Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions (www.guardian.co.uk)
by Cory Doctorow (of When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (craphound.com) fame)
If we're going to teach kids to use PowerPoint and word processors as part of their core education, we should be teaching them regular expressions. Very few pieces of technical arcana have their widespread applicability – and the present lack of widespread appreciation.
I've changed out all of our upstairs light fixtures, save the stairs and the bathroom, to LED light bulbs. They're 80% savings over the incandescents I swapped them out with. It's basically most of our fixtures we use regularly. Haven't gotten an electric bill yet that covers the installation period but considering how much we use them, should see a good slice of savings.
Have you seen these new sifteo cubes? They look amazing. I want a set. Actually to be specific, I want an 8 year-old child to buy a set for so I can play with them.
Submitted without comment:
http://www.yousuckatcraigslist.com/?p=9059 (www.yousuckatcraigslist.com)
A few months ago, I was looking to perform off-site backups for friends, and found that I could no longer do the "wholesale" backup I'd intended, as I was running out of space. After clearing out some of the more ridiculous things I was storing, I recorded a mental note to look at purchasing new hard drives for my NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, and promptly discarded the note.
A few weeks ago, I found cause to log into the interface for the NAS device, only to find that it'd been trying for a while to send me emails telling me that it'd detected a bad sector on one of my disks, and while recoverable, needed to be addressed. I cleared the errors, recorded a mental note, and promptly forgot about it again.
I was home sick most of this weekend, with not a lot to do other than sneeze and watch The West Wing. Something about the rhythmic blinking lights of the NAS reminded me to look into hard drives again, and I ended up finally purchasing the new drives.
For a $200 upgrade, I'm going to be able to:
There, of course, will probably be snags along the way, but I'm posting this for everyone's benefit/edification, less so me touting my technological conquests. These types of technology are available for the consumer market, and are built to be accessible by those without extensive computer or programming-type backgrounds.
If your data is at all important to you, or your paranoia keeps you up nights thinking about what would happen if your hard drives were stolen, or destroyed, NAS-type implementations, or the equivalent automated technologies put into a home computer, make all the difference in data protection and recovery.
PAX Prime, 2012 Synopsis
Eh, for some reason I feel it necessary to write down my thoughts on PAX. Ignore as you will. Mostly, I just don't want to go through the hassle of briefly resuscitating the Escape Characters only to put it back to death.
I've been a fan of Penny Arcade for many years now, reading the comic proper for the longest amount of time, but also enjoying the other pieces and parts they've been adding to their portfolio (PA:TS, PA:TV, PA Report, their various comic experiments, collaborations, commissions, and side projects). I like their output because it is at once irreverent but respectful of gaming and games in a way that is unique, and darkly humorous. I've grown more enamored with their various dealings as an organization because they have essentially become luminaries in the gaming community, showing the gaming industry from their perspective, and by becoming representatives of the community they were giving it a better image than it had already given itself.
For people that I talked to about going to PAX, I called this our "pilgrimage," the one trip I must make as part of my religion once in my lifetime. I said that more or less flippantly, but it had an accuracy to it: games are probably one of the few things that have been both ubiquitous and fairly personal throughout my entire life. If you ever want to watch me light up like a Christmas tree, ask me about Planescape: Torment. Or Grim Fandango. Or... well, name almost any game, but you see my point. PAX was a pilgrimage to bear witness to a gaming culture I've considered myself a part of for many, many years.
Given that, PAX was what I wanted. I wanted to see a sea of people like me, slightly overweight with ill-fitting geek t-shirts and camelback backpacks stuffed to the brim with exhibit hall swag. I wanted to see the Penny Arcade staff, whose lives I'd felt I'd been a part of (if only slightly) after watching their documentaries of their working processes and personal lives in relation to Penny Arcade. I wanted to see the over-the-top video game obsession and the industry coming together behind a collective idea shared by 70,000 like-minded people.
(taps fingers) And I saw all of that happen. And I was happy to see it. And yet, there was a weird sense of disappointment in some regards, possibly in learning from the experience, or perhaps in just seeing truths I hadn't seen before.
