This guy gave his WP blog a command-line interface! It’s really well done.. I love how even the graphics look like they are on a green monocrome display!
Filed under: old timers |
1 Comment
Tagged: commandline
worth the download!. I wish I had remembered to set the Poster Frame … doh. Maybe after I finish tonight’s code.
Link to TWIL’s SK3 video (requires QT7)
Link to TWIL’s space
Filed under: video |
0 Comments
check it out!! It looks like they announced the winning video today!!! You can see the other entries too, I hadn’t seen them before, they are pretty lame. One of the runners up is just in his living room the whole time! Where’s the smoke effect dude?
Congrats T-WIL you totally deserve it!!
Filed under: beats, video |
2 Comments
A while back I posted a perl script that would update your Twitter status whenever you changed your iChat status message. Unfortunately, you had to configure launchd or cron to use it, which no one wanted to do. So I made an open-source Cocoa app that is easy to use! It’s called TikiTwit, and you can download it for free!
Download it here! This is a very early version, so please help me test it!
Filed under: code code, osx |
62 Comments
Tagged: cocoa , opensource
Let’s say you need to url-encode a string. No problem! You can call uri_escape in perl, or urlencode in php, or urlencode in python, or CGI.escape in ruby…
But now let’s say you are writing in Cocoa. ugh. Before you shell out to your favorite scripting language, check out CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes() It doesn’t encode the RFC 2396/RFC 2732 reserved characters by default (other than ‘[' and ']‘), but you can specify additional characters to encode in the fourth argument. Use something like this:
CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes( NULL, (CFStringRef)@"escape this %;/?:@&=+$[] string", NULL, (CFStringRef)@";/?:@&=+$,", kCFStringEncodingUTF8 );
It took me quite a while to figure this out… I found the NSString method stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding, but that doesn’t escape the reserved characters.
(I have a suspicion that Cocoa developers are getting paid per letter…)
Filed under: code code, osx |
3 Comments
Tagged: cocoa
One of my favorite blogs lately is Don to Earth, written by Donald Crowdis who at 93, is one of the oldest bloggers around. I rarely come into contact with people who are older than 80 in my day to day life so I love reading his thoughts about things. He writes a lot about life and death. You’d think that would be morbid but he makes me laugh and I always come away feeling a little bit more grounded.
Filed under: inspiration, lifehacking, old timers, why are we here? |
0 Comments
wow, these are awesome.
Readymechs are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. They are designed to fit on an 8.5″x11″ page and printed with any printer. You’ll need double-sided tape, thick matte paper, and 10-15 minutes for build time.
I want to make them all! although i’ve noticed they are missing a pineapple readymech. how could that be? maybe that’ll be my project this weekend :-)
Filed under: gadgets |
3 Comments
Tagged: crafty , neat , toys
So this just makes my geeky little heart sing. a couple days ago i discovered that i can stream internet radio stations from my cell phone to my car’s stereo! This heralds a pretty big change in my listening habits since my car was the only place left I listened to commercial radio. now I won’t have to listen to commercials anymore. yay! here’s what i’m using to get it working
Of course you’ll also need a data plan with your cell phone company (Sprint charges $15/mo for EVDO). Sound quality and reception are surprisingly good. It does tend to drop in certain places (especially along the 280 where my cell reception is spotty) but in general it works pretty well in the city. Aside from $20 for the radio app, there are no extra fees. Given that XM satellite radio costs about $13/ mo, this is a pretty sweet deal!
Filed under: gadgets |
3 Comments
Tagged: apps , pocket pc
We just got back from a trip to New Delhi. Here is some medical advice that you might find useful:
That’s all the advice I have.. maybe bob has some more!
Bob says:
- when traveling abroad, big cities often do not have the same malaria risk as rural areas. for example, if one were traveling to Bangkok and not leaving the city, malaria prophylaxis may not be necessary. It would certainly be advisable if one were to explore the surrounding areas.
- if your insurance plan does not cover the expense for your medications, consider filling just enough to get you there, and buying the rest when you arrive. Of course, you should be sure you have easy access to a reliable pharmacy at your destination.
-travel safely!
