Did you know Google runs a free and open image resizing service? I certainly didn’t. While lazily poking around the Google+ HTML I found an interesting thing: for resizing post images on the fly, G+ uses an open API endpoint. That might come in handy at some point in the future when prototyping this or that, so jotting down some notes felt like a good idea. If you know more about this API, let me know, please!
“Awesome” is the new “good”. “Amazing” is the new “nice”. “X totally destroyed/killed Y” is the new “Y is slightly inconvenienced by X”. “The best thing ever” is the new “I’ll be amused by this for the next 2 minutes." “A new, fun way to do XYZ” is the new “Let me waste your precious time”. Those over-excited fucksticks broke my favourite language.
Standing up for your truths, videogame movie adaptions, videogames violence, the history of Boing Boing and a paraplegic woman controlling robotic limbs with her brain. Sanding slippery slopes. “Never Lie About Who You Really Are” by NPR’s Dan Pallotta is a strong essay for not letting things slide. It may be tempting to just ignore stupidity and ignorance coming my way, but ultimately someone has to pay a price, either me (by dying a little bit inside) or someone else (think customer care people having to deal with bugs/oversights in software or some such).
Counting those Stephen Colberts, new spacesuits, stem cell research tripling mice life spans, and the mystery of the dark night sky explained. One of the great satirists of our time: How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?: An enjoyable look at one of my favorite satirists. Towards the end there’s a short excerpt from the long list of his “exploits” — it’s quite astounding, really. It’s Buzz Lightyear! NASA’s Z-1 spacesuit prototype looks familiar.
Your favourite new Dropbox tool, gun control in Japan, why Germany is still on top, Python-less docco, Instagram, and a video short about Earth seen from space. I’ve built a thing you can buy. It’s called Servus and is a quick-upload Dropbox tool for Mac that supports custom themes for your uploads' preview pages. There is a 14-day trial, and until the end of days I have the aptly named APOCALYP-SALE 2012 going on.
Building a fire-and-forget ad blocker using OpenDNS. I am an avid Xbox Live user. More to the point, I’m an avid Xbox Live Gold account owner for a number of years by now. So, I’ve paid for the console, I’m paying for all my games, and I pay an ongoing monthly fee for the connectivity, experience, whatever you want to call it. Still, Microsoft —proprietor of this fine service— thinks it’s entirely sensible to put ads in the frontend, or show Kinect ads before videos.
It’s the godsdamn console wars all over again, I swear. So today Apple might/will/should announce the iPhone 5. Which, of course, means there’ll be a hilarious avalanche of delightful “art” by curiously insecure1 Android users, just like this one: Haha, it’s funny because it’s utter bullshit. I guess Apple users are from Mars, Android users are from Venus!!!1 Or something. Bloody hell, I’m already sick and tired of the predictable Apple user bashing.
The Saga continues, or: Goodbye Calepin, hello Jekyll. A few weeks ago word got around that Calepin, the Dropbox-based blog service I used, was going to close soon. Luckily, all my posts were plain text files on my Mac already (well, Markdown files), so I was much calmer this time around as I knew it wouldn’t mean as much work as last time. Still, it meant I’d have to move yet again, and after looking around without finding anything that suited me1, I hunkered down and tried to come up with a setup that wouldn’t annoy me (much).
Bash one-liners, Flickr vs Yahoo!, low-innovation internet, draft posts in jekyll, a great zombie-related short. This is useful. “Bash One-Liners Explained” is laying out in some detail the hows, whats and whys of bash’s power in a number of examples. Part I deals with files, and I’ve learned a few new tricks! Bookmarked. This is depressing. I started at Yahoo just a few months after Yahoo! had snatched up Flickr, and I remember being happy about them doing it, for they were “the good guys”.
Yo dawg I herd you like installers so we put an installer inside your installer so you can install while you install. Oh hey, there’s a new Adobe Flash Player release for Mac. Wonderful. Naturally, the download package is a DMG file (a disk image); you double-click it after downloading, that’ll mount a new “drive”, and there’s the installer app. Unfortunately, the suave bastards at Adobe’s Mac division are too cool for school, so the installer app is not just a plain old Mac installer app, no siree.
Ssssh, it’s okay. It’s not an insult. At some point in the past I’ve decided to follow you on Twitter Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other social network, because you appeared to be a person whose postings I might be interested in. But recently you’ve noticed me unfollowing you. Now you’re confused/sad/angry. Don’t be. I am just following my three simple rules. You may unfollow me at any given time, because what I post might not be your cup of tea.
Dev HTTP Client, Calepin closing, Facebook dick move #2754, shoelace knots, dubstep agriculture. Bloody useful. Dev HTTP Client is a Google Chrome extension to "[e]asily construct custom HTTP requests, save them permanently, take advantage of variables and contexts." Comes with lots of neat features such as response syntax highlighting (HTML/XML/JSON) and image previews. Calepin is closing shop. The blogging service I use for this here blog is called Calepin, and I like it a lot (as mentioned before).
How to get super-ripped without leaving your chair. TL;DR: I’m doing table push-ups in my coffee breaks. I’ve mentioned on Twitter the other day that a few weeks ago I’ve started a rather casual office fitness routine. Some people were actually asking about it, so I think a quick blog post is in order. First up: what I describe here works for me. YMMV. Okay? Cool. Basically, my day job is to sit on my ass all day long, hunched over a laptop, typing like a rabid monkey.
