#technology

US National Parks App

About 3 months ago I started a vibe coding project focused on tracking visits to U.S. National Parks. I’m happy to say the app is now available at parks.chri...

Cloud Amputation

Back in May I started a project to reduce my dependence on 3rd party cloud services, especially those that I think have degraded in quality or are likely to ...

You.com

So far I’m impressed. You.com logo My issues with Google go beyond my feelings about the company Alpha; I think the search results have degraded significa...

Link Blog Automation Permalink

Posts are usually 1) a link as the post’s title, 2) an excerpt from said link, and 3) a snippet of commentary. Occasionally, a list post will turn into a ...

Automating Jekyll Posting Permalink

The whole process actually takes place over two shortcuts. I abstracted away the process of preparing images (giving them titles, compressing them, etc....

How We Setup Our New House for Automation

We moved into our townhouse in Beaverton Oregon almost exactly a year ago. The smaller footprint and mostly clean slate coming in allowed me to take some ste...

My First Publication with Standard Ebooks

I've been contributing to Standard Ebooks over the past month or so, working on my first publication as a producer. A bit more about Standard Ebooks: Standar...

Professional Update

I don’t write much here any more – too much time writing on other places on the Internet. I at least used to be frequent about travel writing here, but Julie...

Cutting the Dish

We have a lot of change ahead of us in the coming 6 months, and being (ahem) unemployed one consideration is to minimize our fixed monthly expenses. High on ...

Using Drafts to post to my blog

I love SquareSpace for my blog hosting, but I detest their iPhone app. I'm digging the new Drafts app for generic text composition and I just wired it up to ...

Online Learning

Jacob and I have both explored quite a few online college courses over the past year. His completion rate is better than mine. We started with Software Engi...

I remember Steve Jobs

I can't fully explain the impact Steve Jobs had on my life, but I can at least share a chronology of memories directly linked to his creations. I remember f...

Shared Computers and Idiots

I'm in NYC right now and got upgraded to a nicer hotel room at the Westin Times Square that included an iMac. I didn't use the computer, but bumped the mous...

Kicking the FIOS router to the curb

I've been on Verizon (now Frontier) Fios for several years and mostly love it. Bandwidth has been consistently good and we never have TV outages (unlike Dir...

Computational Thinking in the High School

I spent most of Saturday attending a very inspirational working session at Washington State University - Vancouver. The working group is the Northwest Distri...

Teaching College Computer Science

Starting last summer I began exploring ways to get back into teaching. Other than corporate training it has been over 15 years since I last taught a formal c...

One month with the Amazon Kindle

Scott Hanselman and I met for lunch a few months ago and he showed off his Amazon Kindle to me. This product was nowhere near my radar, but as I approached m...

Jacob Teaches Dad How To Program

Jacob is doing quite a bit more programming these days. In addition to some of his self-study of Ruby he is enrolled in a game programming class at Sherwood ...

ogpc 1.0 - What a Great Start

I had the pleasure of helping stage the first Oregon Game Project Challenge (ogpc 1.0), a state-wide project and team oriented computer game programming cont...

Ruby, Rails, and Macports

It should be easier than this. I thought I had a decent Rails installation running on my MacBook Pro but TextMate was giving me some grief when shelling out ...

Two Months with an iPhone

I’m a little over two months into owning and using my iPhone and it is past time to share my experiences so far. I made a complete transition from using a B...

Automating Your Home IT

I enjoy hacks that simplify my life and let me focus on the stuff that really matters.  I’m a long-time reader of Lifehacker and even bought Gina’s book so t...

Hosting Images with Flickr

I continue to bump into bandwidth limits with my ISP, Stormhosts.  While they remain very affordable, given the image-rich blog that I provide I’m wondering ...

Tips for Podcasters

Here are some tips for Podcasters to make the listening experience a bit more user friendly: Number your episodes sequentially.  This makes it easy to deter...

Backpack Review

I’ve been using Backpack since the launch earlier this month.  I was initially attracted to Backpack because of the technology involved (Rails, AJAX), but I ...

Backpack is Coming Soon

I’m looking forward to this - Backpack is coming soon.  This is written on Rails and comes from the makers of Basecamp and Ta-da List. They just posted their...

Ruby on Rails in Portland

Lucas Carlson gave a presentation yesterday on Ruby on Rails in downtown Portland.  Looks like there’s a lot of local buzz going on regarding Rails.  There’s...

Google Maps and Images

Google Maps continues to get even more interesting.  They recently added satellite imagery to the maps, adding a much-needed feature that helps bring context...

Ruby on Rails

OK, let’s geek out in the technical way for a bit.  Patrick mentioned that I pointed him to Ruby, and more specifically to Ruby on Rails.  I’m...

GeekSpeak / PodCasting

There’s been quite a bit of talk about the pros and cons of PodCasting.  Part of this issue is that people get too wrapped up in the technology as opposed to...

Tivo Removing Features

Boy, this could be enough to push me back towards cable and Windows Media Center.  I don’t know if they’ll push this patch down to DirectTivo (which isn’t of...

Gmail is pretty sweet

I was fortunate enough to get an invite to open a Gmail account from my friend Scott Ladewig. Gmail is Google's answer to Yahoo, Hotmail and others: free ...

Ole’s RSS Cookbook

If you still haven’t taken the plunge and picked up an RSS reader, maybe all you need is a nice tutorial on what it is and how to use.

Tivo Hacks

This is mostly just an entry for me to remember where to find the stuff, but here is the best place to find the list of Tivo hacks for modifying default se...

Plug for a Couple of Tools

I don't write about technology too much in this forum, but every once in a while I like to plug some cool toys or tools that I find useful. First, have a lo...

Another Reason to Like Apple

As I've mentioned before, I recently purchased a new iPod and a used iBook. I also enrolled in the iTunes service to see what all the hype is about. The i...

Web Service Access to BoardGameGeek

A few of us over at the BoardGameGeek tech Yahoo group are exploring some ways to use web services to provide programmatic access to BoardGameGeek. Even i...

Joe Long on Indigo Technology Roadmap

Joe Long from Microsoft gave a nice talk on the technology roadmap for Indigo, with a nice dose of prescriptive guidance for those of us who need to do dis...

Don Box on Indigo

I’‘m sitting in a great talk by Don Box on Indigo

TechEd Wrap-Up

TechEd is essentially over for me - I’ll be driving to the airport tomorrow morning

Reading Masters of Doom

I picked up the book Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner this week while in Columbus. This is a gr...

InfoPath and CAB Files

As Scott mentioned yesterday, we have been playing with InfoPath and we were sufficiently impressed.