Mon: Jan 06, 2014

Last Year of Selfies as an animated gif not a full video.     #>


Crockpot Mexican Chicken. Totally making this tonight.     #>


Recently headed out and took some photos of my friend Brad Clement ice climbing. He's a sponsored athlete by Marmot and needed some updated photos for their social media campaigns. Here's one of the better ones:

Front Range Ice     #>


Southeast Colorado’s canyons . South East. Interesting.     #>


Your Voice: Commercial group homes destroying residential neighborhoods. Yet again the Lakewood Colorado city council ignores what their citizens want and just do what they feel like.     #>


Debunking the paleo diet: Christina Warinner at TEDxOU. One interesting point in there is the photos of "before and after" for plants that humans have cultivated.

    #>


I've signed up for a membership at the new Earth Treks Golden and am hoping to get to use the hell out of it. As part of it I've been seeing a lot more people wearing belay glasses and I'm of the age now where straining my neck upwards all day is getting old. Belay glasses are nothing more than an eyeglass frame with a couple of prisms and mirrors, allowing you to look up without having to move your head (kind of like a not-quite-complete periscope). Here's a list of the belay glasses I've found online, the price range seems to be from $40 to well over $100...

    #>


Learn Knockout.js. Pretty slick way of doing a Javascript tutorial.     #>


PRISM-break, a list of alternatives to commercial online services that give your data to the US Government. In some cases it's just privacy-oriented companies and some it's downloads that you can run on your own servers.     #>


Clean Wooden Cutting Boards Naturally with Lemon and Salt     #>


Externally Powered USB OTG - Nexus 4. "OTG" in this case means "On The Go", it's a method of being able to plug something like an external hard drive or USB thumbdrive into the phone's USB port in order to have some additional storage. The Nexus 4 doesn't supply power on the USB port so a Y cable is needed that can be plugged into a powered USB port. It's cumbersome but if you have an external battery pack it would work fine for moving files on and off the phone.     #>


Pencil Project, a free and open-source GUI prototyping tool that people can easily install and use to create mockups in popular desktop platforms. Looks interesting.     #>


Privoxy, a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Thinking about installing this and routing my phones and tablets through it just to eliminate the ads that pound those mobile devices. It's not so bad for me but the kid just doesn't discriminate on what she installs.     #>


For Christmas I picked up a Roku 2 for the 13-year old to use with the basement TV. She's pretty addicted to Netflix and I figured this could be a good single-purpose device. Turns out just to use it you have to have a Roku account. This alone is stupid, I've already paid for the device and already have a Netflix account, why the hell do they need anything additional from me?

It gets worse though, in order to have an account Roku requires a credit card just to use the device. This pretty much pissed me off since, again, this is a Netflix-only device for a 13 year old who does not have a credit card (and I'll be damned if I'm giving those assholes mine.)

Their forums are full of apologists saying "oh, it's no big deal, you just call customer service and they'll create an account without a card". But why the hell should I have the additional friction of that? Not to mention they obviously out-source their customer service since the woman who answered the phone was unable to communicate with me (I've been around the world for work and have been complimented many times on my clear enunciation, yet I had to repeat myself constantly during this phone call.)

Long story short I did manage to get the box playing Netflix but it was a very shitty user experience and I will never waste money on a Roku device again. In contrast when I'd picked up a WDLiveTV system a few years ago for myself the experience was great. I plugged it in, turned it on and everything worked. No bullshit additional account required, no phone calls to them, no giving up a credit card that would never be used, nothing. If you want to have a media box for your TV I'd strongly recommend the Western Digital over the Roku.     #>


"Zombie Story" - A Mind-Blowing Comparison of The Walking Dead & Toy Story. Impressive.

    #>


FreeFileSync. Looking into this for my photo drive backups, I'm currently using MS SyncToy and Grsync (I back up to 2 different drives using 2 different tools as a precaution.) They work well but I'm always interested in alternatives - SyncToy in particular seems to go quite slow when dealing with 2 TB directories...     #>


Stripe Checkout, handy if you want to add Stripe credit card acceptance to your website.     #>


Older Stuff