Geeky

Blurring the news in my feed reader

April 23, 2012

As part of my continuing effort to make myself, rather than advertisers who covet my eyeballs and purchasing power, the customer, I took out a premium subscription to Newsblur. It’s an RSS reader that claims to offer “Visual feed reading with intelligence” and I want it to replace Google Reader. Not that there’s anything wrong [...]

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Il mio pomodoro e una gallina

April 11, 2012

Ever a sucker for new productivity porn that will make me effective, successful and attractive to small animals, I’m kicking the tyres of The Pomodoro Technique. In a nutshell: work at something for 25 minutes, resisting all distractions; take a 3-5 minute break; repeat. Every four sessions, take a long break. This all happened because [...]

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A ride around the Roman outskirts

March 24, 2012

View Bike ride 2012-03-18 in a larger map Rome is not a cycle-friendly city. It could be, if the Romans could be persuaded to give up their beloved motor cars, of which, in 2008, there were 2.4 million to 2.5 million people. Not sure whether that is people people, or people old enough to drive. [...]

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Useful links matter to me

March 17, 2012

We’re all guilty sometimes of over linking to our own material, in the belief that this may affect our search engine rankings. The practice is really bad on some ad-farms and joke news sites, where some sort of automatic software creates a scattergun of links, often double underlined, that are generally useless. And, fortunately, easy [...]

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Need a new angle on email

March 13, 2012

Apple told me to move all my stuff to iCloud and so, despite the fact that none of my mobile devices is able to take advantage of the magic that it supposedly represents, I went ahead. Now I have nothing but grief. In fairness, I was warned … GMail, which used to handily collect mail, [...]

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Oi! RoySoc! Do it right!

February 22, 2012

I heard this woman from Southampton University give a talk called History of the Web Part I to the Royal Society, and it was quite good, even though, possibly even because, there were a couple of things I disagreed with. And being a glass half full sort of guy, most of the time, we could [...]

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Science in the Kitchen

February 18, 2012

Spent this morning in the kitchen, doing three things. A new batch of peanut butter cookies. Hypothesis: They’ll be as good or better, made with peanuts finely chopped in my fine chopper instead of peanuts. Method: Follow recipe, but substitute 265 gm finely chopped salted peanuts for 265 gm peanut butter. Results: They are as [...]

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Bread is for real

February 13, 2012

You can follow someone on Twitter and friend them on Facebook, but real friends are people you break bread with. Got that?Original article: My Dinner With Clay Shirky, and What I Learned About Friendship

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How many walled gardens can one man tend?

January 21, 2012

The pressure has been building. At the last count, I was doing stuff online (i.e. sharing content) at 10 different places. And they all seem to require feeding. That’s fine; after all, an online social relationship is no different from one in wetspace. They all need regular grooming. What I find hard to understand, as [...]

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And another thing about Mendeley

January 9, 2012

It’s no picnic. Or is it? I’m impressed with Mendeley’s response to blog posts about it, but I’m not just trolling for comments. Rather, I want help understanding what seems to me to very odd behaviour. So odd, that I took a bunch of screenshots that might help me tell the story. One of the [...]

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Mendeley vs Bookends: No Contest

January 4, 2012

My take on the battle of bibliographic software Time was when managing a reference bibliography required a stack of cards, either plain 3 x 5s or, if you were very technologically advanced, bigger ones with holes punched around the edge, and a secretary or, if you were technologically advanced but lower than pond-scum on the [...]

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Ominous display

December 31, 2011

This does not look good. Not aesthetically, and especially not technically. It is a screenshot of my Mac at 13.36 yesterday. We’ve had some display issues in the past, mostly fixed, at least temporarily, by installing a little gizmo-app that speeds up the fans and keeps things cool. But this is different. The machine froze [...]

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Credit where credit is due

December 29, 2011

All hail Fastweb! I know this is going to annoy some people, and I never thought I’d write the following sentence. Today, Fastweb, purveyors of internet access and telephonic services to the patient, delivered more than they promised. This morning our modem went pfft. With it died the telephone. All connections worked perfectly; power left [...]

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Rethinking freedom in software

December 28, 2011

Another wonderful piece of software has landed in my lap. Workflowy (gack!) is “just” an online form to, you know, write shit down. I’ve been a GTD freak for a while now, not obsessively, but enough to get me through my days. And I’ve always found that the old hipster PDA served me better than [...]

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How Yahoo helped me regain my love

December 24, 2011

The preceding post is something I am inordinately proud of. Doesn’t look like much, does it? But trust me, it is. A while ago I discovered Scoop.it, which makes content curation rather easy. Content curation is, of course, nothing new. I like to think that’s exactly what I’ve been doing here and at the other [...]

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xkcd: Privacy

November 28, 2011

The main reason I’m linking to this xkcd, Privacy, is that the mouseover text uses the exact same joke that Sydney Brenner used when the 1975 Asilomar meeting decided to put a temporary halt to recombination in the laboratory.

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Getting geeky again

November 13, 2011

Social media are in turmoil, and I’m riding out the storm. Not to be too dramatic or anything, but a lot of cheese has been moved around, and I’m trying to cope. First off, Google disabled the social aspects of Google Reader, likely to send us all scurrying to Google Plus. So the little things [...]

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iMovie 11 tip: static framing after Ken Burns zoom

November 9, 2011

I had a lot of trouble trying to combine a Ken Burns gentle zoom with static framing after the zoom. It is easy enough to split a clip and apply Ken Burns to the first clip. The problem is getting the crop in the second clip to match exactly with the End framing of the [...]

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If you love something, set it free…

September 23, 2011

Facebook’s most recent set of changes prompted me to explore Google+ and if nothing else it is a lot easier on the eye, probably because I don’t have all that many circle members, or whatever they’re called, yet. Of course, ultimately one wants everything duplicated everywhere so I wandered over to my curated topic at [...]

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Is there a thermodynamicist in the house?

August 31, 2011

We recently took delivery of a new immersion water heater, the old one having given up the ghost after less than four years. Two problems arise, one of which I don’t really care about. I seem to remember, long ago in a distant galaxy, frequently getting embroiled over cocoa and crumpets on whether leaving an [...]

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Well whaddaya know? I’m curating content!

August 7, 2011

When Luigi first told me he was having fun with Scoop I flashed back to my favourite, and eerily prescient, board game. But no, this was Scoop.it, a reasonably simple system for curating content. WTF? you say. All the smart kids are doing it, not merely finding stuff out there on the web, saving and [...]

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Markdown is the new Word 5.1

May 21, 2011

We are legion, the folks who recognize that the Mac is not a Typewriter, and yet want — crave, actually — a blank piece of carbonless copy paper with its vertical lines at 40 and 60 characters on which we honed our skills, such as they are. So when I read Kevin Lipe’s Guest Post at Forkbombr, [...]

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Arts meets science; art maybe wins, but loses my respect

April 17, 2011

Björn over at 5¢ense points to a brief report, that the godlike Craig Venter was slapped with a cease-and-desist by the estate of James Joyce, for daring to encode a Joyce quote in the DNA of the microbe Venter built. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” What [...]

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Coins aren’t random, thumbs are

February 1, 2011

Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the [...]

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