoft Office 2011. You can use the ASDictionary app from the appscript page [4] to see what scriptable functionality, if any, various Microsoft Office for Mac applications support.

References:

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/apple...

[2] http://appscript.sourceforge.net/py-appscript/index.html

[3] http://rubyosa.rubyforge.org/

[4] http://appscript.sourceforge.net/tools.html#asdictionary

Why not just start with some embedded development then?

8-bit PIC and AVR microcontrollers have very simple instruction sets and can be connected to simple I/O devices like switches and LEDs, but they both use Harvard architectures, so you have different address spaces for code and data. The newer 32-bit PIC micros use a MIPS core, but the development tools aren't very open, despite being based on GCC.

The 16-bit MSP430 is fairly simple, has good open-source development tools, cheap development hardware (check out the Launchpad), and a more conventional von-Neumann architecture. Check out some of Michael Kohn's sample code for the msp430 assembler he wrote:

http://www.mikekohn.net/micro/naken430asm_msp430_assembler.p...

This doesn't surprise me too much. I just got a Nokia Lumia 900 (I'm using it right now in fact) and from a design and usability standpoint it really impresses me. Everything's so smooth and fluid, and the interface is so clean and consistent that it's just fun to use. It's so good that I could care less that the screen doesn't have some super high pixel density, that there's not that many good apps, or even that the camera performs poorly in low light situations.

I thought it was a video and that I couldn't find the play button at first. Then I looked for a transcript and couldn't find that either. Finally I thought maybe it was an audio player with a slideshow that follows along.

When I realized it was just a slideshow, I was disappointed. Slides are meant to highlight points, illustrate concepts, and provide focus during a presentation, but they aren't meant to replace it. The only purpose in sharing slides is so that the folks who saw the presentation can remember it better.

I've added the following to my grub options (this helps a lot if you use Gnome3 like me): pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1

Which makes the complete entry look like:

    title  Arch Linux
    root   (hd0,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/sda5 ro pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1
    initrd /initramfs-linux.img

I also use thinkfan to keep reasonable fan speeds along with the ondemand cpu-frequency scaling policy on battery power keep power usage down. I also minimize disk usage by taking advantage of my 8GB of memory and placing /tmp in tmpfs. These days I usually get 8-10 hours of actual use on a single charge, but most of that is writing/running code and browsing the web. If you usually do something more CPU taxing, you'll probably run closer to 5-7 hours. That's using the 9-cell battery that juts out from the case slightly and a low power SSD.

The most annoying part of the X220 is the buttonless clickpad. It works really well if you use the tap to click features, especially since the multi-touch lets you scroll around and double/triple click with multi-taps, but in the end I just couldn't get used to tap to click. Using the actual click/button, click and drag is so horribly broken with clickpads on Linux (and even Windows, if you ask me), that I gave up on that fairly quickly too. Finally I just disabled the touchpad in the BIOS. The touchpoint works too well to bother stressing over the ill-conceived touchpad on this model.

The IPS screen is great, but there is some occasional ghosting. It's only a temporary effect though, so it's a price I'll gladly pay for having a better image than any of the external monitors here in the house. It's also extremely bright, so I suggest turning down the brightness a few steps and letting your eyes adjust, otherwise you'll unknowingly burn your eyeballs out.

The battery also has a little bit of looseness when it's locked in. Based on what I've seen on other forums, this one's hit or miss, with some people having the same problem and many others not. Overall though, the laptop feels fairly solid without being heavy, but it's not nearly as solid as the X120e (which feels dependable) or the aluminum-body Macbooks.

Finally, the keyboard on this thing is great. The keys are nice and big, the escape key is prominent and in the right spot, and the quality of the tactile feedback is perfect.

If I had to choose all over again, I would've gotten an X220T, since I underestimated how much I use my wacom tablet, but other than that, I'm quite happy with the X220.

This isn't what he's doing, but if you use an audio routing system like jackd on Linux or Soundflower on Mac OS X, you can capture audio output from one application (flash youtube videos, Skype, iTunes, etc.), mix it with your system input, route the superposition of both signals to Audacity, and record everything into the same stream. You can also use audio routing to mix a conversation into the input of an icecast server. That way you can stream a live Skype conversation mixed with music and sound effects into an Internet radio show while also recording and monitoring it.

http://jackaudio.org/

http://cycling74.com/products/soundflower/

Everyone's questioning Windows 8 because they see it as something that you're either forced to use in a tablet or forced to use in a computer, with possibly bad trade-offs in each scenario, and I didn't think much of Windows 8 either... until I saw the Lenovo Yoga.

