A Mouse
I'm now sporting a shiny new computer and since it doesn't come with a built-in trackpad, I need a mouse. I have a mouse, but for reasons I won't go into, I want a different mouse. My preferences are as follows:
1) laser is
Topic
tech
A collection of 171 posts
Software is Hard & Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline
As I impatiently wait for the FedEx guy to deliver my new computer, I've been reading some articles that you probably won't care about at all, but I don't want to lose them, so they're going here for safe-keeping.
First, this article
Counting in English
Just now I was sorting through my old projects, zipping up the ones I haven't touched in forever, for archival in the dusty, dark corners of some external storage device. And I came across EnglishCounter. A while back a friend of mine was about to interview for a
iButton Part II
The iButton (DS1922L), USB reader (DS9490B#) and environmental capsule thingy (DS9107+) arrived today. I had to dig into the source code of the example programs to figure out how to access the logger - entirely because they're idiots, as it turns out. But, after that, it was easy
iButton
I just ordered an iButton temperature logger (looks like a large watch battery) and a USB reader. Set at a 15 minute interval, the iButton should be able to record the temperature for over forty days without exhausting its internal memory. The battery is rated to last for a decade.
GPS Stagnation
As far as I can tell, hand-held trail-style GPS units peaked with the Garmin GPSMap 60csx. Pictured is my old GPSMap 60cs (no 'x') on the top of Mauna Loa. It is rugged, beautiful and functional.
Since its release Garmin has produced iPhone-style GPS units with touch screens
Words
I wrote an Objective-C program to parse all of my iChat log files (necessary because the format is a binary property list that I really didn't want to have to parse by hand) which go back to early 2005 (the pre-2005 logs are backed up elsewhere and in
Due to years of POP3 use and a rough transition to IMAP, I ended up with thousands of duplicate emails scattered across hundreds of mailboxes. Much like my desire to replace my boss at the AJC with a small shell script, I reduced this task to something similar: mail.pl.
iChat
A couple versions back, Apple updated iChat so that instead of just storing each chat log in a "flat" directory, it organized them by date. Of course, it didn't go through the potentially thousands of chat logs you already had and update their organization accordingly. So
Check This Action Out
Okay, so, I added a Postgres database (which has support for PostGIS) to the system. I've got a "location" table and a "tracklog" table.
In the location table I added about a dozen points-of-interest, including McKinley base camp, the five other camps and the