I bought a Mac, an Apple- you know, the kind you can’t eat because they’re carved out of a solid block of aluminum (at least the cases are). This may come as a surprise to many of my friends who have sat through my anti-mac rants over the years. How did I end up changing my mind?
OK, I decided to update my wordpress install and start blogging again. I’ll get around to customizing the theme soon, and hopefully start blogging about some of the stuff I’ve been up to recently. Stay tuned!
As I hinted at in my last post, I’m going to Tokyo! In one month I will be leaving for a two week trip to visit my pal Bowen who has been there studying for many months. I’ve been researching stuff to see, places to go, and things to do. Hopefully there will be no shortage of cool stuff to blog about in the coming month. Stay tuned for more details.
I bought a bike a couple months ago and I’ve been using it to commute to work and to get everywhere else I need to go. I think I’ve only used the bus 2 or 3 times in the past month. I might save details about the bike for another post, but right now I just wanted to point out this kind of cool website I found dedicated to custom bike routes. It’s called Bikely and there are thousands of routes for places all over the world. I actually found it while looking up bike tours in Japan (like this one. Again, I’ll save details on Japan for another post).
I made a couple routes with bikely, my daily commute (one way) and my daily commute + extras (round trip with additional common stops).
My desk is just on the other side of this camera. Click control to look around, but you might have some trouble looking in my direction…
http://lakeshorestatepark.com/
Is this a return to blogging? We’ll see, there may be a few things worth posting about that happened in the last year.
I know everyone probably browses digg differently, but I think my technique must be fairly common. I skim the front page for interesting articles and middle click on them (open in new tab for firefox). After I go through all the articles I haven’t seen yet I start reading them all. This is my favorite method, but there is a problem. If you want to digg one of the articles, you have to go back to digg and find the headline to digg it. I got kind of annoyed by this, so I wrote a greasemonkey script that will inject a “digg” bar at the top of each article page. Now you can read the article and digg it or not directly from the article webpage. This is version 1.0, it seems to work fairly well but it might be kind of rough around the edges. Only tested with the latest version of firefox/greasemonkey on windows XP, so results may vary!
Click here to download from userscripts.org!
If you use digg, then go here and digg it.
I bookmark a lot of websites every day related to obscure hardware/software things for work, and my bookmarks in firefox were getting out of control. I thought about organizing them all in firefox and just trying to make sure I categorize links correctly when I add them, but the categories would easily get out of control. Many categories also tend to overlap and pages end up having equal importance in two or more places which is not good for a folder based setup (I don’t really want to double bookmark things). I’ve flirted with using an online bookmark manager in the past but laziness and/or lack of necessity usually stopped me pretty quickly. When you deal in the business of weird hardware and software combinations though there are way too many little tools/patches/extensions needed to get things up and running to remember them all so I decided it would be best to keep things organized. Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is pretty damn good at doing that, with even less effort than it takes to bookmark things “the normal way.” One nice thing about del.icio.us is that it uses tags to organize links, not folders. So if I run across a specific tool that lets software package x talk to hardware setup y using technology z for project a, I can simply tag my bookmark “x y z a” and be done with it It’s now in four distinct categories, and will be displayed under searches for any of them (or a combination of a couple). Using an online bookmarking system has other advantages, like being able to access your bookmarks anywhere with an internet connection (without having to install some sort of bookmark sync manager), being able to link people to your bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/dujoducom/, or specific tags: http://del.icio.us/dujoducom/blog) and being able to see bookmarks from other people that bookmark similar things. Even though I initially started using del.icio.us as a simple organizational tool with little interest in much else, being able to view similar bookmarks has become a huge help. People generally tend to bookmark quality websites, so if you are trying to find information on something you can get a snapshot of “the best of the web” on any given topic by browsing through the most popular pages on any subset of tags. It is also great for finding additional bookmarks for obscure topics that might have taken you longer to find using a search engine. It’s also good to be able to bookmark things based on project, that way if I know I used a certain tool for a given project, I need only to call up the tag for that project to see a list of pages associated with it. The art of tagging takes a little while to get used to because it is a lot different than using a folder structure, but del.icio.us helps you out by recommending tags that other people used for certain pages, and once you have a tag collection of your own it will also recommend tags from your repository. That way you can be even lazier by clicking on the tags instead of having to type them in manually.
Well, that’s the end of my rant, I hope you check out del.icio.us if you haven’t already.
Firefox users, be sure to grab the del.icio.us extension for incredibly seamless and easy bookmarking!
http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension