I wrote up a quick-and-dirty “User Style” to make Twitter not suck so bad. Now it looks like this:
Here’s how to make it work on Firefox: Install Stylish and restart Firefox. Go to twitter.com and log in. Click the Stylish icon in the bottom-left corner, choose Write New Style -> For This Page. Give it a name of your choice and replace the text with the contents of this text file. Hit save. Enjoy.
Lift is a free iPhone app which helps you achieve daily goals. It’s pretty and it’s simple: You make a list of habits that you want to achieve every day (say “Floss” or “Exercise” for example). Then you go them and check them off as you accomplish them. Over time, your chart fills up with little green dots that mark how frequently you achieved your goals.
It’s essentially the grown-up equivalent of those little sticker charts that parents and elementary school teachers use to motivate kids. It’s free for the iPhone, with Android and web versions promised for the future.
Much and more has been written about Google executing Google Reader. That decision has eroded the last of my trust and good will for the company and has forced me to seek an alternative RSS service.
After some research, I went with Fever, for many reasons:
Two caveats: First, you’ll need web hosting. System requirements and installation difficulty are similar to WordPress. Second, Fever is not free: It costs a one-time fee of $30.
I am pretty impressed with Fever so far. It works smoothly, imported my old data without much fuss, and syncs with Reeder just as I had hoped it would
It also has some neat features of its own. The main selling point is the Hot list. Fever has you break your feeds into two categories. “Kindling” are your must-read feeds, the ones where you want to read every single post. “Sparks” are low-priority or high-volume feeds where you don’t necessarily care about every entry.
Kindling is handled pretty much the same way Google Reader handles feeds, while Sparks are kept separate. They are combined in the Hot List: Links that several of your feeds point to are ranked higher, highlighting most talked about stuff. It’s a pretty neat way to handle the information overload you might otherwise experience with a traditional feed reader.
Overall, I think it’ll work for me. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone since it does require a measure of tech-savviness to set up, but if you are able and willing to set it up it’s a worthy replacement for Google Reader.
I’ve got a first generation Kindle Fire. But I was frustrated by the Amazon software: You can’t install apps from the Google Play store, and a lot of features that other Android tablets have are either disabled or crippled.
So, thanks to the hard work of the folks down at the XDA Developers forum, I replaced the software with the Android 4.2.1, the same software that runs the new Nexus 7 tablets.
I have found the Android experience to be superior in almost every way; the only thing I’ve given up is the ability to watch Instant Watch videos and the ability to use the Amazon Prime Lending Library, two features I never used anyway. In exchange, I now have a full-featured tablet.
Here’s how I did it (mostly for my own reference if I ever need to do it again); no guarantees that this will work for you:
Getting these installed is the trickiest part of the process. Here are the details:
if not EXIST "%userprofile%\.android\" ( mkdir "%userprofile%\.android\" )
copy drivers\kindle\adb_usb.ini "%userprofile%\.android\adb_usb.ini"
Boot into the TWRP recovery by turning off the Kindle. Turn it back on, and then tap the power button once the Kindle Fire logo pops up to switch into Recovery Mode.
Push the Back Up button in the TWRP menu to back up your current data. For this and the next few steps, you can also follow along with this guide; he’s got screenshots.
Factory reset your tablet by tapping Wipe, then Factory Reset. THIS WILL ERASE EVERYTHING. MAKE SURE YOU DID THE BACKUP STEP FIRST IF YOU CARE ABOUT ANY OF THE DATA ON YOUR TABLET.
Go back to the main menu and choose Mount; this will make the Kindle show up as a flash drive on your PC. You’re going to need to copy over 3 zip files:
Once you’ve gotten those zip files copied over to the Kindle, unmount it from your computer, then go to Install and choose all three of those files.
Once installed, it will give you the option to “Wipe Cache/Dalvik.” Do that.
Reboot the kindle. If all went well, you’re now running Android 4.2.1 on your Kindle! If it did not, at least you made a backup, right?
I’ve been catching up on Podcastle episodes lately and there have been some excellent stories in there. I can’t say too much about the stories without spoiling them but I’ll try to describe them briefly:
Outlander was just fun and clever, a tale of a barbarian nobleman who joins high society.
I thought the concept behind Another Word for Map is Faith was fascinating, the idea of missionary-cartographers who bend the landscape to match their maps.
Fable From a Cage probably should have been run on the horror podcast Pseudopod instead. It’s a dark story, about a thief and his encounter with a faerie.
The Axiom of Choice is a take on the old Choose Your Own Adventure stories I read as a kid. It may take a couple minutes to get used to the reading, but the reward is one of the best stories that Podcastle has run in a long time (and there have been a lot of good ones!).
I also loved We Never Talk About My Brother. A story about Jacob and Esau, but not the ones from the Bible. The reader really adds to this one; the midwestern drawl is perfect for the small-town narrator of the story.
