+
Randall Munroe proposed the awesomely geeky idea of geohashing via the xkcd comic and blag recently. The idea basically involves using the MD5 hash of a date combined with the opening value of the Dow Jones Index for that date to derive a latitude and longitude relative to a (generally your own) location.
diff --git a/content/personal/2008/07/iphone-3g-one-week-in.html b/content/personal/2008/07/iphone-3g-one-week-in.html
index b171c0c..66ec99c 100644
--- a/content/personal/2008/07/iphone-3g-one-week-in.html
+++ b/content/personal/2008/07/iphone-3g-one-week-in.html
@@ -11,15 +11,15 @@ Its definitely the best phone I've had. Part of that is due to the tight integra
The on screen keyboard is pretty much as described. You have to give it time to get the hang of it and you have to trust it. If you're typing a word that would be in the English dictionary you're best to keep on typing even if the word is way off. By the time you get to pressing space its usually selected the right word, which is selected automatically upon space. Two irritations with typing though. Its less likely to get shorter word right, particularly when there's multiple valid options. There's no way that I'm aware of to get a list of possibilities and choose the one you want. Of course being a small word means its not hard to fix and if you type it correctly in the first place then it isn't a problem at all. The other minor annoyance is when you get to the last word in a sentence that is mis-typed with a correct suggestion it appears the only way to accept it is to press space (and then delete the space) or grab a full stop.
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I haven't missed MMS at all, especially with a decent email client built in that can talk to Gmail via IMAP and send photos to flickr that way.
+I haven't missed MMS at all, especially with a decent email client built in that can talk to Gmail via IMAP and send photos to flickr that way.
I have missed Todo functionality. I have no idea why Apple have not got this syncing. The support is there in iSync and todos sync with my old phone (Nokia 6280) just fine. I'm hoping that its one of these things that will make it eventually. There's two reasons I miss todo, one to track things to be done, the other is for reminders for things that don't have a duration (which can be put in as calendar entries). There is no way to do reminders without a duration at the moment. Having said that the calendar functionality is comprehensive. It supports multiple calendars, full editing, meeting acceptance and basically anything you can do on the desktop.
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Another annoyance surrounds SMS. When on silent you only get a single vibration on new message, which is easily missed. My old phone did three, which was better. Also when you get an SMS my old phone would show an envelope on the black and white standby screen. With the iPhone you have to wake it up to see if you've got a message after the display goes back off.
+Another annoyance surrounds SMS. When on silent you only get a single vibration on new message, which is easily missed. My old phone did three, which was better. Also when you get an SMS my old phone would show an envelope on the black and white standby screen. With the iPhone you have to wake it up to see if you've got a message after the display goes back off.
The AppStore is great, some of the apps are very well done. I'm really liking Byline, Twinkle, Exposure and MoPhoTo. I'm not much of a Facebook user but the Facebook app is very well done. It just the core parts of Facebook without all the crap. Of those five, three are free, one is free by ad-supported (with a pay for version available) and the other AU$12.99. I think that's a pretty good spread for some top quality apps. Some screenshots of these apps are scattered below.
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Battery life is nothing brilliant as has been reported elsewhere. You'd probably want to change it every day. Today I watched a video podcast on the way to work, send a couple of SMSs during the day, added a calendar event, got a call from Steve, called the dentist, listened to music, read in Google Reader via the Byline app, read and updated Twitter via the Twinkle app and used the timer to cook dinner and its showing half battery. It was off the changer all last night too.
+Battery life is nothing brilliant as has been reported elsewhere. You'd probably want to change it every day. Today I watched a video podcast on the way to work, send a couple of SMSs during the day, added a calendar event, got a call from Steve, called the dentist, listened to music, read in Google Reader via the Byline app, read and updated Twitter via the Twinkle app and used the timer to cook dinner and its showing half battery. It was off the changer all last night too.
A complaint of the old one was that the ringer and message volume was very low and easily missed. I've it plenty loud enough and its only on about three quarters. Speaking on the phone the volume is good, although I haven't tried extreme environments like a club.
@@ -27,5 +27,5 @@ One of the best built-in apps on the whole phone is maps. Whenever you want to f
Maybe I'm easily sold on such things but the UI is truly beautiful and being solely finger driven is revolutionarily (on a phone). I'm a happy customer.