I found that the unique and personal relationship I'd developed with the Penny Arcade brand while reading the comic was indeed shared with the other 70,000 attendees. Shared, and divided. And there were those there that knew the same jokes and references, and yet it meant something else entirely to them than what it did to me. During the Q&A sessions angsty teens would line up not to ask questions of their idols, but gush and outpour their emotional trials and tribulations and thank Mike and Jerry (the two main guys, if you aren't familiar) for something they'd done. I was there to see Mike and Jerry. Heartless as it sounds, I couldn't care less about some dude's girlfriend leaving him and the Penny Arcade community being there for him. I was repeatedly irritated by the fanboys and fangirls yelling "We love you!" during a brief quiet moment. I wanted to hear these people say the interesting things I'd come to expect from them. Mostly I was satisfied. But only just.
I also learned that being part of a fandom means having to deal with other fans. Many, many other fans. The convention was a repeated exercise in speedwalking and 45 minute to 2 hour lines in hopes of seeing things that were important. And it wasn't that this was a surprise: many of the things I was interested in were the main events. But it was even in the smaller sections (the ones having to deal with game writing, storytelling, ethics and morality in games and those playing them, etc.) that there were still incredible numbers of people. And while the lines were manageable, and the Enforcers (security guards / volunteer convention workers / entertainers) were efficient and respectful, every line I stood in was time that I had to spend at the expense of something else potentially interesting. If a panel or an event was also a waste of time, I'd essentially wasted half a day for it.
Another missing element was the purported "community," or the community I thought I'd sensed in the descriptions surrounding PAX and Penny Arcade. Indeed: if everyone speaks the same language, and is interested in the same things, wouldn't a crowd of 2,000 people waiting in line be a large, socially active entity? Sadly, not in our experience. Many of the people we saw, while very similar, weren't particularly interested in talking. Most times I'd glance back to see a crowd of downward looking heads, busy on cell phones, Nintendo DSes, or some other wonderfully obscure handheld electronics. Groups of friends and other cliques managed to talk to each other, certainly, but more often than not excluded the ones around them. It may be that this makes sense for a crowd of people who are overwhelmingly introverted, but it's my opinion that conversation is two parts conversational topics, one part conversational skill. At the very least, it would have been an easy conversation. If I had to guess, it was more the case of the villain in the movie "The Incredibles," when he said "When everyone's super, no one will be." Being and weird and different my whole life, it was strange to have that which I held so close to my identity become so incredibly indistinct. I was guilty of playing with my phone as well.
There is also that, while very subtle, I became aware of the business portion of the Penny Arcade brand. While not overt, it was apparent that much of the convention was geared towards the aggressive marketing of the exhibiting vendors (and even Penny Arcade themselves). The expo hall was designed to trap people in vendor areas, vendor booths, keep them in line for as long as possible, and keep people from attending other booths. It was the loud, obnoxious part of gaming that I hate to be a party to, but there were again so many people that I didn't even feel like I could reasonably visit the indie game developers. I didn't have the time or patience to see or play the games I wanted. I managed to catch the main developer of Zeboyd Games, the developer of the third Penny Arcade game, and ask him some technical questions about C# optimization. The man looked so, so tired.
(scratches head) My gaming habits have changed drastically in the last year, even the last few months. I've only briefly played a number of short, almost casual games this summer (given my biking, working, and generally busy schedule of summer activities), but even before that I hadn't turned on my game consoles for months at a time. I'm having to focus on other portions of my life, and at the same time recognize that some of my past habits, even past identities, are at cross purposes with my future plans. I am no longer anywhere near the lower end of the age spectrum of what is considered the gaming community. Wikipedia claims 37 years old to be the average age of gamers, which while it assures me I still have plenty of years before I'm considered "average," judging by the attendees of PAX I felt like an old man.
Overall, had a good time. I do now have a powerful need to write and create. And also, to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Elizabeth put on a moon landing shirt this morning. Me: "thats a good shirt to put on today." her: "why?" me: "july 20, 1969!" her: "OH! I didnt even think about that!"
Want to switch to yoda-power?
How did I not see these what-ifs on xkcd (what-if.xkcd.com) before?
