Tim on October 17th, 2008

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Matt Williams’s presentation on Ruby and Arduino, here are some videos, slides, and notes from the ORUG site.
You absolutely must check this out. The field of robotics is going to play such a massive role in all of our lives over the next few years, and this is […]

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Tim on October 16th, 2008

Just got back from this month’s ORUG, where Matthew Williams gave a presentation on using Ruby to control an Arduino. Matt is a very natural speaker, and the presentation was great. He even demoed a bartending robot he built, which should be featured on Make very soon.
I took notes during the presentation, and they are […]

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OK, so let’s say you’re an OSX user, and you use the command line a lot. I bet you’ve accidentally deleted a file using rm, and wished that it had gone to the Trash.
We had this problem a few days ago, and fortunately the file was under version control. But we looked for a solution […]

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Tim on August 19th, 2008

I watched a video of Adam Savage at a hacker con in NYC. You should watch it too. He talks about Mythbusters, and also has a lot of other good stuff. Strongly recommended.
Bonus: Look for his pirated copy of The Dark Knight.

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Tim on July 31st, 2008

I’ve got a post at Websites and Beer talking about adding vinegar to beer. Blasphemy? Maybe not…read on.
I’m reposting this here, because it’s sort of a follow up to my post about cheap versus expensive wines. Hooray for food. Hooray for science. And hooray for food & science together!

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Tim on July 30th, 2008

I love Science. I don’t just love Science, I *fucking* love it. Maybe I’ll do a post on the Science sticks someday.
There’s a webcomic I particularly like, called XKCD.  It’s Science-y, Math-y, geek humor. Perfect for me.
One of the best is the following comic, good old #397. I love it because Feynman (one of the […]

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Tim on July 30th, 2008

I’m sharing the link love today. This is a link to Futility Closet, a blog run by a very nice (and presumably well-educated) guy named Greg Ross. He updates often with lots of odd bits of trivia.
He had a post the other day, discussing the price that was paid to the Native Americans for the […]

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My coworker Jacob shared a neat cell phone tip with me. If you often get solicitations from a particular phone number (especially those annoying automated ones), you might find this useful.
Next time you get a call from a number you’d rather not hear from again, add them to your phone book — maybe with the […]

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Tim on July 23rd, 2008

One hugely important thing in coding is debugging. Unfortunately, a lot of Javascript debugging gets done via alert() calls. This gets awkward quickly, with the alerts affecting timing, and just being annoying if you have to dump large amounts of data out.
Firebug is a great development tool, and has a really handy logging interface that […]

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Tim on July 22nd, 2008

Zombie Feynman got me reading about Feynman, and I came across a great page discussing Feynman’s involvement with the textbook industry. Although it’s funny at times, it’s fairly sad that this is actually the back end of our education system.

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