Braintube

Birdhouse Snake

Matthew — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:18:07 +0000

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

Matthew — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:19:10 +0000

Using a Monome to control video and audio.

Kaossilator

Matthew — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:01:42 +0000

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

History Meme

Matthew — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:57:24 +0000

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

Matthew — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:32:20 +0000

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

Posting Styles

Matthew — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:57:14 +0000

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

Matthew — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:31:38 +0000

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

Matthew — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:00:55 +0000

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

Matthew — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 02:26:06 +0000

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

Matthew — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:36:04 +0000

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

Steak Night

Matthew — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:52:45 +0000

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

Matthew — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:49:24 +0000

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

Matthew — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:31:54 +0000

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

Marching Zeppelin

Matthew — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:41:43 +0000

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

Marching Radiohead

Matthew — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:55:40 +0000

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

New Deskbar Plugin

Matthew — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:33:17 +0000

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

Matthew — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:13:16 +0000

Write more later, typing one handed.

Cottonmouth?

Matthew — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 22:43:02 +0000

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

Matthew — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:59:29 +0000

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

Matthew — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 02:20:33 +0000

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.

Voting

Matthew — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:28:50 +0000

Had a perfectly normal voting experience today. People were taking an extra long time to vote, however. Not sure if that was because of the new machines or because of the large amount of items to be voted on, 8 screens total. Since the new machines have absolutely no paper trail, I have no way to know if what I voted for is what was actually recorded.

I did like how a print out, taped to the wall, of the machines being in a zero vote ready state, signed by all the poll workers and the tiewrapped flash card on the machine itself is supposed to make me feel all safe and confident.

OpenID

Matthew — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:08:21 +0000

You can now sign in with an OpenID when you leave comments on the blog. Why did I added this? To do my little part to try and break some of the ID silos.

If you have a LiveJournal account you already have an OpenID account.

Chesspark

Matthew — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:49:19 +0000

Tofu’s mystery project, a jabber based chess game/environment, finally went beta yesterday. It’s called chesspark, go check it out.

Latest hacks

Matthew — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:49:17 +0000

Lately I’ve fallen in love with Deskbar(think OSX Quicksilver). I put together a couple of plugins to make it more productive for me.
Also upgraded my laptop and desktop at home to EdgyEft. Edgy continues Gnomes slow steady progression of polish, speed and simplicy. It rocks!

In other software news, Brian pushed out an amazing IMAP interface to gMail.

Blog Update

Matthew — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:32:14 +0000

Pardon any oddities, an upgrade is in progress so that I can play with Widgets and maybe simplify some things.

Vacation

Matthew — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 01:26:19 +0000

Made the 8+ hour treck to the Outer Banks for the second time in a few years for a vaction with some friends. A great time was had by all. Some pictures can be found in my Flickr stream.

Spin Cycle

Matthew — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:19:58 +0000

Our clothes washer, a 12 year old, never given us a bit of trouble, beast of a machine, sprang a leak this week. It was the kind of leak that’s hard to fix, so it wouldn’t really be worth reparing on a 12 year old piece of equipment.
As I began a search for a replacement, I was amazed at the active “washer” community that I found online. Forums, FAQ’s, reviews, video, pictures, modifications, restorations and even this amazing site. I happened upon a forum post that linked to a video of almost the exact washer I was intereted in.

Freebird + Washing machines = love!

I imagined all the wives in the other room chatting while the guys all go to the laundry to watch and video this thing run. The 1000RPM spin cycle is mesmerizing.

Switchers….

Matthew — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:07:04 +0000

Some people are finally getting it.

Spelling Bee

Matthew — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:00:06 +0000

Given that the recently completed Scripps National Spelling Bee is open to all English speaking countries around the world, one would assume that the language used for the Bee would be English no? So why is it that more than a few of the words are obviously not English words?