Seeing an ultrabook that transforms into a reasonably compact, multi-touch tablet just made everything click. Windows 8 may not be the best tablet OS or the best computer OS, but it's the perfect OS for notebooks that transform into tablets or tablets that can be docked into a desktop setup.

Personally, I like this one:

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/

Just out of curiosity, what observations concerning the way regular people use computers are you basing all this on? Most of the people I'd describe as regular people don't even know what RSS feeds are, and I don't know a single person who uses them.

Then again, a good number of the people I do know don't even understand the concept of a web address or even how to use bookmarks -- nevermind speed dial. Usually when I watch someone try to find a site, they just search for it in Google, and if Google isn't the default search provider, they search for Google in whatever search engine is the default. They also rarely use any browser "feature" except the back button, and they're afraid to try out new features. Even tabs and multiple windows are often underutilized or avoided by simply using one window at a time and closing it if they want to start over or visit a new site.

In fact, whenever they accidentally activate a feature they don't use (history, right-click context menu, rss feed view, gestures, etc.), it often just leads to confusion because they weren't paying attention to what they did to set off the unfamiliar feature's action. As a result, they just close the window and start over, and if it happens again they get frustrated and do something else.

Also, learning new features isn't free. There's a cognitive cost involved and it takes a certain amount of training and repetition to solidify the ability to use new features. For some people, it's higher than for others, and eventually it gets to a point where people like my Dad have to basically relearn the same features over and over again every time they use a computer. Listening to older relatives talk about their computer experiences, it also sounds like most of the time they're too deeply afraid of accidentally breaking their computer by clicking or doing the wrong thing to learn features by experimenting, further reducing the ability for them to solidify their learning through repetition and practice.

By comparison, those individuals I see who are willing to learn new features or who can notice what they did to set off a feature are usually pretty tech-savvy (or soon will be) and would be able to figure out how to use and install extensions anyway.

So personally, I think it's a good idea to aim for a default, minimalist interface and avoid gestures and interactive UI elements that users can accidentally click or activate. But that's just based on my casual observations of people using computers, which is why I'd love to hear yours, since apparently you disagree.

I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 that I purchased in August. The battery life with the 9-cell battery is downright amazing -- I just leave the charger at home now. The keyboard and screen are really nice too, although the widescreen aspect ratio takes a while to get used to. I also like the simple, matte black finish and the fairly utilitarian design that seems to have good ventilation and heat dissipation. Even the humble Core i5 in my build is also noticeably faster than any Core 2 laptop or desktop I've ever built or owned.

My only regret now is not getting the convertible tablet version, since I underestimated how much I use wacom tablets, and having one built into the screen would be extremely convenient for me.

However, what's best for me isn't best for you. If you use Linux and don't like tap to click or the Thinkpad trackpoint (the famous red pointing stick in the center of their keyboards), you might test drive the X220 before considering it, because the clickpad they put on these models will probably drive you nuts -- especially if you're used to the multitouch clickpads on Macbooks.

Also, about the screen size. It's big enough to see what you're doing, but since it's a lot wider than it is tall, you should consider how the development software you use will work with it. I spend most of my time inside of VIM, so I just maximize the window and split everything vertically. With a nice bold 9 or 10pt font (96dpi), I still get about 100-110 columns of text in each vertical window and almost 50 lines, without having to resort to small fonts (I don't like squinting). So for me, this screen size and ratio actually works out very nicely. If you spend all of your time inside of Eclipse or Visual Studio though, the lack of screen height will probably cause some pain.

Some people also report problems with noisy fans on this model. I haven't had this problem at all, but I intentionally avoided getting a soup'd up Core i7 configuration.

That said, I would also suggest considering a Macbook Pro. They usually have excellent battery life and a fairly solid design.

Personally, I'd like a DJVU and PDF viewier that lets you highlight regions of pages and create hyperlinks to other pages in the same document. It should also have a history feature that gives you back/forward functionality like a web browser, and the focus should be on making it easy to read or refer to books and documents that require a lot of jumping around.

I'd especially like one that suggests hyperlinks for documents based off of what users typically make hyperlinks for or based off of some kind of algorithm with heuristics built on content and formatting conventions, because even though just being able to create your own hyperlinks would be handy for studying and reviewing, having them appear magically would be a killer feature.

However, that'd probably be too hard for a single weekend. For one thing, it'd still have to be a good PDF viewer, which means nice features like being able to custom crop/zoom pages to hide margins in documents with lots of extra white space, and it'd have to perform well with the large, complex kind of documents that people would want to add hyperlinks to.

It also lacks long term viability due to the slow rise of eBooks with hyperlinked content on delivery platforms like the Kindle.