Who says blogs are dead? Lets have a live discussion about tonight’s upcoming episode of LOST Season 6, live, right here in the comments on my blog.
To participate simply leave a comment below and wait for some replies. If you want, share a link to this post via Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else you’d normally have this type of discussion nowadays.
(Consider each comment the beginning of a discussion. Click “reply” to reply to a specific comment.)
Or, maybe we should call it Talk Internet now? Talk radio still sounds better. Anyway…
Dan Benjamin, who like me has always been a very big fan of talk radio, has launched a new network for audio podcasts called 5 by 5 Studios. I’ve listened to the first few episodes of each of his shows and so far so good. If you’re a fan of talk radio give Dan’s new network a listen.
Something for everyone.
Icon Dock (love the name, branding, pretty much everything) has just released a set of 50 icons based on today’s popular social media services in full vector including the one I love most. Very nice and very free.
Be sure to check out their other products. Thanks Icon Dock.
/via David Kaneda.
Pack, by fellow Viddler team member and friend Andrew Smith, is a great utility to compress your CSS and JavaScript for deployment. The real meat of Pack comes from its ability to take an entire directory of scripts and compress them using a set of instructions. Nice work Andrew.
Neven Mrgan just changed my perspective on the name iPad. I don’t particularly care for it. However, Neven compares iPad to the name of some of the top gadgets currently getting press. Turns out, iPad is an excellent name now.
LOST Season 6 starts on Tuesday. LOST Seasons 1 through 5, all one hundred and one episodes, are now available via Hulu to help you catch up!
Here is a great example of a good extension written for Google Chrome. The RSS Subscription extension is built by someone on the Chromium team and it brings in the unified feed icon button into the location bar to subscribe to any feeds found on a site. Works perfectly, fits naturally, has a fair amount of options.
I had published a placeholder link for the iPad when it was announced. I’ve now updated that post to include my impressions of the iPad based on the video, announcement video, and Web site.
Kyle Slattery, whom you all should know by now, has also published a post about comparing the physical keyboard input with that of his DROID and the challenges faced by device manufactures that provide both a physical keyboard and a multitouch interface.
Found this little gem tonight after I had made the mistake of ignoring a file that I had already added to my repo and had committed more than one change to and wanted to remove the file from my commit history completely.
“One problem I see quite often in the #git channel on Freenode is that beginners get confused as to why a file doesn’t disappear from history when they place it into their .gitignore file.”
Well, I’m that beginner he speaks of.
To ignore a file from being tracked by Git simply create a .gitignore file in your root working directory with a list of files or directories that you want Git to ignore the changes of. Typically this is good for configuration files, error logs, or temp directories that might be filled with junk.
Pretty simple. However, I had a config.php file in my project for quite a few commits before I wanted to remove it and stop tracking changes. I didn’t go about this the right way and I actually ended up publishing sensitive information to a public place. Eek! So, to help all of you, here is how you do this properly (using my config.php as the example).
I know that it is bad form to remove a file from the commit history as general practice however in this case I had very little choice. I hope this saves any of you that find this the time and stress it temporarily caused me.
Playing Scrabble this evening this rule came up. How many points does a player get if they use all 7 tiles if some of their tiles fall on premium squares?
“If a player uses all seven of the tiles in the rack in a single play, a bonus of 50 points is added to the score of that play (this is called a “bingo” in Canada and the United States, and a “bonus” elsewhere). These bonus points are not affected by premium squares.”
Well, that settles that.
So, it has finally been announced.
Now, what do I think about it? I have to admit that since it was announced, about 36 hours ago now, my opinion of the iPad has swung back and forth like a blade of grass in a stiff breeze. I sit here (on the couch no less) wishing I had an iPad to write this on while at the same time thinking the device is utterly frivolous. I have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone, why would I ever need an iPad?
But, who cares if I actually need one. What do I think about it? Here are the surprises, the bad, and the good.
There were good surprises too but I’ll just throw most of them into “the good” list.
