Author: splicer

Posted onBlahg

Apple sneakily thwarts own attempt to serve users

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The head­line is mis­lead­ing, inas­much as it is dif­fi­cult to believe that this was either acci­den­tal or an attempt to serve users. «Sneak­i­ly» is sort of mis­lead­ing too. «Bril­liant­ly decep­tive» fits bet­ter. Makes for a real­ly awk­ward head­line, though.

One of the con­tentious aspects of Apple’s App Store (both the iOS and OS X fla­vors) is the lack of sup­port for appli­ca­tion upgrade paths. This has some short-term cus­tomer ben­e­fits; for exam­ple, app upgrades are usu­al­ly free. When a devel­op­er … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Crowdfunding can be beautiful

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I’ve seen some inter­est­ing kick­starter-style cam­paigns; it’s always nice to see what kinds of good­ies some­one will come up with to enroll peo­ple in their projects. These kinds of pre-fund­ing dri­ves are an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get peo­ple excit­ed about a project and put on dis­play one’s pas­sion. A dry invest­ment prospec­tus might get the big back­ing, but one real­ly has to have a com­pelling and acces­si­ble idea in order to get a lot of peo­ple to throw in $10… Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

5:04

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If twen­ty-five years and a day ago you had asked me whether a seis­mic event mea­sur­ing 6.9 on the Richter scale would change my life, I am sure the answer would have been «of course.»

Two days lat­er, I would have laughed and said it was sil­ly, that it was just an earth­quake. While a lit­tle excit­ing it was­n’t some­thing that changed me. There were oth­er peo­ple whose lives were real­ly and direct­ly affect­ed by the Loma Pri­eta … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

I don’t want to pay my PG&E bill

by 4 Comments on I don’t want to pay my PG&E bill

A lit­tle over three months ago there was sup­pos­ed­ly a gas leak some­where in the neigh­bor­hood. A Pacif­ic Gas & Elec­tric tech­ni­cian came in to my apart­ment and turned the gas off, and then over the next cou­ple of weeks there were work­ers (not from PG&E) around the build­ing. At one point they tore a hole in my bed­room wall and left it there for days.

Even­tu­al­ly an inspec­tor came in and signed off that the sys­tem was safe­ly fixed. The … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

Saorsa!

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As the Unit­ed States cel­e­brates 238 years of inde­pen­dence from Britain, Scot­land is approach­ing the impor­tant deci­sion whether to no longer be a part of the Unit­ed King­dom. On the 18th of Sep­tem­ber, Scots will go to the polls to vote on a ref­er­en­dum on inde­pen­dence.

I can­not pre­tend to have enough knowl­edge of pol­i­tics in Scot­land to know whether becom­ing a neigh­bor to rather than a mem­ber of the Unit­ed King­dom is good for Scot­land or good … Read the rest

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Posted onOpinionated Junk

How to celebrate Independence Day

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There are of course a num­ber of ways in which Amer­i­cans tra­di­tion­al­ly spend the anniver­sary of the sign­ing of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, many of which have noth­ing to do with the sig­nif­i­cance of the found­ing of this nation, or for which the sig­nif­i­cance has been for­got­ten along the way.

Now, a day off is a day off, and I don’t want to be the one to spoil any­one’s bar­be­cue. You can’t real­ly go wrong in my book by spend­ing the … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

SSL on a Beaglebone Black: balancing performance with security

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I’ve recent­ly set up a local serv­er on a Bea­gle­bone Black, which is a cred­it-card sized com­put­er with a 1GHz ARM Cor­tex-A8 proces­sor. I’m using it as a cloud serv­er to sync my cal­en­dar and con­tacts, hav­ing moved the own­Cloud instance (men­tioned the oth­er day) from my host­ed VPS to my local network.

I cre­at­ed a self-signed cer­tifi­cate author­i­ty and an SSL cert for the serv­er and dis­cov­ered that, con­trary to most of my expe­ri­ence run­ning … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Owning my own data

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I final­ly got sick and tired of the sync dance with Apple and Google not want­i­ng to talk to one anoth­er. I use a Mac but I also have an iPad and since recent­ly I now have an Android phone. I had been sync­ing with iCloud and a long time ago I import­ed all my con­tacts into Google, but I haven’t had sync on that for quite a while.

After tear­ing my hair out try­ing to come up with a way … Read the rest

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Why I’m not upgrading to Omnifocus 2

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I like Omni­fo­cus1 a lot. I can’t say that I’ve mas­tered it to the point where it has ful­ly become a trust­ed repos­i­to­ry for my tasks, but it is use­ful for keep­ing track of the things I have to do. The new ver­sion looks great. I got the demo ver­sion to test out before buy­ing the upgrade and it is a big improve­ment. The price tag is some­what high but in my opin­ion it’s a worth­while upgrade.

So why … Read the rest

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Posted onBlahg

Bagged my first Messier

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Two nights ago I went out with the tele­scope to look at the Moon and the plan­ets. Right now the moon is so bright and late­ly the air has been so hazy that even though I would like to start look­ing for oth­er kinds of objects, it’s got to wait for some time that I can get up into the hills and away from the City. But I end­ed out there until after the Moon had not prop­er­ly set but … Read the rest

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