Birdhouse Snake

Was walking around the backyard this afternoon and was surprised by this guy. Couldn’t see him very well, but based on the eyes and the coloring, not poisonous. A few more pictures in the Flickr stream.

Monome for video

Using a Monome to control video and audio.

Kaossilator

This one I might be able to afford. Still looks fun.

History Meme

Finally a meme I don’t mind participating in. Sadly most of the interesting bits are hidden behind that “sudo”.

% history -1000 | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
194 cd
156 sudo
73 rm
50 ls
45 less
44 vi
31 dpkg
22 kill
21 perl
21 man

Tenori Demo

Following along with my “new instrument” posts, here is the Tenori.

Posting Styles

The keepers of netiquette, have long fought over the correct way to reply to email, mailing list,forum, usenet, etc.. messages. Even though I almost always top or inline post, bottom posting is frequently expounded by digerati as the most appropriate and logical way to reply. Well this week I think I’ve come across what might be the definitive reason(at least for me) that top posting is in fact the one true way.

On a mailing list for a project I run, a list subscriber requested that replies sent to the list be top posted instead of bottom/inline. The subscriber happened to be vision impaired and it said that it was extremely difficult to follow a thread when his screen reader had to dig through all the extra/old text to find the new content in the reply.

So at least for me, until someone comes up with a screen reader that can deal with large amount of quoted text easily or somehow “skip to the content” in mail messages, I will stick with top posting and the rare occurrence that I need to inline post to clarify something.

Site Changes

Well I had plans to move this thing over to MTOS, that is on hold for a while. As promised, I have added a “Self Accumulator“. It needs some CSS love, that will come soon. Besides aggregating “me” it has allowed me significantly lighted up the sidebar.

Stopping the spam

I want a place to aggregate/archive my online activities. Something like Mugshot that I do use, but under my control. I tried using this blog to do it, but decided it should only include stuff I write specifically for it and “spam” from my other sources doesn’t work here. I’m going to put up some kind of “self accumulator” separate from my blog soon.

Honda Fuel Cell

Why am I just hearing about this now? I would have thought a commercially viable fuel cell vehicle to be big news. I do have some fear of that big pressurized tank of H in the trunk, however.

More Fear of Girls

Not as good as part 1, but worth a view.

Steak Night

It’s been a while since we’ve had an official “steak night”(nudge nudge, brian, poke poke) and I’ve been wanting to try this trick, so I broke down and cooked up to London Broil tonight. I can say without a doubt the “trick” works and the Broil was some of the best I’ve had.

Blade Runner

Missed seeing it in the theater, I guess I was too young at the time and I think it only ran for like a week, but it totally blew me away the first time I saw it on TV.

“For the new director’s cut, the special-effects footage was digitally scanned at 8,000 lines per frame, four times the resolution of most restorations, and then meticulously retouched. The results look almost 3-D”… from the NYTimes

Man I wish it was playing somewhere close this time around.

The future of music

If you haven’t seen one before this is a Monome

Marching Zeppelin

If you’re a true band geek you’ll watch part 1, 2 and 3.

Marching Radiohead

Being and old school band geek and Radiohead fan, this made my day and it almost works even.

New Deskbar Plugin

Since I’ve been stuck at home and can mostly only type one handed, I decided to work on my Deskbar plugins to try and keep myself busy and forget about the pain in my sholder and back. As a result, I put together a new Deskbar plugin called Wayd(What Are You Doing) that allows you to update multiple micro-blogs at once(twitter, jaiku, etc…). It currently supports Twitter and Jaiku but I hope to add Facebook and Pownce once they have an API available. If anyone knows of other micro-blog services I should include, please let me know in the comments. Since the Deskbar plugin API changed, you’ll need the 2.19+ version of Deskbar for this plugin to work.

What I did on vacation last week

Write more later, typing one handed.

Cottonmouth?

This big guy was in our backyard yesterday afternoon.

Anyone confirm what he is?

Update:
Could be a Banded Water Snake or a Mud Snake.

Short update

Forgot to blog about it when I released it, but I put together a Twitter plugin for Deskbar. Also I released a new version of the Gajim plugin. You can download both them from my Deskbar plugin page.

A little trip planning

Today we managed to get Placeaware.com ready to release to the world. It’s an interactive trip planner with some nifty features. Play around with a few of the live sites or watch the screen cast.