Posts
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Under the lid of a power line conditioner, the APC H15
I just acquired an “APC AV H15 Home Theater 1500VA Power Filter and Power Conditioner”, which is usually just called the APC H15. It’s a pretty popular device basically to smooth out the AC power for home theatre type systems, and also protect your equipment from any kind of bad power juju. Some people buy these kinds of things to make their speakers sound better, but my system probably isn’t good enough to notice at this point. My concern was that my apartment has bad power, and I’ve been having random computer shutdowns, blown lightbulbs, and even weird lines in my new LCD TV. Fortunately I got this silver H15 less than half price because they’re moving from silver case to black case.
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The Shape of Things That Hum
The Shape of Things That Hum is a series of 11-minute short documentaries about different electronic instruments. It goes through a bunch of classics, most I recognize the sound easily but never knew the name or the story. Here’s the proper order:
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Urban camouflage / hiding in plain sight
Check out this artist hiding out in an Ikea store using a unique urban camouflage. Watch as he disappears in plain sight!
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How To Save the World Without Destroying It (Too Big to Fail. It's True.)
Cross-posted in my Daily Kos diary, where it will be almost certainly ignored (because kossacks mainly care about breaking news).
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iPhone programming: how to switch to a landscape view at the moment of your choosing
Maybe someday, Apple will make it easy to rotate manually into a landscape view. But right now it’s been causing me enormous headache with hideous frames issues. Running an app in landscape the whole time is easy, but doing just some views in landscape is insane, especially if you’re trying to switch while in the middle of a navigation controller.
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The StartupCamp Report - StartupCampWaterloo5
So last night was StartupCampWaterloo5 – the Original Startup Camp with the Best Format(tm). We had on the order of 60-80 people in attendance. We didn’t do formal count of startups this time, but there were 12 proposed demos on the whiteboard, and I know of at least 3 other groups that were represented. As usual we had a keynote speaker: Mark Evans, who among other things runs the mesh conference in Toronto. He usually talks about social media, but he focused for us on communication, highlighting good and poor first impressions and public communications strategies of various websites.
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A "short" list of financial market crimes
It seems like the truth is slowly emerging about all of the horrific things that went on during the boom times and are now emerging from the muck as the swamp is drained. Someone like Bernie Madoff can always cover his debts while the market is rising, but suddenly his ponzi scheme fails when it crashes. It seems that there is now a laundry list of semi-legal crap that is similarly being outed.
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Wondeful joy! Mix Ruby and Objective-C with MacRuby
How great is this. You can use any language you want in your MacRuby projects. Want to add in some code you already wrote in Objective-C++? No problemo!
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How to make an iPhone button highlight (hold state)
Here’s how to use iPhone SDK to make a button hold it’s on/highlighted state when you click on it:
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What is the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy really about?
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is about life, the universe, and everything, … and the fact that it makes no sense. Life makes no sense. Nothing that happens makes any sense. There is no purpose, to meaning, no answer, just an endless series of coincidences, catastrophes, and occasionally good times which we just have to put up with until we die. This is the thesis of HHGTTG, and also a good bit of Douglas’s other work.
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