Filed under: excursions, medicine |
8 Comments
Tagged: india
If someone got me a cake like this I think I would start crying right there:
via Jamie via nonumnos
Filed under: design, food |
4 Comments
I don’t remember how I heard about the Hi5 / T-Mobile / Sidekick Rap Challenge … I thought I read about it on TR but I can’t find the post. (I mean, where else would I read about such a thing?).
It has come to my attention that the one and only T-WIL, neé né (thanks Alexis!) Travis Wilbur, our biggest fan, has entered the contest with not just a Rap but a full on video to go with it.
You have got to check this out. Mad props dude! T-Dog: drop a comment on here so we can get some nice QuickTime encodings up, this flash video is driving me nuts (it’s dropping frames on my macbook pro) and I want to see your video in full rez glory. Not that I’m not impressed that you implemented your own Flash Video Player SWF for the video … this guy just doesn’t stop …. (although you might want to close that “object” tag in the myspace embed code for your video)
I don’t see how anyone else could win this contest. But if it doesn’t happen don’t worry about it, you’ll be laughing at these dinosaurs in a couple years when you’re rockin’ Hollywood in your Expedition.
Link to T-WIL and the “Low Level” Crew
UPDATE! We are talking about Travis WILBUR!!!. Sorry Travis … all these pixels dull the mind :-) Travis Walker is some guy I went to high school with.
Filed under: beats, video |
6 Comments
Tagged: ninja
Service started last Saturday on the officially named Muni Thunderbird, also sometimes referred to informally as the T – Third. From January to April the Thunderbird will run free service, weekends only, starting at 10am. April 7 full service will begin.
I gave it a shot today and it was great. The ‘bird is right in front of my building. I took along my camera and did some timelapse sequences. This first one is shot vertically and ends up looking pretty dumb on YouTube since they apparently don’t know how to deal with 320×480 video.
I did about five sequences today of various durations. My favorite is a five second loop of 280 in the early evening. Once again this is pretty boring on YouTube since they don’t loop the clip.
Link to tbird sunset, vertical (h264, YouTube)
Link to 280 overpass (h264, YouTube)
Filed under: excursions, transportation, video |
2 Comments
I’ve been listening to this ridiculous podcast called Learn Hindi From Bollywood Movies… I love it! The guy who does it, Arun Krishnan, does a great job. I LOLed several times!
John Lennon had once said that ‘all you need is love’. In this matter, love is indeed different from orange juice. For there is many a breakfast we have had without orange juice, but seldom have we been able to enjoy an egg that has not been fried under the steady gaze of a soulmate.
Filed under: education |
1 Comment
Tagged: hindi , india , podcasts
This is a pretty sick video of police in St. Petersburg slashing and destroying tents used by homeless people in St. Petersburg. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening in the United States and not somewhere like Zimbabwe.
I’m glad that San Francisco Values don’t include hating poor people so much that we demolish their homes..
Filed under: prison4life |
0 Comments
Tagged: bigotry
The Wooster Collective blog has a disheartening video that documents the removal of street art in Barcelona.
For many years, if you were to ask us where the “heart” of the street art movement was, the answer we would give was always Barcelona. Not only would artists travel to Barcelona to paint on the streets, but many of them would move their as well just because the city was tolerant to their work.
Barcelona was for us, a live version of the Wooster website. On the walls you would see work from artists from all over the world together.
But then, not too long ago, the city of Barcelona began systematically wiping out the street art scene in the city. Today, the scene in Barcelona is only a shadow of what it once was.
From Chaz comes a link to the video above created by Pas. In 2004, Pas became a fan of The London Police and walked the Raval neighborhood taking pictures of the TLP lads as well as work by other artists from across Europe.
Two weeks ago, Pas returned to stay at Raval. But what he found there was very different then two years before. To show how things had changed, he took pictures of the exact same locations he visited and shot in 2004.
The result is one of the best photographic reportage we’ve seen yet that documents the disappearing street art scene in Barcelona.