I’m currently listening to a reading of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Steve Anderson has read a bunch of stories for the Escape Artist podcasts and it’s not hard to hear why they keep bringing him back.
Good work, Escape Artists!
I just figured out something that my little python script is really good for.
If This Then That is a neat service which connects a whole bunch of web services together with a really simple interface. One of the actions available in ifttt is to create a text file in Dropbox. Combine that with my little python script, and now ifttt can print to your GFR printer.
As a proof of concept, I just created a rule that will automatically print anything I star in Google Reader. But you could do all kinds of stuff. You could, for example:
That’s right, I can now send text messages to my GFR printer. This is pretty awesome.
Here is the story of a spectacular disaster in progress, being funded by my state tax dollars.
Former Major League Baseball pitcher Curt Schilling owns a video game studio called 38 Studios. They recently moved from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, lured by a $75 million dollar loan from the state. This $75 million dollars is more than half of the money Rhode Island allocated for job creation.
Mistake #1: Spending our limited budget on a risky venture like creating a video game.
Mistake #2: Overpaying for the jobs this venture created: The math works out to $260,417 per job actually created. They could have created four or five times as many jobs simply by hiring people directly. Our roads are terrible here; if the goal is to create jobs, why not just hire a thousand people to work on our roads?
So people were already pretty upset about it, but they were working on their new MMO (code named Project Copernicus) and all seemed to be going well.
Then about a week ago the news broke that not only could 38 Studios not make payment on their loan, but they also couldn’t make their payroll. So the local news here has been talking about how the governor and his staff were in meetings to try to keep the company alive so they could keep paying their loan. (As the old saying goes, if you owe the bank $75 dollars, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $75 million dollars, the bank has a problem.)
Things were obviously not going well, but hopes were high. 38 Studios released a video showing off the work done so far on Project Copernicus, which looked pretty impressive.
Then two days ago, 38 Studios laid off their entire staff.
Oh, but it gets worse.
38 Studios also had a employee relocation program. Employees were told that they could move to RI and the company would sell their old houses. They didn’t. So some of these freshly unemployeed people also have surprise second mortgages!
All of that to say: Rhode Island is about own an MMO. Which could be kind of cool.
If you’re interested in reading more about this train wreck, Metafilter user ericb has been posting several excellent links about the story over the past few days.
Ever since seeing this Microprinter post I’ve been fascinated by the idea of having a thermal receipt printer to play with. But they were always a bit too pricey for a toy, and I wasn’t sure that even if I got one I’d be able to make it work.
Then I discovered the Printer project over at Go Free Range. James Adam had already done most of the work for me. He’s got detailed instructions on how to put this together with a cheap thermal printer from Adafruit, an Arduino with an ethernet shield, and a few LED’s, resistors, and wires.
What I’ve done is written a python script that takes a folder full of text files, converts them to HTML via Markdown, and then sends them to one of these free range printers. Here it is in action:
Here’s the script. It includes the Markdown python library and all the other libraries are standard, so you shouldn’t need to track down any dependencies. You’ll just need to update the variables in the printtxt.py script to point to your folders and your printer URL.
I’ve pointed the script at a folder in my Dropbox, which means that I can save these text files from anywhere and have them print out automatically. I’m also using Hazel on a Mac Mini to automate running the script as soon as a new file arrives in the To Print folder, but you could just as easily run the script via chron or the Windows Schedule Task program.
What will I use this for? I don’t know yet. But I think it’s pretty neat.
I wrote a little python script to help people get motivated to write more*. It compares the word count of a text file (by default “mywork.txt”) to a target number; if you’ve exceeded your target, it will congratulate you and download a recent picture of a kitten from flickr.
I wrote this over a couple hours, so it’s mostly rough edges. It depends on having wc and wget installed (which you already do if you have linux). I know it works on Python 2.7.2, but it should work on anything > Python 2.5.
Installation instructions:
1. Install the Python flickrapi module (on Ubuntu, sudo apt-get install python-flickrapi)
2. Download and extract this motivator script zip file.
3. Get a Flickr API key; it’s super easy, just sign into flickr and fill out a 2 line form.
3. Edit the .motivator file with your target # of words and with your Flickr API key. (Can’t find .motivator? try pushing ctrl-h to show hidden files if you’re using Ubuntu.)
4. Write more words into mywork.txt than your target number of words.
5. From the command line, go to the motivator folder and run “python motivator.py”
6. Collect your kitten photograph from the rewards folder.
Don’t like kittens (you monster)? You can change the rewardtag variable in .motivator to whatever flickr tag you like.
Enjoy!
* Actually, it was more to play with Python for an evening. I will probably never touch this again, but it was fun and, who knows, maybe someone will get something out of it.
