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... )

 Over at my other blog, I wrote the postmortem to the project I've been working on for the past week.  The project didn't go as well as I had hoped, but I wrote the postmortem anyway, maybe for the closure, maybe as a cautionary tale.

I called it "Prettiest Little QR Code Ever."  Well, that reflects my initial hopes for the project more than the ( Read more... )

Gah! There's way too much to do, and so little time. All I can do at the moment is document what I need to get done before vacation. And even then, I was torn between documenting it here, or at my new experimental Habari blog at david.dlma.com. What am I going to do with that blog? (I treat it like some people treat their Moleskines. It's too ( Read more... )

Hypothetically speaking ( again), suppose you bought Bonnie Pink's beautiful ballad "Water Me" on iTunes.  No, wait, scratch that.  At Amazon.  No, wait, scratch that, too.  Neither place sells it.  Story of my life.

So you fly to Japan, buy a digital copy, and fly back.

They you decide that you want to sync your iTunes library with your OpenTape ( Read more... )

Installing PyGreSQL isn't trivial, especially on Dell computers.  Here's a recipe that worked for me and Python 2.5:

1. Download and install postgresql-8.3.5-2-windows.exe  (You shouldn't need the whole install.)
2. Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\lib to your PATH for libpq.dll.
3. Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\bin to your PATH for ssleay32.dll.
4. Hide ( Read more... )

I've got a new feature in my lifestream, but I don't know how to expose it. Currently, the lifestream entries look like this:


( Read more... )

I'm really proud of my lifestream. Originally I got the idea from Jeremy Keith. (And I use a subset of his style. I intended to use my own style, but I simply love his, and I don't have any design skill.) A lifestream is an aggregation of your user activity feeds from across the internet. Essentially, it can be thought of as an automatic ( Read more... )