Category: blog

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases. The list: I don’t care what you think. I didn’t ask you. No doubt you thought that was terribly clever. You’ve attempted logic. Not all attempts succeed. One should not have that many errors in that few characters. Either your educators have failed you, or you have failed them.

In my continuing adventures with the PogoPlug V4, I decided to get OpenVPN working. The install was easy enough, but getting the configuration correct turned into a literal project—it has it’s own GitHub repository. My VPN provider of choice is TunnelBear1. I started with them about a year ago because of their free service. The free accounts get 500 MB of data transfer per month. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to get me out of a data emergency.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals. The goal for this week was to push out 1000 words per day.

Ally tugged at the stethoscope around her neck and smoothed the stolen lab coat. The gray industrial carpet was hard under her feet. The tile floor of the crossing hallway was a few yards ahead. She looked at James. “Which way?” In the hallway a few people walked by with morning coffee. The lingering caffeine in the air taunted them. James glanced at the emergency exit sign on the wall. The blue scrubs hung loosely on his shoulders as he pulled on a surgical cap.

Amazon shipped me the PogoPlug V4 faster than I expected. It landed on my doorstep this afternoon. It’s a little bigger than I thought, but not by much. I also ordered a couple of add-ons: A 8GB tiny flash drive A miniature 802.11n wifi adapter ArchLinuxARM can only boot from the top USB port. That’s why I bought the tiny flash drive. I wanted the lid to close. The wifi adapter won’t see action for a few days yet.

It’s not here yet, but I think this might be a fun project. I just ordered a PogoPlug V4 for $19. These are now discontinued.1 The company has given up on the hardware and moved to a cloud-based product. It looks like it might be a Dropbox-wannabe. I’m not sure. I also don’t care, because I’m going to set it up to run Linux and have a nice little home server.

I’ve been trying to fix my sleep for the last several weeks. The last few days have been mostly normal.1 In that I’ve been going to bed around midnight and waking up with my alarm at 8:30. I’ve felt much better, and I don’t need a mid-day nap so often. This has been good and a welcome change. But I’m finding that the wake up time is just not working for me.

This morning I received an email from the Ulysses developers about the ePub bugs I reported. One thing that surpised me was a request to update my script that fixes the playOrder incrementing. One thing that came to my mind: since you already developed a small Ruby script, could you integrate the unzip and zip process within the script, so users wouldn't need this extra step anymore? — Götz So I did!

Managing receipts is a necessary evil for anyone that needs to track tax deductions. I wanted a way to keep my receipts in one place on my computer, and have an easy way to mark the ones that are deductible. Keeping track of emailed and downloaded receipts is usually much easier than having to file paper copies. Usually. The one advantage of paper is that it can be glanced at. A folder full of PDFs isn’t something that be looked through with a quick riffle of the thumb.

In 2010, the Library of Congress announced it had started archiving all of Twitter. Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.