A couple of years ago I bought my son a Nintendo DSi and a handful of games. It's a fun platform and we've gotten many hours of enjoyment out of it. But it looks like it's days are numbered.
My son has two chances to get a new game each year: Christmas and his birthday. So, the first year I bought it, I got maybe 3 or 4 games. At about $35 a game that's $140.
A year ago, I got an iPad.
But I get pestered every paycheck for a new app, or smurfberries, or whatever the virtual currency of his latest obsession is. $0.99 here or a $1.99 there and it doesn't seem like much. But I just checked my iTunes bill for last month and I spent about $25 in Apps and In-App Purchases.
So, in 6 months, I will have spent more money on the App Store than a year's worth of DSi games. Actually, it's quite a bit more. Just this month I bought Final Fantasy Tactics for "my son". At $15.99. So I'm on track to spend about $35 this month in the Apple ecosystem.
This is significant.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
Function Flip
Way back in 2002, CrazyBrowser released a tabbed browsing wrapper for Internet Explorer 6 and it was amazing. I loved it and used it until I switched to Mac in 2007.
I was still using dialup in those days so I'm of the generation that would open a link in the background tab to load while continuing to read the current page. As such, I hardly used the back/forward functionality and switched between tabs exclusively.
The default keys for Previous Tab and Next Tab were F2 and F3 respectively. This worked out perfectly since I'm a touch typist and have my left hand on the home keys and my right hand on the mouse.
This behaviour has since become so ingrained that I add global shortcuts on my Mac to mirror this as one of the first things I always do when setting up.
However, this necessitates setting F1, F2, et al to act as function keys in System Preferences. This wasn't so bad on my 2006 Macbook Pro since the volume keys were on the left hand side and so was the Fn key. On my new Macbook, the volume keys have been moved to the right and I can no longer hold Fn and hit the volume keys with one hand. And as we all know, changing the volume is a pretty frequent task.
And then I came across Function Flip (via Shawn Blanc).
Function Flip basically gives you the option of setting specific keys back to their default hardware functions. So I can use F1 through F9 as regular function keys and use F10 through F12 as hardware keys to change the volume without having to hold Fn.
It installs as a Preference Pane and getting up and running with it is ridiculously simple. It only does one thing, but it does it well and it's the one thing I need.
Good software should make you feel like you don't know how you lived without it. Function Flip is firmly in that category.
I was still using dialup in those days so I'm of the generation that would open a link in the background tab to load while continuing to read the current page. As such, I hardly used the back/forward functionality and switched between tabs exclusively.
The default keys for Previous Tab and Next Tab were F2 and F3 respectively. This worked out perfectly since I'm a touch typist and have my left hand on the home keys and my right hand on the mouse.
This behaviour has since become so ingrained that I add global shortcuts on my Mac to mirror this as one of the first things I always do when setting up.
However, this necessitates setting F1, F2, et al to act as function keys in System Preferences. This wasn't so bad on my 2006 Macbook Pro since the volume keys were on the left hand side and so was the Fn key. On my new Macbook, the volume keys have been moved to the right and I can no longer hold Fn and hit the volume keys with one hand. And as we all know, changing the volume is a pretty frequent task.
And then I came across Function Flip (via Shawn Blanc).
Function Flip basically gives you the option of setting specific keys back to their default hardware functions. So I can use F1 through F9 as regular function keys and use F10 through F12 as hardware keys to change the volume without having to hold Fn.
It installs as a Preference Pane and getting up and running with it is ridiculously simple. It only does one thing, but it does it well and it's the one thing I need.
Good software should make you feel like you don't know how you lived without it. Function Flip is firmly in that category.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Why do I Twitter?
http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
That site is awesome. Seriously, go read it, and then come back.
...
Done? Good. Great stuff, right? But in and of itself, not a reason to go around stalking following people on Twitter.
Since 2001, I've been frequenting The Ozone Asylum forum on and off. On there, Jive started a thread on this in 2008, and I went ahead and signed up. But other than some tweets from Bugimus (@bugimus) on what he had planned for the weekend, there wasn't really much there to interest me. (Not that Bugs wasn't having interesting weekends back then. :) )
Fast forward to earlier this week, and someone mentions @shitmydadsays to me. So I read it, and I damn near died laughing. My endorphin hazed brain then hit on something profound, at least for me.
Twitter is really just a way to listen to interesting people. But the beauty of it is that you get to decide what's interesting.
I read Daring Fireball almost religiously, and I think I'd John Gruber would be a pretty interesting guy in real life. So I follow his Twitter stream. Simple as that.
When I'm browsing the internet, and I come across an interesting blog post where the author has a Twitter, I'll follow him for a few days. If I don't like his stream, I unfollow. Again, pretty simple.
But then, some of my friends on Facebook use it like broadcast SMS. "Hey, let's do pizza tonite. Meet at Pizza Hut."
