Cows and Chickens

The Toronto Java Users Group is back for its fourth great year. Things are going well, we have a nice steady group of reg­u­lars. We still meet at the Free Times Cafe, and the meet­ings have a nice social aspect. Present­a­tions are short and sweet, and we try to avoid blatant product pitches. If you’re into Java, […]

This is a dis­turb­ing thread from my email (names have been changed to pro­tect the inno­cent): From: John Smith To: Dan Dan, I got your email from your blog, linked from the Toronto Java Users Group. Won­der­ing if you or any of your friends / con­tacts may be inter­ested in Java Developer oppor­tun­it­ies in down­town Toronto? Do you […]

I am extremely dis­ap­poin­ted with this product. It has ser­i­ous design and qual­ity flaws. I’ve been invest­ig­at­ing put­ting some Insteon devices in my house to con­trol my lights and appli­ances, so I ordered a few samples. I ordered a wire-in dim­mer (2876DB), a 2-wire wire-in dim­mer kit (2474D), a power­line modem/computer inter­face (2413U) and the above-mentioned plug-in lamp mod­ule. My first hint […]

About five years ago, I wrote a script to scrape the web­site of Rotate This and repub­lish their con­cert ticket list­ing as an RSS feed. Every six hours for five years I’ve hit their site and updated my data­base. The RSS feed has quite a few users, using Feed­Burner, Google Reader, Bloglines and a few other mis­cel­laneous RSS viewers. […]

My Roomba 560 was mak­ing clunk­ing noises as it drove around… I think it was the safety clutch some­where in the brushes driv­etrain. I took out the brushes and cleaned as much cat hair as pos­sible, but there was some jammed in one of the square drives in the side of the brush hous­ing. I couldn’t get that […]

A few days ago, I got a sud­den feel­ing that I was on too many social net­works and my inform­a­tion was spread too far out of my con­trol on the inter­net. I was also read­ing a lot about Face­book’s pri­vacy prob­lems and their erosion of user con­trols in order to bet­ter mon­et­ize their inform­a­tion 1, 2, 3. Dur­ing the pro­cess of […]

I can see 62 dif­fer­ent access points from my apart­ment. Only two or three are carrier-grade hard­ware, the rest are just people’s home routers. I can only see three that are on 5GHz though, and one of those is mine. If you’re in a really WiFi-dense area (ie, any­where down­town) you will get quite a bit of benefit […]

Chrome for OS X is lack­ing a book­mark export fea­ture. I’m sure it will have one in the future, but it doesn’t have it yet. It will hap­pily import your moz­illa book­marks and let you get star­ted using the browser, but even­tu­ally you will notice that your book­marks are locked in. It only recently got a very rudimentary […]

I’ve been tidy­ing up some things around the condo, mostly in the IT realm. I’m try­ing to reduce the num­ber of devices, cables, con­fig­ur­a­tions, and gen­eral annoy­ing­ness in my daily exist­ence. So far, this is what is new: AppleTV + 1.5TB USB Drive And this is what I’ve elim­in­ated: MediaPC Run­ning Myth­Buntu (a con­stant source of aggravation) […]