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The idea that one could earn a living through blogging, especially considering the relative infancy of the computing industry as a whole and the internet in particular, fascinates me. Twenty years ago, such an occupation did not exist; today, websites like The Loop , Marco.org , and Daring Fireball attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, generating a steady and respectable cash flow for their respective authors Jim Dalrymp....
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Ever tried to copy something onto a USB flash drive, only to discover that the file was too big to copy? This is because most USB Flash drives are formatted using the FAT32 [1] filesystem - which only supports individual files up to 4 GB in size, no matter how much free space you’ve got. It also only supports drives up to 2 TB , can’t store symbolic links, can’t store files with these characters in the name: "*/:<>?\| – and is g....
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This post is about a particularly elegant (and crucial) feature in puppet exported resources : attribute overriding . If you’re not already familiar with exported resources, you should start there, as they are the killer feature that makes configuration management with puppet awesome. (I haven’t found any explicit docs about this feature either, so feel free to comment if you know where they’re hidden.) Setup : I’ve got a virtual..
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This post is about a particularly elegant (and crucial) feature in puppet exported resources : attribute overriding . If you’re not already familiar with exported resources, you should start there, as they are the killer feature that makes configuration management with puppet awesome. (I haven’t found any explicit docs about this feature either, so feel free to comment if you know where they’re hidden.) Setup : I’ve got a virtual..
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Over the year he spent without the internet, Paul Miller wrote thirty-five articles for The Verge. I have only gotten to a few of these dispatches so far, but I already added the rest to my Instapaper queue. This isn’t just a story about a guy who got tired of the internet; it’s a story about a guy who got tired of the internet, an interesting story about a guy who did something about it, and a moving story about how that decision effec..
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In this post, I’m going to show you how I made a Lisp to Javascript compiler. I really enjoy programming in Clojure but have often thought that the JVM isn’t always the best platform for scripts due to the slow JVM start-up. So, I decided to implement a simple version of Clojure that compiles to Javascript and can be run on top of nodejs. Compilers are notoriously hard to understand and therefore make for great mind-bending exercises. Ex....
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In this post, I’m going to show you how I made a Lisp to Javascript compiler. I really enjoy programming in Clojure but have often thought that the JVM isn’t always the best platform for scripts due to the slow JVM start-up. So, I decided to implement a simple version of Clojure that compiles to Javascript and can be run on top of nodejs. Compilers are notoriously hard to understand and therefore make for great mind-bending exercises. Ex....
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Firstly Happy Mother’s day to my mother. Google is, as usual, busily releasing doodles . Today, the doodle takes you through a Rube Goldberg -esque sequence, giving you four decisions to make along the way. Each decision gives you one of three different choices, and at the end, a unique drawing is displayed. I expect: 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 81 different permutations. At the end of the process, you can print your image. I got directed ..
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Firstly Happy Mother’s day to my mother. Google is, as usual, busily releasing doodles . Today, the doodle takes you through a Rube Goldberg -esque sequence, giving you four decisions to make along the way. Each decision gives you one of three different choices, and at the end, a unique drawing is displayed. I expect: 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 81 different permutations. At the end of the process, you can print your image. I got directed ..
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One of the most important features in quantified self is the ability to export your data in an open format. Fitbit lets you download your personal data if you subscribe to a premium membership. Alternatively they provide an API at dev.fitbit.com/ that allows developers to interact with Fitbit data in their own applications, products and services. In a blog post at quantifiedself.com Mark Levitt shows a way how to export your Fitbit data int..
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In reply to Lefteris "Leftos" Aslanoglou. I am glad you enjoyed these lectures. I think studying machine learning is a great motivator to dive deeper into linear algebra. Of course, machine learning is not just linear algebra (also statistics, optimization, probabilities) but a lot of interesting problems require background in linear algebra. So far, t..
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Perhaps more noteworthy is Reeder’s new, standalone RSS feature — you don’t even need a Feedbin or Google Reader account anymore. Instead, you can start curating RSS feeds right on your iPhone; if you had a Google Reader account you can also simply import your feeds straight from there.” Great news. Reeder is easily my favorite iOS RSS reader, and definitely one of the best on the market. This new feature makes it all the more appealing..
