Mental note: Don’t ride unicycle in the snow without chains
Snow chains for your unicycle, so useful it's indescribable.
Bluetooth GPS data logger
I have a bluetooth GPS now, but to log routes I need to take my Ipaq as well. This bluetooth GPS with a data logger built in looks like a pretty cool alternative to what I do now.
Surprise for the day: Australian beer is cheaper in the US than in Australia
Image stolen from Woolworth's Homeshop My two favourite Australian beers would have to be Coopers Pale Ale, and the Malt Shovel Brewery Amber Ale. In fact, I am half way through a MSB now, which might explain my terrible spelling in this post. Then again, it might also be that I've been working away for 12 hours now. Anyways, back to the story... Since moving to the US I have been subsisting on these terrible American beers that they have around here. Some of the micro-brews are ok-ish, and Sierra Nevada is better than a punch in the face, but they're really nothing special. For a start, their weak. On the non-micro-brew front, I recommend Coors if you're in a no-beer emergency and you have to get something mainstream. The other fall back drinking plan has been to develop a taste for Margaritas, which we have been serving in 500 mil pint glasses for effect. Anyway, back to the story... So yesterday Catherine and the kids and I ventured out to try to fix this. BevMo was rumoured to have Australian beers, and I thought it might be worth a try. The exciting news is that it turns out that…
Build your own cables
PSP remote control cable and Canon EOS 350D (Rebel XT) remote cable release.
Book reviews
I'm always a little hesitant when I see reviews of the book. It's irrational, but I guess it's a little bit like being worried that people are going to tell you that your kid isn't the smartest in the class, or is ugly. That's why I sat on the review from Linux Format May 2006 until today, and only read it just now. Wow. "This is probably the best Linux book you will buy all year". I guess it doesn't get clearer than that. All I can say is "thanks Linux Format". They commented on the lack of colour figures in the examples as well, and once again I should point out that there are colour versions available online and as a download. A colour revision of the PDF version of the book is also currently in the works.
Two things
One, wikipedia rocks. Especially for technical topics I previously found hard to research like image encoding formats like YUV. Kudos to those who write pages there. Secondly, is it just me or is the history of television formats fascinating. For example: The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations: Western TV was popular in the East, authorities were well aware of this, and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black&white, because the underlying TV standard B/G remained the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television". Later East German produced TV sets even included a dual standard PAL/SECAM decoder. In any case the majority of TV sets in East Germany were monochrome (black & white) until well into the 1980s.
Phoenix for business
You know that somewhere has to be special when people tell you that the good points of a place are that land is cheap, it's geologically stable, and there are lots of banks. Well, that's Phoenix and the bit they're not mentioning is that you're in a desert. It's warm. Really warm. Oh, and dry. It's a nice spring afternoon as I write this, and it's 108 Fahrenheit (42 Celsius). Fortunately that seems to be about as hot as it gets here. Phoenix is so far a nice city, although I have only haven't seen much (I'm here on business). Not very built up, and quite spread out. Some parts of town I drove through also have billboards in Spanish only.
Mental note: get an eccentric father
Then I too can get out of traffic fines.
Greg likes MySQL cluster, oh and Stewart’s talk
Greg Linden (Google watcher, search engine dude, ex-Amazon) saw Stewart Smith's talk on Google Video about MySQL cluster, and likes the idea. That's cool. Time for more content on Google Video?
Twisted conch
It seems to me that every time I go to write some networking code in Python, the twisted guys have got there before me. Today's adventures are involving twisted conch, which seems very cool. The documentation is a bit patchy though.