I’ve come back from a self-imposed web blackout to discover that I’m the featured desktop for December 29th over at the phenomenal Lifehackers site. This isn’t the first time that I’ve made it on Lifehackers. Gina has even been so kind as to send such interesting people as Clive Thompson my way for some great chats. I think the majority of my referrals now come from Merlin at 43folders.com and Gina et al at Lifehackers. I’m no crack programmer, and had despaired of making some tool that helped people squeeze an extra ounce of Things Getting Done from their day. The fact that I’m getting noticed and seem to be sparking some conversation on respected sites is very gratifying. So if you’ll excuse the gushiness, thanks Gina, Merlin, and everyone who’s taken the time to visit my site and mull over what I have to say. This is the push that I needed to recommit to White’s of Henry Lane.
Author Archives: andrew
Predictions for 2006
A lot of very bright people have had a number of predictions for the upcoming year, and alot of them sound great. Some of them are pretty much “How to build the skills that’ll get you a resume that will allow you to own the world.” I’m not going to try to one-up these a-listers. Instead I’m going to provide my very modest prediction that I believe you can absolutely rely upon, and build your whole year around.
You heard it here first. Take this one to the bank, folks.
Ah, now that’s clever.
Got a GMail account? Enjoying your new webclippings feature? Checked your webclippings feed while in your Spam folder recently?
Bringing new meaning to “Enabling with Google”
I don’t really want this site to become a linklog, but I couldn’t pass this one up. The Beer Hunter uses the Google API to display locations of alcohol retailers in the Toronto area. If they’re open, the icon is solid. If they are closed, the icon is translucent. Clicking on an icon gets you the address, the hours (with the opening hours for today highlighted) and their status.
Less delicious than I would have anticipated
I’m pulling the automatic del.icio.us updating from my site. I like it in theory, but in practice all I’m getting is a site full of bulleted links. While I think it is great that people may get the impression I’m updating my site much more than I am, you could easily get the impression that all I do is crap out bookmarks. Plus, you’re probably not interested in all the ephemera I grab from the web. Yesterday’s wealth of presentation-oriented javascript libraries, windows file managers and ext2fs drivers really drove that home for me.
I do intend to create a links of the day posting, but that will include only stuff I tag appropriately. This will be up as soon as move to my new host that supports cron.
More paper!
I’ve popped up a few more wallpapers to my flickr account.
Back to Montreal:
Over to France again:
And one last one from The Ex this past summer:
links for 2005-11-07
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also vr Halflife
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papercraft mac classics with some fly art
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The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval Sea Forts. Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area.
links for 2005-11-05
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Alternative desktop manager for Windows XP that arranges your windows into a loop. Similar to the Looking Glass interface.
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command line tools for the Windows Shell, from Cygwin with dependencies
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uses a skin and extension that grabs XP UI styles. the end result is bang on
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wall sockets with rotating plugs to accomodate big wall warts
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Eugene Lazutkin has started to implement a rich ui for OpenWrt by creating an ajaxian host editor for OpenWrt using Dojo.
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Provides shortcuts to handle much of the simple templating I do all the time: tables, tabs, flyout menus, etc
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MochiKit is a highly documented and well tested, suite of JavaScript libraries that will help you get stuff done, fast.
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like the python interpereter, in your web browser. demo of mochikit’s DOM api
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This demo does “live” Regular Expression matching to help you toy with JavaScript Regular Expressions.
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Spyce is the server-side page scripting language for the XBox Media Centre
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The GoAhead web server is the embedded web server used in the XBox Media Center
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Python scripts for the XBox media centre
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Salling Clicker offers the ability to control popular applications from mobile phone or handheld computer through a user interface similar to that on a portable media player.
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Tutorial on transfering a WordPress blog from one site to another
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Automated WP backup tool
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simple augmented reality toolkit that uses a webcam
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An intimate look at Gypsy refugees in Belgrade suburb who make a living by transfoming Citroen’s classic 2cv and Dyana cars into Mad Max-like recycling vehicles, with which they ollect cardoard, bottles and scrap metal.
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built from an old sega handheld and a cigarette lighter adapter
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The ëOpen Source IPTV Production Suiteí is an ensemble of high-level animation, 3D, compositing and editing tools that are available as free, open source GPL applications. However, this is not a direct attempt to duplicate the production tools found i
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I have this running on my USB key. I set it up to work with Outlook in about 10 minutes
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HID drivers are available, so you can use both USB devices on XBox and XBox controllers on the PC
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plasma-fieldsy screensaver
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Make great eyecandy, including a screensaver
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Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence.
links for 2005-11-04
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symfony is an open-source PHP5 web framework with easy AJAX tools
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Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It’s simpler, faster, more polite, and less annoying than group emails.