Great game, great series, no happy endings, many people outraged. MASS EFFECT SPOILERS AHEAD, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. Last night I finished the Mass Effect 3, the last part of an exceptional scifi trilogy. Up until this point I’ve consciously evaded all ME3 news, posts, reviews, articles, videos etc. that were floating around. I knew there was some sort of controversy regarding the game’s ending, but I had successfully tuned out all that hubbub whenever it came up.
localtunnel, Baldur’s Gate, Sparrow for iPhone, Russian space program, Dow Jones, RUIN. In that order. Get it out there. I fell in love with localtunnel this week: “The easiest way to share localhost web servers to the rest of the world”. Let’s say you want to temporarily share your local dev server (running on port 3000) with the outside world, i.e. a client or a colleague. Run the server as usual, then do a gem install localtunnel && localtunnel 3000.
I’m not strong enough to stomach this. Workout Hero for iPhone ($1.99 at the time of writing) is a CrossFit app which “provides you with all the tools to become a Workout Hero”. I bought it because I was under the impression I could use it to keep track of my casual push-up regimen, and other types of workout I might eventually decide against on doing. Turns out I can do that, I just don’t want to.
If you think sexual harassment is acceptable, you’re a goddamn idiot. What the fuck is wrong with that guy? Quick recap: a few days ago, Capcom held a Street Fighter X Tekken tournament. It was televised, and showed some of the seedy underbelly of the videogaming community. There was misogyny, talk of rape, and the declaration that this was entirely acceptable as Street Fighter and sexual harassment are one and the same thing.
DNS validation, meta-news, Backbone, shirt-based US election humor, git. A DNS validation service that doesn’t suck. I can recommend DNSValidation.com, they’ve served me well. Important (videogaming) news. Rock Paper Shotgun somehow manages to distill the gist from every gaming headline ever into a neat yet funny list. These people are professionals. Backbone Patterns. Rico Sta. Cruz' list of useful Backbone techniques comes in rather handy. I like his idea regarding partials.
Sublime Text 2 packages, Samsung Galaxy Note, Gumroad, Yoshi’s Blend. Sublime Text 2 has quickly become my default text editor, and it’s great that you can enhance it with some select packages. My favourites so far are Sublime Package Control (great starting point!), sublime-jshint, Gist and SideBarEnhancements. Allrounder devices FTW! TechBlock’s editorial “Samsung’s super-sized Galaxy Note changed my life” is rather in-depth. Beautiful photography, too. Gumroad is really, really, really simple way to sell links.
Links that will change your life forever. Alright, let’s pick up my old 2007 habit again of collecting interesting links in a quick post. Quinn Norton’s three part series on Anonymous' past and present in WIRED is rather good and very well worth the read: Anonymous 101 (1): Introduction to the Lulz Anonymous 101 (2): Morals Triumph Over Lulz Anonymous 101 (3): 2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread DocumentUp “Automatically generated documentation sites for your Markdown files!
Goodbye, Tumblr! Hello, Calepin! So, once again I was fed up with my choice of blogging platform. Tumblr, which I had turned to after ditching Wordpress, is just not what I am looking for anymore. It’s not a bad platform in itself, but I noticed more and more that… I really don’t care about “liking” a post (I am talking about Tumblr’s own feature, not Facebook’s.) I really don’t like reblogging all that much.
Well, Movember 2011 came and went, it’s time for one final update. Over the course of the last four weeks I was able to rake in a total of €3011 going to the Movember Global Action Plan benefitting prostate cancer research and prevention world-wide. Many thanks to Susi, Mike, Marcus, Brad, Christian, Hendrik, Alexander, Mario, Dawn and my parents! You guys rock. Also I’ve actually talked about prostate cancer with a number of people — it’s not necessarily the most awesome topic at a party but it’s important nonetheless.
So, der Movember 2011 ist vorbei, Zeit für ein finales Update. Über die letzten vier Wochen hinweg habe ich insgesamt €301 für den Movember Global Action Plan eingenommen, der die Spenden an die Prostata-Krebs-Forschung und -Vorsorge weltweit verteilt. Vielen Dank an Susi, Mike, Marcus, Brad, Christian, Hendrik, Alexander, Mario, Dawn und meine Eltern! Ihr rockt! Ausserdem habe ich mich tatsächlich mit mehreren Leuten über Prostata-Krebs unterhalten, was zwar nicht unbedingt das lustigste aller Themen ist, aber wichtig.
Relevant web development top list is relevant. (Please pay attention to the hojillion ads in the sidebar while you look at this hastily constructed list of partially broken links.) Being an avid reader of [any “high-rated” web development resource site], I always envied their exhaustive web development top lists. Like the 20 best jQuery plugins to make lists. Or the 50 must-read tutorials for finally understanding those web development resource sites.
When Hendrik told me I’m missed Cocktober (ask him…), I was very sad. But then I realized this year’s Movember is upon us, and I wasn’t sad anymore. True story! So I scrambled to register myself there, pledging to make more of a fool out of myself than usual over the course of the coming month. What for, you ask? For a good cause: I’m trying to raise money for prostate cancer research.