Filed under: video, why are we here? |
1 Comment
During a massive layover at Heathrow, I tried to check Boing Boing and found that a filter installed on their public access internet terminals was blocking the site. I guess this is interesting for a couple reasons:
- Boing Boing posted about it, resulting in more than 3000 views of the screencap on flickr, which is more views than all the rest of my flickr photostream combined.
- BB was blocked for exceeding a ‘weighted phrase limit’. I’m not sure how blocking sites with high use of the words ‘DRM’, ‘Disney’, and ‘Ukulele’ is going to protect me from anything harmful.. Also, I’m not sure there are any words out there than can hurt me.. OMG SCARY WEIGHTED PHRASES!
Filed under: sucky companies |
0 Comments
High-rez scans of a first-edition copy of Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions are now available at the Internet Archive. Yay! Direct links to Ajax-y FlipBook and 12MB PDF.
But it’s still fun. At 2.1fps, I think pedestrians will look cool, I’m going to try to capture people getting on and off of BART or something.
I’m shooting JPEG sequences at 1600×1200 with the hope of being able to repurpose the content as HD. But for now the target is nice SD sequences, maybe 16×9 format if I can manage it. I got some 2GB SD Cards, these will hold about 3200 1600×1200 JPEG images, so I can record a timelapse of up to 1/2 hour. I want to play the content back at 60fps, so that will work out to a playback time of about 1 minute. It’s not much to write home about in the timelapse world, but then again I haven’t even dragged my ass outside to shoot a 1/2 hour sequence yet, which is really the whole point.
Link to My First Timelapse using The Best Codec Ever
Link to My First Timelapse using Crappy Flash Video
when a double espresso will do the trick. According to this study at the University of Georgia, caffeine cuts post-workout pain by nearly 50 percent. Also…
…a 2003 study led by UGA professor Patrick O’Connor found that caffeine reduces thigh pain during moderate-intensity cycling. O’Connor, who along with professors Kevin McCully and the late Gary Dudley co-authored the current study, explained that caffeine likely works by blocking the body’s receptors for adenosine, a chemical released in response to inflammation.
The recent study was only conducted on women so they’re not sure if it works on men just yet and apparently it doesn’t quite work on people who already consume lots of caffeine on a regular basis since they’ve likely developed decreased sensitivity to its effects. Still, I’m going to make sure I have a latte before hitting the slopes this winter! (although I’m still going to keep the vicodin in my pocket)
(via collision detection)
Filed under: medicine, support |
2 Comments
There’s a good interview with Sanjay Patel in SF Gate today! He created the The Little Book of Hindu Deities I posted about earlier and is also an artist at Pixar. So happy to hear that his book is getting around!
Filed under: books |
0 Comments
Do you hate dialing customer support with some terrible pressing problem only to get strung along by endless automated voice prompts? Here’s a great database of numbers for 500 companies (give or take a few) with instructions on how to get directly to a live human when calling for support.
The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.
A tip that I’ve been given to get the best support from a cell phone carrier (but haven’t tried yet) is to call and request cancellation (rather than tech support). You’ll get sent to a “retention” specialist who is trained to do whatever he or she can to keep you as a customer, so your problem will get routed to the right person a lot faster.
Filed under: lifehacking, support |
1 Comment
BugMe is quite possibly the most ingenious mobile app ever. It’s simply a digital post-it-pad that lets you scrawl a note and attach an alarm to go with it. You can even record a voice note to go with each scribble.
The alarm can be set for a specific interval (i.e. in 1/2 hr, 1 hr, etc) or for a specific date and time and when your phone alarm rings, it’ll flash your scribbled note to remind you of what you need to do. I use it to remind myself to move my car for street cleaning, feed the parking meter, call people and other random things that I always forget to do. Setting a reminder is just as easy as jotting a simple note, except now, they don’t get crumpled in my pocket or lost among all the other notes on my desk.
Filed under: lifehacking |
3 Comments
Tagged: apps , pocket pc
Cheryl Porro is a software engineer by day and a baker of cupcakes by night. But these are no ordinary cupcakes…there are recipes for vietnamese-inspired, thai-inspired, and indian-inspired cupcakes and much more on her blog which is completely devoted to creative cupcakes. I can’t wait to try some of these!
Filed under: food |
0 Comments