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The NSA on how to really, really, REALLY secure your desktop
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Directory of game modifications, TCs and related projects
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use the Vapour Software to automatically download and update games and mods. like steam for mods
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tool to create virtual albums of photos
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Have you always harbored a secret (or not so secret) yearning to write? This course is designed to help you learn many of the skills you need to write successful science fiction and fantasy stories.
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And, dutifully, I will eventually check out each and everyone of them. But I WILL NOT add them to the root level of my RSS reader.
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During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire lifeís work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries
links for 2005-11-03
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predominantly web-based applications
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Includes shout-out box where people can drop names of torrent sites
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tv torrent site
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modification of tiddlywiki
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lots of pointers to wiki solutions
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Is there enough meat in Star Wars to tickle my communication studies nerd as well as the regular old nerd?
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The Jack-PC from Chip PC Technologies takes “zero desk space” by converting existing enterprise LAN jacks into full-function Windows CE-powered thin client computers, without requiring additional cabling
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Turn those scam “Recovery CDs” vendors ship into a real, usable Windows installer
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I used to have an Applescript that autoexpired my “Downloads” directory in the OS 7.6 days.
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vPod is a program for transferring music to your iPod from Windows. It presents a unified view of all of your music and lets you see what is and what is not already on your iPod.
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hand-configuration for the modified dash
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The xboxmediacenter.xml in Detail
Web what now?
I accidentally clicked on a link in my del.icio.us inbox that got me to an article on Web 2.0. I think that this pretty much sums up what most people think about this way-way-new-web malarky way better than a translation would.
My $0.02
links for 2005-11-02
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Potentially great use of those flyers you can’t seem to stop
links for 2005-11-01
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Festival Speech Synthesis Systems is a free software multi-lingual speech synthesis workbench that runs on multiple-platforms offering black box text to speech
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How to use a new feature of del.icio.us that gives you a list of all your postings during the day
I weep for the two coffees I could have bought had I not seen DOOM
My local cinema has a great deal. If you have a lifetime membership to Hostelling International, you get the $4.25 senior’s/children’s ticket price. That means it costs roughly 1/3rd the price of a ticket at somewhere like the Paramount Festival Square to catch a film. Michelle and I have been seeing more films as a result. While none really blew us away, we’d caught some watchable flicks like Serenity and Elizabethtown.
On Friday, I thought Michelle was going to go to yoga, so I decided to catch DOOM. The Hallowe’en spirit, its cheaper to catch it now than on DVD, I need to get out of the house more; all that.
I’m not going to review this movie. In general, I don’t review movies; I’m not great at it. And far snarkier people than I have had at it already. Suffice it to say I’ve only seen one movie worse than this one: Austin Powers in Goldmember. (How that got a higher Tomatometer reading, i couldn’t tell you. Maybe it got better after I left about 2/3rds of the way through.) I went in with really low expectations, and they didn’t even manage that.
It is so terribly underdeveloped. It has the generic skeleton of a scifi horror, but they forgot to flesh out the parts between guys with guns running from one location of Olduvai to another. Basically the movie works like this: guy sees something, tries to kill it, it gets away from him. He calls everyone, they run over there. The Rock tells them to stay in a location. Someone walks away for a dumb reason, and is killed. Rinse, repeat. They took out the Hell stuff, the Burtrugeur-esque character is called Dr. Carmack, haw-haw, and they bit the Resident Evil T-Virus thing to create the Zombies. They open with a hackneyed character development scene in the barracks that plays like a cheesey version of the opening of Predator with the special ops guys in the helicopter. They do the lockdown in medlab like in Aliens. And, yes, there’s a couple of minutes of terrible First Person Shooter perspective crap that features the most killable pinky ever.
With movie tickets generally going for $12, and the DOOM 3 and RoE games going used for about $20, there is absolutely no reason to go see this movie. If you really want an hours worth of DOOM entertainment, you’d have a better experience with the shareware levels of the original DOOM played with Doomsday.
(As an aside, I caught The Rock on The Daily Show last week. He flat-out lied about what was in the movie. That really bugged me. He knew that he was being gawked at by a bunch of gamers, and said what they wanted to hear. Not fair, Mr Johnson. You’ve come so far into the mainstream, and people are starting to respect you. I loathe the WWE, but have enjoyed you in a number of flicks, particularly Be Cool. Don’t pull this; you’ll squander the credibility you’ve worked so hard to get.)
A long list of applications
My work machine was in desperate need of a wipe a few weeks ago. It has had scads of transient freelancers on it, and it started out as a Flash developer’s box, and has never in all this time been brought back to the metal. So in preparation for the reinstall, I jotted down a list of the apps I had and needed. Since it was little bother to annotate, I thought I’d post this to my site; maybe you’ll find a hidden gem that will make you more productive. Continue reading
Gitcher White’s of Henry Lane Wallpaper
I’ve posted some of the images I use as wallpaper on my various machines to flickr. They are scaled to 1280×1024, since that’s the native resolution of my LCD panels. If you like them, please leave a comment!