Idea:
1. Turn your iOS/Android device into a measuring tape that's not a pain the ass to use.
How:
2. Build a package of three battery powered devices that come packaged together and pair with a custom app on the iOS/Android device. Devices pair with the phone via BlueTooth, and emit noise outside the range of human hearing, one freq for each device. Devices come with instruction to place them at known (user adjustable) distances from each other in an equilateral triangle. (Use 4 devices and form a tetrahedron?) iOS/Android device listens to emitted noise to calculate its position relative to the devices. The App calculates and remembers the positions of the phone, so you can ask it to give you x,y,z and hypotenuse distance between whatever points you ask of it.
Result:
3. PROFIT
Neil Young has been banging (www.wired.com) around (www.usatoday.com) on the interwebs recently bemoaning the state of the musical recordings. While I'm not sure that aging hippies who have smoked way too much weed really know that much about technology, he does raise an interesting point. The quality of the music (and the medium) we are using for music today is pretty shitty. Over half my music collection is stuff that was ripped at 128 kbps by old-school encoders in the early 2000s that left the songs riddled with artifacts. Coupled with the fact that most people are terrible at backing up their hard drives in general, we're all on the verge of losing our Third Eye Blind collections every. freaking. day.
All is not lost, however. An overly dedicated audio nerd wrote a pretty comprehensive article (people.xiph.org) about how music is recorded, how sample rates and whatnot affect what you hear, and how everyone probably really just needs to chill out and buy a decent pair of headphones.
Which gives me a little hope that maybe, just maybe, we'll all be able to forget about the Spice Girls with one more hard drive crash and really focus on those high quality Lady Gaga singles going forward. Or is that just me?
Randomly decided to buy a video game. Best Buy employee and his friend hanging out in the game aisle, randomly start talking to me. Seemed like nice folks, asking what I'd heard about the game I was looking at. Small talk turned to a subtle technological pissing match. It ended with the friend telling me that if I had trouble building a computer that I could take it to one of the shops in Anchorage and have it put together for about $75.
I've been too long out of the world. My people no longer recognize me. I have become something... different (www.youtube.com).
Why didn't anyone tell me Jonathan Coulton released a new album (secure.jonathancoulton.com) in September?
(It features Sara Quin, of Tegan and Sara fame, singing Still Alive.)
As per some advice from Josh, I made a new YouTube channel especially for all the dirty signs I will be signing:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ASLTerpCat/videos (www.youtube.com)
Tell your parents. Enjoy.
I made some new dirty signs videos:
http://youtu.be/foe47TnghSk (youtu.be)
http://youtu.be/ex4q6HZ4uGg (youtu.be)
http://youtu.be/wK4lY51JAn4 (youtu.be)
Enjoy.
Tech Journalists: "No iPhone 5? Puh-leeze."
Consumers: "GIVE US ALL YER IFONE 4Ss NAO!"
Apple to Tech Journalists: "Bitch, please. Say what."
Why, Amazon, why (www.npr.org)? You're simply not going to win the tablet war, even at that price point.
"Have an open mind, and it will be simpler" : http://www.youtube....atch?v=aY_CidIS8YM (www.youtube.com)
SPDCA: An alternative to texting.
I think I've mentioned before my opinions on texting. Long and short: it's an ingenious way for cell phone companies to essentially charge for nothing. From a technical standpoint, the profit margin on texting, given the almost negligible effect texting has on existing infrastructure, is incredible, particularly when it comes to overage fees. Having recently been disappointed in AT&T's announcement for their future move to stop selling "limited texting" plans (instead either pay-per-text or unlimited plans, and nothing in between), I wanted to talk about an alternative.
Instant Messaging (IM) is almost as old as the Internet itself. Starting as bulletin boards, moving through forums, and then services like ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc., most of our/my generation has had some experience with a chat window. The services were built with the intent that two people would each be sitting at a computer, with a keyboard, and a relatively persistent connection to the Internet. The systems and protocols themselves work surprisingly well, even supporting things like file transfers, video chat, screen sharing, even sometimes blending telephony into the mix (see: Skype). There even exists a protocol whose purpose is to allow you to create your own IM protocol, making the formalization of old IM protocols (AIM, ICQ) and the creation of new ones (Gtalk) relatively easy.
