I came across an old LifeHacker article Get Shit Done Blocks Distracting Web Sites So You Can Do As the Name Instructs, that mentions a productivity script, get-shit-done. So I went to the github repository only to discover that the Python script was no longer functional. I didn't have permission to fix the script at the site, so here's a quick ( Read more... )

Yesterday my daughter in the fifth grade got the following homework assignment "arrange the digits one through nine into a nine-digit prime number." (Note, since zero wasn't included, it's not really a pandigital number ( Read more... )

My list of addresses has made its way from a physical address book, to a Palm Pilot, to Microsoft Outlook, to Google Contacts to the iPhone Contacts app. Along the way, each of the transitions has played fast and loose with the mappings of the individual fields ( Read more... )

My Remote Backup Script is working nicely. After the backup, it writes some status to a file, "rsync_completed.txt ( Read more... )

Dreamhost offers a personal backup service.  Here are some notes on what I did to get it working from my Microsoft Windows Vista system.

Install All Required Cygwin Modules
First, I installed any missing required modules for cygwin.  At first, I had trouble with ssh, because it complained it couldn't find cygssp-0.  Using cygcheck confirmed the ( Read more... )

Four services I use changed their APIs on me last week.  Four.  What the hey, Internet?

TechCrunch

They migrated to the Disqus commenting system.  In the process of doing so, they broke a feature of their RSS feed.  Their feed has the element for each item, and it used to contain the correct number of comments.

I'm too busy to have to read each ( Read more... )

I carpool with a friend in a nearby building to the climbing gym. To decide who drives, we play email roshambo. The HTML code for the Rock/Paper/Scissors choice is presented below:

Rock
Paper
Scissors

We've done this for years, and we each end up driving about 50% of the time, with a few short streaks breaking up the routine. I decided ( Read more... )

Wow, it's hard to believe that even in 2010 the good folks at Amazon are still blocking word-of-mouth advertising via lifestream.

A little history: A lifestream is a voluntary record of your activities online.  Generally they're made from Atom and RSS feeds.  Those feeds generally are lists of dates and urls, so that you can make a note that "at ( Read more... )

I haven't really seen this spelled out in a really clear manner on the web, so let me help out. YouTube's got useful programmatic feeds. You can specify a feed for a user's videos like:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/communitychannel/uploadsRead more... )

Yeah, I know that that subject text is hard to read. Blame it on the insomnia. I like the LiveJournal them "Expressive" by Jared MacPherson, but one thing that bugs me about it is that list items at the top of the post tend to overlap with the userpic.

Here's an example:


( Read more... )