April 2011
1 post
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January 2011
1 post
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December 2010
5 posts
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Senator Bernie Sanders
Thanks, Bernie.
Now one of the things that we’re going to see going on is that while we struggle with a record breaking deficit and a large national debt; caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, caused by tax breaks for the wealthy, caused by an unpaid for medicare part D prescription drug program, caused by the wall-street bailout; driving up the deficit, driving up the national debt.
...
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JackTard of the Week
Bob Beckel, democratic strategist and all around master of nuance, in an appearance on Fox News recently, had this to say about Julian Assange:
A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a...
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Lieberman for President
I feel bad for all our friends at the State Department and USAID who have been “banned” by their employers from accessing the WikiLeaks site, both at work and on their own home computers.
Essentially, the Federal Government’s logic is that because these cables haven’t officially been declassified, reading them would be breaking the law.
OK
Well, I guess that’s that. I’m glad the Government...
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Pakistan?
I wonder if the American government will ever be able to summon the courage to face the cablegate leaks with the same type of aplomb shown by nations that truly embrace free speech.
Nations like ..wait. What? Oh come on, really? Pakistan? You’ve got to be kidding me.
From Pakistan’s Lahore High Court ruling on whether or not to ban the Wikileaks site:
We must bear the truth, no matter how...
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Executed as Spies
WikiLeaks has been taking a bit of a pounding from the right since it began the release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables last week. Sarah Palin called for the organization’s founder Julian Assange to be treated as a terrorist and described him as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands”. Mike Huckabee, and others in the right wing press, went further and suggested that those involved...
November 2010
1 post
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September 2010
4 posts
2 tags
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Quicksilver
To be a European Christian (the rest of the world might be forgiven for thinking) was to build ships and sail them to any and all coasts not already a-bristle with cannons, make landfall at river’s mouth, kiss the dirt, plant a cross for a flag, scare the hell out of any indigenes with a musketry demo’, and - having come so far, and suffered and risked so much - unpack a shallow basin...
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24 Hours in Shenandoah: Marshall Mountain
Another weekend and another chance to spend 24 hours in Shenandoah. This time I was up on Marshall Mountain in the Northern section of the park. The loop starts at the Jenkins Gap overlook around the 12 mile mark on Skyline Drive. I’ve gone both ways around on this loop and I definitely think coming back on the Appalachian Trail is the way to go. That section of the loop has the best views and...
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August 2010
3 posts
2 tags
AppleBlog Roundup 04
Well, another couple weeks have gone by and it’s time for another roundup of recent articles I’ve written over at TheAppleBlog. Maybe one of these days I’ll figure out a better way to bring all my content together but until then here’s roundup number four.
iPhone HDR: I played around with some HDR apps for the iPhone and tried out the new HDR Pro tools in photoshop CS5....
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24 Hours in Shenandoah: Knob Mountain
I managed to get out for a quick loop hike in Shenandoah last weekend, 24 hours quick to be exact. To me, 24 hours seems to be almost the perfect length of time to be able to enjoy an easy bit of backpacking. I can head out early on a Saturday hike all day, find a nice place to spend the night, hike out in the morning, and still have time Sunday to run errands and get ready for the upcoming week....
July 2010
3 posts
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Heart Sutra
Speaking of being left blank, I’ve been thinking on the Buddhist Heart Sutra quite a bit lately. If you’re not familiar with the specific aspects of Buddhist philosophy represented in this particular sutra I’ll give you the cliff notes.
All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.
It’s essentially all about...
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A Quick Walk
I got out for a quick walk the other day, partly to check out a new trail I found recently and partly to test out the camera in my new phone (iPhone 4). The trail is only about 5 minutes away from my place, so it’s not exactly out in the middle of the wilderness. Being right next door though and only like 4 miles long makes it a great option when the mood strikes in the middle of the day....
June 2010
4 posts
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New/Final Codex
I wrote this plug-in for Google’s Quick Search Box a while back to replicate a bit of functionality from Coda that I lost when I moved over to Espresso. The gist of the plug-in is that it lets you quickly send search queries to documentation sources for things like HTML, CSS, jQery, Python, MySQL, and so on. I do a lot of these kinds of quick looks into documentation as I’m working so having...
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New Home
I’ve been meaning to dig into Tumblr themes for a while now, but I’m a total slacker so the notion’s never progressed beyond a to do item in my next pile, until now. This weekend I decided to dedicate some time to figuring out how it all worked and at least getting the shell of something I like together. After working through the process from scratch I have to say, I like it quite a bit. As far as...
May 2010
3 posts
2 tags
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AppleBlog Roundup 03
Over the last couple of weeks (OK.. so more like months, I’m a bit of a slacker) I’ve written a few posts over at TheAppleBlog and I just wanted to include them here for the sake of completeness. A few of these are on Google Quick Search Box which, while being a great little app, has frustrated me a bit with it’s lack of forward progress in Beta. I’ve recently switched over to...
April 2010
1 post
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Shame On Gizmodo
This is why we can’t have nice stuff. When Engadget originally posted the pics of the allegedly new iPhone HD/4g over the weekend I took it with a big grain of salt. Apple hardware hardly ever leaks. It looked real enough, even though those unsightly seams and that odd volume rocker screamed fake. Ultimately I figured Ihnatko was right and that it was just an knock-off from somewhere in the Far...
March 2010
1 post
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February 2010
1 post
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January 2010
1 post
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December 2009
1 post
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September 2009
1 post
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On The Trail In Shenandoah
I spent last weekend hiking around in Shenandoah National Park and despite having not been hiking for a long time had an absolute blast. The park runs roughly north south for over 100 miles along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains and encompasses nearly 200,000 acres 80,000 of which are protected as wilderness areas under the National Wilderness Preservation System. Skyline drive runs the...
