We need a word that says “I know tech” when you’re on the phone with tech support, you’d just say “Fizzbin” and they’d know.
Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – FizzBin – The Technical Support Secret Handshake.
Yes, I fully support this idea. I hate having to call tech support and sit through the first 5 pages of the support script but I also feel like a jerk when I have to say “I ran an ISP for 5 years, I know what I’m doing”.
Evernote is becoming a favorite of many people for holding all their stuff. We put things into it. That’s a little vague, if you ask me.
What Evernote actually does is offer you essentially a blank slate of information capture and management tools, that allows you to use their product for a huge number of interesting and different things.
via 7 Ways To Make Use Of Evernote | MakeUseOf.com.
This is both a good introduction to Evernote and as it says, 7 ways to make use of it.
I really started using Evernote to capture things at the Agile 2008 conference and I’ve been steadily increasing my use ever since. I use it to capture all the web bill payment confirmations (the ones they always say to print for your records), random recipes I find online, travel info, notes and scripts for work, web articles about clothes, all kinds of stuff. I capture mostly using the Firefox addin, then I can pull it all up on my iPhone later. This is especially nice for travel. Between that and TripIt, I have everything I need for travel at hand all the time.
You can use Evernote for free but if you upgrade to the very reasonable Premium plan you get more transfer and some other additional things. I also got a great tshirt but I’m not sure if they’re still doing that.
The best part of this article? I found it when it was linked to on Evernote’s twitter feed and it turns out the first image on the page is one of my notes from Agile 2008. It’s a funny small world.
There are obviously many reasons why Git is awesome (and why it sucks too), and there comes a point where it helps to dispel some of the rumors and issues surrounding Git. The following list attempts to show what Git is not.
via git ready » what git is not.
I’ve got git setup on my laptop as a test and so far I’m really liking it. We’re switching to Subversion at work so I’ve been using git locally and pushing to Subversion using the gitsvn tool. I’ve only just started playing around with it but I like the flexibility it gives me with branching locally then pushing the changes I want to svn for permanent storage. Once I’ve spent a little more time with it, I’m going to write up my experiences. Having the git to svn bridge gives a good way to start out with git without having to make a big commitment.
If you’re new to git, check out this great cheat sheet as well. I love cheat sheets. :)
Even though I’m on WordPress 2.7.1 (courtesy of the magical new auto-upgrade in 2.7), the Press This bookmarklet continues not to work for me. When I try to use it, I don’t see the formatting buttons at the top like I should and text I select on the page I’m blogging about isn’t copied into the post like it should be (at least selecting text doesn’t blank the input box like it used to). This makes it fairly useless for me. Prior to 2.7.1 it wouldn’t even put the URL of the page I was on in the new post so at least it’s getting better. I still can’t use it for everything, but I can for some stuff which is certainly good.
I’ve been using the great Tumblr service for another blog, Blind Teeth, for awhile now and I love their posting bookmarklet. It’s super easy to post anything so I wanted to figure out how to use that for posting technical stuff to this blog. I suppose I could hack around on the Press This problem to see about fixing that but I’ve spent a few hours on it already and thought I’d try this route instead. I suspect most people will have no interest in this but I wanted something for people googling to find.
First, I setup a new tumblog on Tumblr if you don’t have one for this purpose already. Blind Teeth isn’t really for technical stuff so I didn’t want to post the same things in both places. You can have multiple and it handles that really well as I’ll get to in a second. Once it’s setup, go to it and copy the URL labeled RSS on the right side of the page.
Then, install the FeedWordPress plugin in your blog. It’s very easy under 2.7, just download the zip and use the Plugins page to install it. Once it’s installed, go into the new Syndication box on the left nav menu and add the RSS URL as a new Source.
I set mine up to add new posts as Pending so I can edit them. This is a good idea as the formatting of the Tumblr post probably won’t match the formatting of your blog. Once it’s setup and going, anything you post to the new Tumblr will be added as a new Pending post in your WordPress blog. You can then go in and edit and Publish from your admin screen. This obviously isn’t as one-click easy as just using the bookmarklet of either service as is but since my Press This doesn’t work this is a good compromise. It might even turn out to be too much friction and I abandon it but for now, it’s working pretty well and it’ll help me post here more.
As I mentioned, Tumblr has a great posting bookmarklet. The cool thing is that when you use it and you have multiple tumblogs it asks you at the bottom which one you want to post to. This means you don’t have to have multiple bookmarklets.
Tumblr is a great service and if you’re looking for somewhere easy to have a blog, try them out. I hope this was useful and if you have comments, please let me know below.
So one conclusion to draw from this is that developers of document-based applications should protect users from themselves. Your work should be saved even if your document is not. Separate the management of items in the file system from the idea that what you’ve typed or drawn or edited should be “safe”
via Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome.
Great work from Gruber as always. This is something I’ve argued with many people about, an auto-save, versioning file system. Your operating system should save everything you do to a document automatically and not make you save at all. If I want to save a particular version of a document with a special filename to email out or archive, fine. Maybe I’m just used to using version control systems as a programmer but I’d love to be able to make a bunch of changes to a Word document and be able to undo them even after saving. Or rewrite 2 paragraphs, then decide only one of them is worth keeping. There’s no reason users should have to worry about saving and losing changes. Computers excel at storing stuff, let them do it.
So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
Clay Shirky on the “cognitive surplus”.
Great stuff from Mr. Shirky. Well worth the time to watch.
Mad Science Alphabet Blocks | Xylocopa.
Mad Scientist Alphabet Blocks
I know what the Grommes kids are getting for Christmas now! Click on the picture and check out the detail on these, they are 100% awesome.
This is cool. I’ve always been very interested in genetic/evolutionary algorithms and one of the ways I’ve wanted to practice is writing a simulation of a creature that figures out how to walk a path. This guy used this same idea to solve a real game. Nice stuff, although I wish there were some more technical details. (He does provide the code though).
A cool thing he sees is something a lot of GA research finds, that the algorithms often evolve unintuitive or extra-complex solutions. Just as in real life, evolution is only interested in solving the problem.
Speedtest – how fast are you?.
Steve Yegge had a post the other day about learning how to type faster, a skill most programmers probably ignore. I know I did. I’ve never really properly touch-typed. I don’t use the home row or any of that stuff but I don’t look at the keyboard either and I type fairly quickly. I knew I could get better though so I was happy when I found this test. It doesn’t take too long and it seems like just doing this a few times a day will help. For the record right now I’m hovering right around 52 words per minute. I’m hoping to get up to 60 average in a month and see how hard that is to achieve.
Bre Pettis | History Hacker on History Channel.
Watch Bre Pettis’s TV show pilot this Friday at 8pm and Midnight on the History Channel. Bre is awesome and the first episode is on Tesla, one of my heroes.
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