The problem is that the IM services have become somewhat unpopular, largely due to the onset of texting. The cell phone is the form factor that the original IM designers dreamed of: an always on, always connected device that could fit in your pocket, notify you of new events, and allow you to send and receive messages. And what's more: cell phone companies have convinced the public that it's necessary to pay for such a service, when instant messaging gives you the equivalent functionality, with the potential to exceed that of texting in some ways (status messages, for one).
Recent smart phones have started including IM clients (somewhat better supported on Android, in my short experience, than on the iPhone). I'm glad of this trend, because it gives its users an alternative to the obnoxiously overpriced texting racket. The problem is that for those who choose to communicate over IM, even though they can communicate outside the bounds of "texts," they quickly run aground of the fact that the people on the other side of the IM chat are often at a keyboard, not on a phone. This means that they can easily be spammed by a litany of messages, or be unable to respond quickly enough. Most IM clients, on a computer or otherwise, fail to indicate where a client is connecting from, so a user can't always tell if they're talking to a phone, a computer, or both. This is because most of the IM protocols don't make this distinction, for the reason that as long as you're connected, the service really doesn't care about anything other than successfully delivering a message.
So here's my solution: maintain an IM chat account, say on Gmail/Gchat. Maintain that account separate from your other chat accounts, and only use it for your phone. With that account, only allow messages from other chat accounts that you know are associated with cell phones, and nothing else. Don't log in to this chat account from a client with a keyboard, and if you do, only do so with the knowledge that the person on the other line will respond as they would a text: eventually, not necessarily immediately.
This satisfies the need for passive, non-verbal communication. It also grants the user the ability to set status, such that even if their phone's IM client is connected, they can indicate that they are otherwise engaged (something that isn't possible with texting). Also, depending on how you configure your Gchat client, you can have an off-phone record if your texts, and a record that is searchable (something hard to find in an text clients).
I'd be interested to hear if anybody wants to try this. It requires a smart phone that supports an IM client and push notifications thereof. There is a decent client for Gchat on Android, and I've heard of people using a utility called "Fring" on the iPhone. At the very least, it would be interesting to see if people who text each other frequently (roommates, significant others, etc.), could get rid of the majority of their text usage by going the IM route.
Can we talk about 4? The newest Beyonce album, duhsies. So I listened to it when it came out, and was mildly amused by the shoulder-ography in the music video, but wasn't particularly pleased with the album as a whole.
I've been working a lot in the Beyonce ouvre from Destiny's Child to the present for a B medley in a show I'm working on. Back in the Destiny's Child days, like EVERY song was a hit. And B'Day is half #1 singles and half songs that could have been #1s if there hadn't been so many other contenders. Dangerously in Love, same thing. But Sasha Fierce and 4 seem to have progressively fewer and fewer hits, and this is distressing to me.
I've been relistening to 4 and I'm obsessed with a few songs: Love On Top is GREAT, in that old school 80's R&B way. Also, no jokes about the title and me, please. Best Thing I Never Had sounds like it should be in the musical In the Heights or something, which could be good or bad depending on how you see these things. And Run the World is a pretty good song in the style of Single Ladies. I mean, it's no Single Ladies, but its trying.
Anyway, is this a good album? I can't decide. Sometimes my love for B and her voice just overshadows the fact that the songs aren't amazing. Does anyone care about this besides me?
Keep forgetting to link this: Die (http://idkfa.com/die), a dice-rolling, randomness generator, tailored towards board games.
I threw it together while I was bored one day, and had played board games the weekend before, and had the idea. It lets you roll any number of any sided dice, but also do things like pick random elements from a list, give a new order to elements in a list, as well as shuffle elements in a list.
As you roll more and more dice, the output will stop outputting individual results, and start outputting "buckets," that is, start reporting "5- 5's" to mean that you rolled 5 a total of 5 times.