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+
Back in December there was a post on the Gmail Blog which gave instructions on how to get some stickers for the cost of postage. I thought I'd try it out so I sent them an International Reply Coupon (IRC) (something I'd never heard of before) and what do you know they showed up today. They managed to come all the way from San Francisco in an unsealed envelope too. Now to decide what to stick them to… and who to give the unicorn one to.
+Back in December there was a post on the Gmail Blog which gave instructions on how to get some stickers for the cost of postage. I thought I'd try it out so I sent them an International Reply Coupon (IRC) (something I'd never heard of before) and what do you know they showed up today. They managed to come all the way from San Francisco in an unsealed envelope too. Now to decide what to stick them to… and who to give the unicorn one to.
diff --git a/content/personal/2009/03/once-a-month-cooking.html b/content/personal/2009/03/once-a-month-cooking.html
index e58f517..7db5751 100644
--- a/content/personal/2009/03/once-a-month-cooking.html
+++ b/content/personal/2009/03/once-a-month-cooking.html
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
This weekend Amanda and I embarked upon our first attempt at once a month cooking. The theory goes that you spend a weekend buying and cooking in bulk and then don't need to do it again for another month. Given we both aren't keen on cooking when we get home from work this allows the meal preparation to be simple and quick, without resorting to frozen pizzas or trips to KFC. It also has the potential to be cheaper since you can buy in bulk.
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We selected a number of pasta dishes including typical sauces such as Bolognese but also did a lasagne and spinach and ricotta cannelloni. To add some variety we also included some double batches of massaman and Thai green curries. For snacks we baked some choc-chip cookies and choc-caramel muffins. Most of these weren't from scratch. Packet mixes, pre-made curry pastes and bottled pasta sauces were used to keep things simple also also allow the meals to be done quickly allowing us make more in a day.
+We selected a number of pasta dishes including typical sauces such as Bolognese but also did a lasagne and spinach and ricotta cannelloni. To add some variety we also included some double batches of massaman and Thai green curries. For snacks we baked some choc-chip cookies and choc-caramel muffins. Most of these weren't from scratch. Packet mixes, pre-made curry pastes and bottled pasta sauces were used to keep things simple also also allow the meals to be done quickly allowing us make more in a day.
It is pretty tiring standing at the bench for hours on end so we came up with a system of one hour shifts. One of us would cook whilst the other did lighter tasks around the house, which worked well. It also avoided the problem of, "too many cooks in the kitchen...".
diff --git a/content/personal/2009/04/greetings-from-tall-karri-country.html b/content/personal/2009/04/greetings-from-tall-karri-country.html
index a990135..65e80d6 100644
--- a/content/personal/2009/04/greetings-from-tall-karri-country.html
+++ b/content/personal/2009/04/greetings-from-tall-karri-country.html
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
-
I was sorting through some old postcards that I bought during the trip around Australia my family did in 1992. Amongst them was this particular one. Now that I'm not twelve and obsessed by tractors and earth moving equipment it seemed quite bizarre. The caption on the back reads:
+I was sorting through some old postcards that I bought during the trip around Australia my family did in 1992. Amongst them was this particular one. Now that I'm not twelve and obsessed by tractors and earth moving equipment it seemed quite bizarre. The caption on the back reads:
A view of a Karri tree being lifted prior to loading on to a truck at Pemberton Western AustraliaPemberton is in the southern part of Western Australia that features the Karri forests. According to Wikipedia Karri trees can grow up to 90m tall, making them amongst the tallest trees in the world. The photo seems like such a strange image to put on a post card. Can you imagine writing home to family telling them about the beautiful Karri forests on a card that depicts them being destroyed? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/technical/2008/04/womens-weekly-getting-in-on-the-linux-action.html b/content/technical/2008/04/womens-weekly-getting-in-on-the-linux-action.html index 1bdeb86..7a8027a 100644 --- a/content/technical/2008/04/womens-weekly-getting-in-on-the-linux-action.html +++ b/content/technical/2008/04/womens-weekly-getting-in-on-the-linux-action.html @@ -1 +1 @@ -
I snapped this with my my phone whilst I was shopping at Safeway last Sunday. It seems the Australian Women's Weekly are Linux fans or aren't aware that they may be infringing Larry Ewing's copyright. Who wouldn't want a Tux cake though.