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Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this post) These paintings are extremely simple but somehow strike the viewer as deeply profound. They give the impression of bein..
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Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this post) These paintings are extremely simple but somehow strike the viewer as deeply profound. They give the impression of bein..
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Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this post) These paintings are extremely simple but somehow strike the viewer as deeply profound. They give the impression of bein..
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This 135g technical marvel became privy to my secrets, my dreams, my work and personal life. Since that time, I’ve worn my way through several iterations of this device, yet my feeling for ‘it’ grows stronger as the months and years go by.” Permalink.
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In 2012, Betaworks purchased Digg; a year later in 2013, the company announced a revamped list of priorities placing a successor to Google Reader at the top , and acquired Instapaper a few months later. As Brian Bishop pointed out in Instapaper acquired by Betaworks, owner of Digg , the Instapaper-RSS reader combination uniquely positions Betaworks to emerge as a major player on the internet in the combing years. As an extremely inno..
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Transporter is a private “off-cloud” storage device for syncing, sharing, accessing, and protecting your digital life. No cloud, no fees, no privacy concerns. Your files are only stored on your Transporters and computers and mobile devices that you authorize.’ What a great idea. I will seriously consider getting one of these. Permalink.
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Scott Weisman is the co-founder of LaunchPad Lab, a web development studio that has clients such as Chesapeake Energy, Hanson and Greater Than.
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If you find yourself interviewing for a software engineering position today, you can be 90 percent sure that you will be asked to solve some programming puzzles. We’ve all been there. You come to the office for an interview, spend a few minutes talking about the job and you, and then the inevitable hits: programming puzzles and quizzes. You are asked to solve nonsensical, irrelevant, theoretical problems on the spot while the interviewe....
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If you find yourself interviewing for a software engineering position today, you can be 90 percent sure that you will be asked to solve some programming puzzles. We’ve all been there. You come to the office for an interview, spend a few minutes talking about the job and you, and then the inevitable hits: programming puzzles and quizzes. You are asked to solve nonsensical, irrelevant, theoretical problems on the spot while the interviewe....
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I've always been a proponent of the "right tool for the job" approach to programming. Different languages are well suited for different situations. Over the past 2 years I've spent a great deal of time with Ruby on Rails after coming from a background of PHP, Java and Perl. Here's how I got started and some of the lessons I learned along the way.
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Speaking of Cabin Porn , the folks over at the site have put a lot of work in to finding and posting great pictures lately, as well as polishing the site’s design over the past few months. And while it may not be new, for I actually can’t remember if it was there or not before today, I wanted to take a minute to mention the Cabin Porn Archive , where you can find every post going all the way back to February of 2009. Having just discovered..
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Seeing pictures like this one remind me of all the times I looked at a hill and thought about how awesome it would be to grab a shovel and dig a house out of it, similar to the way Sean Hellfritsch and Rob Wilson built their subterranean breakfast nook , but more like this stone cellar in Newfoundland. Permalink.
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I knew this would happen. Out of all of the new things that I have to learn to do for this snail game, the part that is the most tedious and difficult for me is the UI. Every part of the UI. You’d think that I’d be able to use web design skills from my previous life to make this at least a little intuitive, but nope - this blows. And it’s not just designing the thing that’s the problem, it’s finding the best way to implement it, too.
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The idea of a Nintendo phone, initially proposed by Moises Chiullan and Horace Dediu on episode eighty-three of The Critical Path, has continued to gain traction in my mind since I listened to The Analyst Taxonomy . As Moises pointed out in the tail end of the show Nintendo, like Apple, possesses the capability to not only manufacture physical devices, but to create the software necessary to run them as well. Permalink.
