Monochromatic Outlook

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.

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.

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 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.

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 wouldn’t I buy the upgrade?

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 was at least behind some trees, and decided to begin my hunt for the Messier objects.

There has been a little controversy over the case of Lane v Sabine Parish and the question of whether a teacher telling a kid that his family’s religion is «stupid» is unconstitutional. One side says the Constitution provides «separation of church and state» (words which do not appear in the Constitution) and the other side says that the idea of such separation has been taken farther than the Founders intended.

I’ve been wanting RonPaulCoin(RPC) for some time. I’m not bullish on the currency, in fact, I think it’s a bad idea. Naming a currency after a personality, especially a living one (Teslacoin could be kind of cool) is a terrible idea. But especially because Ron Paul is such an anti-fiat-currency goldbug, I thought it would be funny to have one RonPaulCoin.

It seems a little strange to refer to Das Keyboard as «the Das Keyboard» because of course «das» means «the». It’s something like asking for the «hot salsa picante sauce», except that «keyboard» is not German for «keyboard», placing Das Keyboard firmly in the realm of branding. Das Keyboard isn’t even made by a German company—the keyboards are manufactured in Taiwan and they are designed and sold by a company in Austin Texas.¹