Category: Ramblings

  • Two Things All Weather Apps Get Wrong

    Two Things All Weather Apps Get Wrong

    I haven’t tried all the weather apps, but all the ones I’ve tried get these two things wrong. I’ve been trying to find or come up with a term for the first one, “Cold Front Day” is probably the best I’ve found and it helps to have a name for it. While we’re on the…

  • Christmas Songs Are a Huge Scam

    This morning my 5 year old was singing Let It Snow and I realized something. A lot of Christmas songs start playing in November, but are about the snow that (in Michigan) we usually don’t see until January. Frosty the Snowman? Dude is not getting built until February. Let It Snow? The weather outside is…

  • Workaround for IKEA Bekant Sit/Stand Desks

    Workaround for IKEA Bekant Sit/Stand Desks

    When I set up my home office in 2015, I knew I wanted a motorized standing desk. The easier it is to raise and lower, the less commitment there is in standing up. The less commitment, the easier it is to stand up. At the time, IKEA had just released their Bekant Sit/Stand desk for…

  • How to Install Movable Type 2.64 on macOS Sierra

    I started this blog in May of 2003. I had a LiveJournal at one point, and even wrote my own blog system to teach myself a new language called PHP. But this blog, 90% Crud, started then. I used Movable Type, a Perl CGI application. I wrote some stuff, met some good folks and was inspired…

  • Please stop pretending you know how much bandwidth BitTorrent uses

    I’ve seen this mentioned a lot when people talk about BitTorrent, but this bit from an announcement of BitTorrent 4.20 happened to push me over the apathy threshold: It’s no secret that bandwidth concerns have been one of the more pressing issues surrounding the BitTorrent community. CacheLogic, which provides P2P caching solutions for ISP networks,…

  • From the Onion to the NYTimes

    Do you remember my Point / Counterpoint post from September, where I pitted changes at The Onion against changes at The New York Times? Probably not, but thanks to hyperlinking you can pretend you knew all about it. Anyway, the New York Times, obviously concerned with my feelings on the matters, took it upon themselves…

  • Mechanical Turk data point

    While this shouldn’t be considered a definitive guide to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, my friend posted his experiences to his private blog and I thought I’d share (with his permission, of course). First off, if you’re not familiar with the service it’s a way to pool human talent over the Internet. There are some tasks that…

  • Buy.com followup

    I’ve got a followup to my earlier post about Buy.com. My girlfriend submitted a complaint to Michigan’s Attorney General’s office on their website describing her experience. They then contacted Buy.com, who decided not only to finally ship her bag but they also gave it to her for free! It was certainly a good resolution on…

  • del.icio.us search and tag tip

    Searching del.icio.us is slow, finding links by tags is fast. Always look for a bookmark by tag first, then search when that fails, and then fix the tags. For instance, I was looking for Notes on developing a web service API so I typed http://del.icio.us/revgeorge/webservices into my address bar. When it didn’t show up, I…

  • Point / Counterpoint

    POINT Here’s a bunch of archives By The Onion America’s Finest News Source The Onion has opened up its archives to the world for free. We used to think that charging for access to the archives was a good idea, until we did it. Our accountants have compared the ad revenue for non-protected content against…