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How to convert Apple Lossless/ALAC/.m4a files to FLAC with avconv, on Ubuntu Linux
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duncanlock.net
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13 years ago
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eng
I recently needed to convert some Apple Lossless music files to FLAC . Here’s how to do it: If you don’t already have ffmpeg or libav-tools installed, do this: $ sudo apt-get install libav-tools Then run this to do the conversion, in the folder with music in: $ for f in * .m4a ; do avconv -i " $f " " ${ f %.m4a } .flac" ; done And that’s it - it will convert all the .m4a files in that folder to..
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Shortly after Merlin Mann posted Chasing the Right Zero I linked to the article , as did most of the internet. With Chasing the Right Zero , Merlin wrote the article I had had simmering on the back burner for months, putting to words my epiphany regarding Inbox Zero and the real meaning behind the philosophy. At the time I felt no need to add anything to his words or quantify my own opinions on the subject, so my linked list post cont..
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In HTML applications, jQuery has changed the way people thing about view rendering. Instead of an input or a text field in the view pulling data into it, the jQuery code pushes data into the view. How could this look in a server side situation like Java? In this code example, I read an HTML template file from the classpath, set the value of an input field and append more data based on a template (also in the HTML file).
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Download for Windows Check out the IndieDB project page Like on Facebook Follow on Twitter After seven months of hard work, Alpha 3 is ready to play! Some interesting statistics: 28,000+ lines of code 29 MB of compressed voxel data 63 MB of sounds and music 38 animations 60+ textures and normal maps 220+ revisions since Alpha 1 Incidentally, most of that is open source! If you're a developer, check it out on G..
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A weekend of train-ventures, dodgy restaurants, and the most amazing weather in the universe.
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liza.io
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13 years ago
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eng
I was meant to write this blog post four hours ago. Instead I got home and decided that since this one would have quite a bit of pictures in it and I’ve been running into bandwidth issues I may as well find a better solution for image hosting (as opposed to uploading everything to this server). I signed up to Amazon S3 on its free trial account and have been attempting to set it up ever since. Now I don’t even want to write this stupid po..
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In this post we’ll get a quick look at two ways to define a category as a type in ML. The first way will be completely trivial: we’ll just write it as a tuple of functions. The second will involve the terribly-named “functor” expression in ML, which allows one to give a bit more structure on data types. The reader unfamiliar with the ML programming language should consult our earlier primer.
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In this post we’ll get a quick look at two ways to define a category as a type in ML. The first way will be completely trivial: we’ll just write it as a tuple of functions. The second will involve the terribly-named “functor” expression in ML, which allows one to give a bit more structure on data types. The reader unfamiliar with the ML programming language should consult our earlier primer.
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In this post we’ll get a quick look at two ways to define a category as a type in ML. The first way will be completely trivial: we’ll just write it as a tuple of functions. The second will involve the terribly-named “functor” expression in ML, which allows one to give a bit more structure on data types. The reader unfamiliar with the ML programming language should consult our earlier primer.
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Figure 1. Just hold down your chosen compose key, then press the other keys in turn: [compose key] + e + = gets you a Euro symbol. The compose key on Linux is incredibly useful, but not configured by default - and on XFCE there’s currently no graphical UI to change it. However, it’s pretty simple to change… here’s how to make the Caps Lock key your compose key: In the file /etc/default/keyboard, change XKBOPTIONS to look like this....
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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been attempting to get up at 5am to work on snails before going in to actual work. It’s been working for the most part apart from a couple of slip-ups and basically goes like this:
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This was a difficult piece for me to write because my feelings regarding academic writing are so conflicting. On the one hand, I view academic writing — by which I mean the type of writing taught in American schools — as a certain boon: it introduces kids to the writer’s craft, teaches young writers how to write, and provides an introduction to organizing and conveying thoughts and ideas in a coherent and orderly fashion. On the other hand ..
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Allan McRae , Pacman developer, found an interesting small tool, called Distro Picker . This tool finds the Linux-Distribution based on what you prefer as a Desktop Environment, Package Manager and other settings. When I tried it out, it offered me my current distro: Arch Linux , so interestingly, it works really well! I’ll definitely have to take a look at the other distros offered.
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