I haven’t had an opportunity to use the iPad yet – which I presume won’t happen for months – but I didn’t see much that was bad about the device. Nearly everything I saw was incredibly well thought out and looked easy and dare I say fun to do.
All this and I haven’t put so much as a thumb on the device yet. I can’t wait to get my hands all over this thing though I’m still not sure I’ll buy one.
On the cusp of an announcement from Apple later this afternoon (or morning if you’re in San Francisco where the event is taking place) I thought I’d roundup my favorite posts about the Apple Tablet up until today.
That is really about it. We’ll see how all of this stacks up in about 4 hours and 10 minutes.
As a sort of pet project of mine I’ll be committing updates to a Google Chrome Extension for Viddler.com. There is very, very little there so far but there will be more over time. If you have a hand for creating cool Google Chrome Extensions feel free to contribute.
When someone says they are going to go freelance this is the first piece of advice that I give them.
“Work for free
or for full price.
Never for cheap.”
/via we(heart)it.
This is pretty great and something I’ve never seen before. The ColorADD System is a system of ‘codes’ that can be used to identify colors for people that are color blind. By knowing each color’s specific code, as well as a particular syntax, the person can discern just about any color in the spectrum.
/via Colour Lovers.
I wish I could handle email this way. Richard Stallman, the guy behind GNU and a self-proclaimed free software advocate and campaigner, only signs onto the Internet to send email a few times per day.
“Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas.”
I try to edit emails before I send them but I admit I don’t do it with every email. I also only try to only check email once per day for a fixed amount of time but that ends up in some major email stacking so then I’m forced to take an entire morning to catch up during the week.
After 16 years of reading and writing email I’ve yet to find the right way to handle it. I’ve found that it is typically those that send you email that are at fault for email problems.
/via The Setup.
What can I say, it has been a bird feeder weekend. Something I learned from my father is that it is very easy to put together your own bird feeder. Using what I remembered from him, I grabbed a branch of Birch tree and hollowed out a few holes, filled them with a peanut butter and bird seed mixture, popped in some nails as posts for the birds to perch on when they are eating and hung it from the tree.
Now we have five different types of bird feeders and I hope it will attract a wide variety of birds.
Left: bird seed mix, Right: suet.
Suet
Bird seed
The temperature has finally gotten above freezing. I took it as an opportunity to get two more bird feeders (in addition to the one we have on our deck) up.
Switching to Google Chrome Developer channel
For months I’ve been using Chromium the open source browser that powers Google Chrome. Using Chromium had its advantages and disadvantages. I had the bleeding edge of what was offered by the Chromium team – whether it was stable or not. But, I also had to manually update my personal copy of Chromium on a nearly daily basis.
Not anymore. I’ve been wanting to switch to the Google Chrome Developer channel (or, the still pretty darned bleed edge releases) for a few weeks but hadn’t had the time to figure out how. After I saw my friend in bleeding edge Chromium releases Justin Blanton take the plunge I began hunting. Turns out, it is pretty easy once you found the right link.
I found this link via the Chromium Blog – but there is an Early Access Release Channels page that explains what each release channel is, its purpose, and how you can get involved. The nice thing about these channels is that these are releases of Google Chrome, not just Chromium, and as such are slightly more stable and refined then the Chromium nightlies I’ve been using. Updating to the next release is also easier in that it happens within the application itself and it continues on the same channel you choose be it beta or developer.
Left: Chromium Right: Google Chrome Dev channel
For example, remember how I complained about Chromium’s Bookmark Manager? Remember those hideous buttons? Well, they are much nicer in Google Chrome then they are in Chromium. Take a look at the graphic that shows the difference between the two. Though the action button doesn’t do much (yet) it does fit much nicer into the Mac ecosystem. Obviously the source list on the left is much nicer as well.
Switching from Chromium to Google Chrome was made all the more easy due to Google’s free Bookmark Syncing service. If you’d like to help test the very latest build of Chrome follow the links on that Early Access Release Channels to download your flavor of Chrome based on which channel you’d like.