Twitter in Plain English is good, but is a bit narrow in scope. Then again, it's hard to explain twitter to someone who doesn't already know what it is.
So, here's a quick way to get started. Sign up, find some people that interest you and start following. Don't be afraid to reply to their posts. I know a guy who tweeted Mariah Carey for a year just to get a response.
If you're from the South Pacific, it's a great way to connect with islanders from all over the world. Search for the hash tag #teampoly and start following people on there.
Short version:
That site is awesome. Seriously, go read it, and then come back.
...
Done? Good. Great stuff, right? But in and of itself, not a reason to go around stalking following people on Twitter.
Since 2001, I've been frequenting The Ozone Asylum forum on and off. On there, Jive started a thread on this in 2008, and I went ahead and signed up. But other than some tweets from Bugimus (@bugimus) on what he had planned for the weekend, there wasn't really much there to interest me. (Not that Bugs wasn't having interesting weekends back then. :) )
Fast forward to earlier this week, and someone mentions @shitmydadsays to me. So I read it, and I damn near died laughing. My endorphin hazed brain then hit on something profound, at least for me.
Twitter is really just a way to listen to interesting people. But the beauty of it is that you get to decide what's interesting.
I read Daring Fireball almost religiously, and I think I'd John Gruber would be a pretty interesting guy in real life. So I follow his Twitter stream. Simple as that.
When I'm browsing the internet, and I come across an interesting blog post where the author has a Twitter, I'll follow him for a few days. If I don't like his stream, I unfollow. Again, pretty simple.
But then, some of my friends on Facebook use it like broadcast SMS. "Hey, let's do pizza tonite. Meet at Pizza Hut."
Twitter in Plain English is good, but is a bit narrow in scope. Then again, it's hard to explain twitter to someone who doesn't already know what it is.
So, here's a quick way to get started. Sign up, find some people that interest you and start following. Don't be afraid to reply to their posts. I know a guy who tweeted Mariah Carey for a year just to get a response.
If you're from the South Pacific, it's a great way to connect with islanders from all over the world. Search for the hash tag #teampoly and start following people on there.
Short version:
- Follow a bunch of people
- Reply to the one's you find interesting
- There is no step 3
Enjoy.
$500 For An Ethernet Cable?!
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/13/500-ethernet-cable-a.html
This is highway robbery and is aimed at naïve audiophiles. There is nothing here that a regular run of Cat6 won't do. Even the product description is bullshit:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/13/500-ethernet-cable-a.html
This is highway robbery and is aimed at naïve audiophiles. There is nothing here that a regular run of Cat6 won't do. Even the product description is bullshit:
"...signal directional markings are are provided for optimum signal transfer..."
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
George R. R. Martin Is Hardly A Slacker
John Scalzi writes on Whatever:
I'll admit, I was one of those people who bitched about Martin taking six years to write a book, and Scalzi's analysis proves that I was wrong.
I think the main complaint is that the books are so good that's a bit of a letdown when you get to the end and there's so much story left to tell. The last book is no exception.
The chapters jump around between the different characters, and at the end of every chapter you're a little annoyed at reading about a different character. However, halfway through that chapter you're so engrossed in the character that by the end you get annoyed when it switches back or switches to another. And yet, I loved every minute of it.
Get the book. Read it. Seriously.
(Full disclosure: buy it from the link above and I get a few cents. Yay me.)
"During those years the unsocialized were snarling at Martin for being lazy or procrastinating or indolent or whatever, he wrote about as many words for novels as I had. By this superficial but easy-to-quantify metric, on the novel front he was as productive as I was, and most people seem to agree that I’ve been pretty productive these last six years. I just spread my words around five novels while he poured all of his into one."
A Small Observation Regarding Words And Releases
I'll admit, I was one of those people who bitched about Martin taking six years to write a book, and Scalzi's analysis proves that I was wrong.
I think the main complaint is that the books are so good that's a bit of a letdown when you get to the end and there's so much story left to tell. The last book is no exception.
The chapters jump around between the different characters, and at the end of every chapter you're a little annoyed at reading about a different character. However, halfway through that chapter you're so engrossed in the character that by the end you get annoyed when it switches back or switches to another. And yet, I loved every minute of it.
Get the book. Read it. Seriously.
(Full disclosure: buy it from the link above and I get a few cents. Yay me.)
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Easily Generate Hex Passwords
From Terminal:
openssl rand -base64 8 | md5 | head -c8;echo
Or use ping:
ping -c1 google.com | md5 | head -c8;echo
Via http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/10/generate-random-passwords-command-line/
openssl rand -base64 8 | md5 | head -c8;echo
Or use ping:
ping -c1 google.com | md5 | head -c8;echo
Via http://osxdaily.com/2011/05/10/generate-random-passwords-command-line/
Monday, July 11, 2011
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