August 2009
1 post
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AppleBlog Roundup 02
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written a few articles over at TheAppleBlog and wanted to include a roundup post to them all here for the sake of completeness:
Convert Your DVD Collection with Fairmount: We’ve all had situations where we’ve needed to exercise our fair use rights and make perfectly legal copies of our own righteously purchased DVDs and Fairmount is here to make that task easier...
July 2009
1 post
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Wikipedia Is Evil
Wikipedia is evil, yeah that’s right evil. The other day I was tooling around in the o’le RSS river of news when I stumbled upon a random tweet from apparent computing legend Daniel Bernstein. Who, though I confess I’d never heard of him before (please don’t make me turn in my geek card), was apparently instrumental in getting software code recognized by the judicial branch as protected speech...
June 2009
4 posts
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Feed a Fever
I’ve gone through a number of different solutions for managing my RSS feeds. It’s been an ongoing evolution from Live Bookmarks to BlogLines to GoogleReader to NetNewsWire to my most recent solution using sync’d versions of NewsFire. I absolutely love NewsFire and lets face it Dave Watanabe knows how to make some beautiful OS X applications.
One simple problem though that all these tools share...
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AppleBlog Roundup 01
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve written a few articles over at TheAppleBlog and wanted to include a roundup post to them all here for the sake of completeness:
Nambu Review: A quick review of the native OS X twitter client Nambu. I like Nambu a lot and it’s got a lot of power built into it. If they ever manage to include FriendFeed support I’d be sold but at the moment I have to admit I’m...
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All Things Apple
So I’ve decided to go ahead and throw in my lot with the good folks over at TheAppleBlog when it comes to my rants and reviews about all things Apple, OS X and the like. You’ll be able to see the articles I contribute over there by going to my Author Archive Page or better yet by grabbing the RSS Feed for the whole site. My first post on Proximity Automation (using Bluetooth and AppleScript to...
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Verified Reporters
I spent some time last night tracking the events unfolding in Iran following the apparent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 48 hours you know that there appears to be widespread doubt about the legitimacy of the election results and that supporters of Ahmadinejad’s chief opponent Mir Hussein Moussavi have been openly clashing with the...
March 2009
1 post
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What Can I Dev For My Country
A couple weeks ago I ran across this post from @corbett3000 about the need for greater civic involvement from the tech community. This was a call to build “stuff that matters” to help the country do more with less, keep our leaders honest and their governance transparent, and fix crap that’s broken.
Maybe it was a kernel of hope tucked away somewhere in my brain from seeing Obama elected, maybe...
February 2009
4 posts
3 tags
QuickPukka
With almost 200 feeds sitting in my RSS reader (Net News Wire) I’ve got a lot of information coming at me everyday. When I see something that I know I’ll want to come back to later I save it as a bookmark on the social bookmarking service delicious. I also use this service to push links to my blog (see the sidebar to the right). To make the process of adding bookmarks a bit easier I’ve been...
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Acceleration Curves
I love OS X. It’s far and away the best operating system I’ve ever used. There are a couple things about it though that have always been a frustration for me. Chief among them is the way movement of the mouse on your desk is translated to movement of the cursor on your screen a process handled by something called the “Acceleration Curve”.
What this curve essentially does is multiply the...
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Pimp Your Quicklook
I’m lucky enough to be able to work on an OS X system at my day job but officially it’s a “Microsoft shop” with most people on Windows and our intranet powered by SharePoint. We store a lot of documents on SharePoint and it’s always a pain in the ass to have to fire up mac office to have a quick look at a .doc or .xls file. To make matters worse there are a lot of Office 2007 files that my version...
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Syncing NewsFire
I just switched all my feed reading over to the newly released 1.6 version of NewsFire and I’m loving it. The interface is gorgeous and the keyboard shortcuts make powering through a large number of feeds a breeze. Add in the new twitter plugin for Safari, subscribe to some key twitter users and you’ve almost rolled your own twitter client.
There was one problem though, no syncing. If I’m at...
January 2009
5 posts
2 tags
Finally
According to our new (if all goes as planned) CIA Director and former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta:
“We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.”
Maybe it’s just me but it almost feels like the last 8 years were just one long blurry night of binge drinking. The...
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Exactly
Nice job boss:
“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers … faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
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FFFFound WordPress Plugin
I’ve re-written my AP Photo plugin to pull in photos from the “everyone” feed on the image bookmarking site FFFFound!. It works essentially the same, just add some styling and perhaps a nice javascript image zoom for a neat little web gallery of interesting pics (see it in action in my sidebar). Thumbnails are added as list items which then link to the full rez photos.
Download the free Plugin...
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Hi-Rez AP/AFP Photos
I’ve been messing around recently with an RSS feed from Scripting News that includes hi resolution images from the Associated Press as enclosures. These are some amazing images of current events from around the world and I have a script setup to automatically download them and replace old ones within a local folder that I point to for a photo screensaver.
It’s a fascinating way to visually see...
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Lights In The Sky
I’ve been a fan of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for a while now so I wasn’t that surprised by the announcement that he was releasing over 400 gigs worth of HD video of the NIN Lights in the sky Tour.
The video from recent shows in Victoria, Portland and Sacramento is all raw footage waiting for the community to edit and re-release as clips or full DVDs.
Well done Trent, I don’t want to...
November 2008
1 post
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Change You Can Believe In
Obama 364 / McCain 173
Good job America, just when I think it can’t get any worse you do something like this. Although I couldn’t vote for him because of the telcom thing I’m sure as hell glad he won.
P.S.: Biden voted against the immunity.