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+ I snapped this with my my phone whilst I was shopping at Safeway last Sunday. It seems the Australian Women's Weekly are Linux fans or aren't aware that they may be infringing Larry Ewing's copyright. Who wouldn't want a Tux cake though.
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diff --git a/content/technical/2008/05/death-to-the-feed-uri-scheme.html b/content/technical/2008/05/death-to-the-feed-uri-scheme.html
index 8c36517..c02ef15 100644
--- a/content/technical/2008/05/death-to-the-feed-uri-scheme.html
+++ b/content/technical/2008/05/death-to-the-feed-uri-scheme.html
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ Fast forward to 2008 and all the major browsers have support for discovery of fe
It seems use of the scheme really took off around the release of Safari 2, which included RSS support. When viewing a feed in Safari it presents the URI using the 'feed:' scheme, thus making its use highly visible.
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+
I understand that using the scheme makes it easy at an operating system level to associate a particular application with the scheme but it should be entirely internal an invisible to the user. The reasons its use irks me is when adding a feed to Google Reader its necessary to copy and paste the link and then remove the 'feed:' at the start. Additionally Firefox removes the colon from http, meaning that has to be replaced too. Okay so I'm lazy but all the hassle can be avoided by simply linking to the feed with the normal 'http:' scheme.
diff --git a/content/technical/2008/08/pondering-sent-from-my-iphone.html b/content/technical/2008/08/pondering-sent-from-my-iphone.html
index e6713ee..bc4ff3b 100644
--- a/content/technical/2008/08/pondering-sent-from-my-iphone.html
+++ b/content/technical/2008/08/pondering-sent-from-my-iphone.html
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ Thinking it over I came up with the following solutions:
I went with the latter as its more subtle but still conveys what I wanted. The result looks like the following (in Gmail).
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+
The first response after making that change was:
BRILLIANT! diff --git a/content/technical/2008/09/pimping-vim-on-windows.html b/content/technical/2008/09/pimping-vim-on-windows.html index bc92533..e67f276 100644 --- a/content/technical/2008/09/pimping-vim-on-windows.html +++ b/content/technical/2008/09/pimping-vim-on-windows.html @@ -29,5 +29,5 @@ set number So what does it all like in the end? Still not as good as MacVim but not too bad (click for full size version, scaled version looks a bit average): -+
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/technical/2009/03/consolas-on-mac-update.html b/content/technical/2009/03/consolas-on-mac-update.html index db165c0..616c4f2 100644 --- a/content/technical/2009/03/consolas-on-mac-update.html +++ b/content/technical/2009/03/consolas-on-mac-update.html @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ Today I followed my own directions on installing Consolas on my Mac Pro. The original directions were put together when installing it on my Mac Book. The downloaded disk image had a different volume name, as did the meta package. So the the command I used to launch the font installer was: open "/Volumes/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg"After the installer ran I went about making it the default font in Terminal. After doing so and setting it the same as it was on my Mac Book (13pt, antialiasing on) it looked terrible on the Mac Pro. Compare the two images below. I was after the latter. -After a little bit of confusion I decided to check the font smoothing style in the Appearance preference pane (in System Preferences). Turns out it was set to Automatic (best for main display) on the Mac Pro and Medium (best for Flat Panel) on the Mac Book. Changing to Medium and relaunching Terminal had it looking identical on both machines. +
One particularly nifty feature if you're on a Windows PC without Administrator privileges is VirtualBox will install and run as an unprivileged user. This means if you're forced to use Windows at work you might be able to install Linux via VirtualBox and become a bit more productive.
+One particularly nifty feature if you're on a Windows PC without Administrator privileges is VirtualBox will install and run as an unprivileged user. This means if you're forced to use Windows at work you might be able to install Linux via VirtualBox and become a bit more productive.
In some future posts I plan to cover some ways you can put VirtualBox to use. The first of these will cover setting up a Linux guest to mirror the deployment environment of a web application. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/technical/2009/03/my-first-new-site-is-live.html b/content/technical/2009/03/my-first-new-site-is-live.html index 2406c77..3e79833 100644 --- a/content/technical/2009/03/my-first-new-site-is-live.html +++ b/content/technical/2009/03/my-first-new-site-is-live.html @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -Since starting my new job at Tricycle Developments in January I've been working on a project to repurpose the Reddit source code into a kind of community blogging platform with voting and karma. +