And one final step further: you can have it only report on "successes" on a dice roll, that is, how many in a set of dice met a certain condition. For instance, "2d6>4" will report something like "1 success" if one of the 2 six-sided dice rolled a 4 or a 5, "0 successes" if nothing meets the condition, or "2 successes" if both dice meet the condition. You can do greater than (>), less than (<), and equal (=).
For as long as you have the page open, it will list the result history, timestamp, pattern used for each bit of randomness you generate. Click on any pattern to have it "rolled" again.
I know people are sort of partial to dice when playing board games. I've thrown enough dice on the floor, or knocked over game pieces, etc., to understand that there can be a better system. Not sure if I'd use (or be allowed to use this, under suspicion of tampering) this during actual games, but a fun toy, nonetheless.
Enjoy!
Also why I'm "trending" away from Twitter: I got my name early enough in Twitter's short Internet history that I was the first "kaiden." Which means anybody who mis-types their "kaiden1234" or "kaidenWeezyFbaby" or whatever shows up in my list of "mentions," and puts a notification icon on my phone. I realize I can disable these things, but I'd prefer to not have to do so.
The following are my "mis-mentions." Which I think are entertaining. If not incomprehensible.
RaynBowVanity
Who do you think should be the next president of the United States? — Snookie... just kidding.. @Kaiden Blake http://4ms.me/hlXkun (4ms.me)
1 Jan
SPOILEDBRATMELA
@kaiden is singing say it to me.its soooo kaute
13 Jan
cuntCOUTURE
Peacing out .. Its been real concrete jungle. I'll see you next wknd! I miss @Kaiden and @juicedbaby already :-(
6 Feb
Barumenfe
@Kaiden oin the Ron and Fez March Madness Contest to win a basketball autographed by Bill Walton: http://wp.me/p1ksja-29 (wp.me)
19 Mar
tdsdavis
Today is a special day! Happy 3rd Birthday to grandma's bird, @Kaiden. You are my heart.
23 Mar
TheOnlyNessie
@_PimpNStilettos @Single_n_Looken @MrMateFinder @ThePimptress_ @PimptressJailed My soon-to-be-born son @Kaiden… (cont) http://deck.ly/~1rvVU (deck.ly)
18 Apr
jolieetrose
smh you just mentioned a WHOLE REAL twitter account lbs RT @prettiestgrlEVA: @xlegallyPINK hahaha smh @kaiden ass lbvs
11 May
MiimiiV23
Lovin life with my baby @jaytay n @kaiden :) mwaaaah
14 Jun
cdchord
@kaiden. first you need to have ladies follow you on twitter. chances of that are low.
22 Jun
cdchord
@kaiden. fuck you, i have a hot girlfriend.
9 Jul
FrostThaBoss83
Aww that's cute is he old enough to have a twitter #Doe RT @Kaiden Miss U too Mommy RT @SharWeezyFbaby: I miss my son like crazy :-((
23 hours ago
SharWeezyFbaby
RT @FrostThaBoss83: RT @Kaiden Miss U too Mommy RT @SharWeezyFbaby: I miss my son like crazy :-(<---- AWWWWW
23 hours ago
LOVExposed
LMAO hahaha , @Kaiden???? I'm dead. @SharWeezyFbaby @FrostThaBoss83 @Kaiden
23 hours ago
SharWeezyFbaby
@honeyb808 @lovexposed. Yess boo. @Kaiden is Jimmy Neutron!! #boywonder
23 hours ago
FrostThaBoss83
That's crazy he got a twitter #Doe RT @LOVExposed: LMAO hahaha , @Kaiden???? I'm dead. @SharWeezyFbaby @FrostThaBoss83 @Kaiden
23 hours ago
SharWeezyFbaby
@FrostThaBoss83 @LOVExposed @Kaiden he'd have more followers than you'd expect. Lol
23 hours ago
FrostThaBoss83
I know my nephew would RT @SharWeezyFbaby: @FrostThaBoss83 @LOVExposed @Kaiden he'd have more followers than you'd expect. Lol
23 hours ago
SharWeezyFbaby
RT @FrostThaBoss83: I knw my nephew would RT @SharWeezyFbaby: @FrostThaBoss83 @LOVExposed @Kaiden he'd have more followers than you'd expect
23 hours ago