First, a set from my anniversary trip to Montréal:
Next, a couple from Versailles:
Then some nice textures from around France:
Most everything I post to flickr is licensed under Creative Commons as Attribution-Noncommercial. Share and enjoy!
Gameboy Advance Movie Player
A while back I came across the Gameboy Advance Movie Player on the Lik Sang site. At the time, it really seemed like just a toy. After all, I already had a Dell Axim on which I played movies, and really, the screen just seemed too tiny. The sound quality was supposed to be only mediochre. I wrote it off.
At some point this summer, I found myself with a lot of CF cards kicking around, and I thought: why not? There were a couple of other items I wanted to buy, and USD$25 is well within my discretionary spending budget. So I bought it, and it’s been kicking around with the odd episode of Family Guy or Aqua Teen Hunger Force on the card I leave in it. I showed it off at work a bit, and used it for commuting.
To tell the truth, I pretty much forgot about it, until my wife and I were getting ready to take a five hour train trip to Montréal. Michelle usually sleeps on trains and planes, so I wanted to have some entertainment. I had a book on the go, but knew it wouldn’t take me long to finish. I didn’t want to take another book, since I had every intention of travelling light. So I went to Craphound, and grabbed a bunch of Cory Doctrow’s short stories from his latest book (which seems to be trapped and eternally checked out at the Toronto Public Library), and some recent scifi from the Gutenberg Project, and dumped them into a folder on my 512M CF card. I also converted the Pimsleur French lessons I’m doing into GBA audio, and grabbed a homebrew Lumines clone called Luminesweeper.
Well, the Pimsleur lessons were a bust. For some reason, the audio came out worse than anything I’ve ever dumped to GBA Audio. Possibly since the original encoding was pretty low-bitrate.
Everything else was a phenomenal win. I have the most up-to-date ROM for the Movie Player which adds bookmarks. This is now my favourite ebook reader, and I take it with me everywhere. The screen on the GBA SP is very readable, and the d-pad is actually very natural for scrolling. I like the positioning even better than the scroll wheel on the Axim. Luminsweeper is every bit as addictive as the original is purported to be, and there are a number of other homebrew games that work with the Movie Player. Best of all, since the ebook reader is really just a text scroller (like | less for the GB), there’s little limit to what you can place on there. You could even turn your GB into a read-only PDA like some folks do with their iPods. Minus, of course, the calendar …
Long and short, if you’ve got a GBA SP and some moderate-capacity CF cards lying around, this device will give them a whole new lease on life.
Instant personal intranet: just add water!
UPDATE: Simon Brown of Safecoms has contacted me to point out a couple of — oh, let’s say gaping — security holes in my script that could allow access to any file on your system through my script, as well as the possibility to attack another computer. If you grabbed the script before noon October 21st, please replace the contents of markdown_file_results.php with what’s below. This code is now correct. Thanks again, Simon!
In the comments on the 43folders post about putting everything in one big text file (inspired by this posting in O’Reilly’s Developer Weblogs) the topic of Markdown and Textile came up quite a bit. This inspired me to finish a couple of really basic PHP scripts on which I’d been working. Continue reading
Sometimes I switch it up like “no, no, no, don’t stop a rockin”!
I’m blowing the whistle. Despite what you may have read, the real danger of the iPod is not hearing loss, social isolation, or even aural hallucinations. The real danger is that 60G of rock may just be too much rock for one person to handle.
I saw the danger manifested myself yesterday. As I left my office I noticed a guy swinging his head violently from side to side while standing on the sidewalk. At first I thought either the gnats that were all over the downtown had driven him to distraction, or he was a crazy homeless guy. Then I got a look at him. He had that greasy front-man-for-Jet look which could be why I thought he was homeless. But he had slick shades, nice clothes, a Fred Perry satchel, and a slick bike. Clearly not homeless.
He switched up his moves for a second, and that was when I noticed the white cords dangling from his ears. And I got it. He was dancing. To his iPod. Dancing hard and very publicly. He had been overcome by the rock.
After the track had ended — or so I figured — he hopped onto his bike and cycled off. He did, however, throw up a few rock hands as he pedaled into the distance.
I’m just thankful he was able to quickly pull over when the need to rock became overwhelming.
del.icio.us for somebody
del.icio.us, the social boomarking webapp, has just rolled out a great feature that allows you to tag items for another user. If you tag an item “for:awhite”, I’ll be able to see it by visiting http://del.icio.us/for/, which will redirect to my own page. (Via Lifehacker)