RobotSkirts

I’ve hung onto a few boxes business cards over the years (these particular ones being from Netscape) with the intention of doing a project. I followed the instructions from the well known business card Menger Sponge project to turn 348 cards into 58 identical cubes. The cubes are quite resilient and resist falling apart; even the structures built with them are far more solid than you would expect. 58 cubes isn’t significant, it’s just how many matte white backed cards I had. Read the rest of this entry »

I enjoy the community I’m part of on Google Reader. They share interesting stories and leave insightful and humorous comments. I use Reader for the majority of my content consumption and it is the place I’m most likely to share an article I’m interested in than anywhere else (Twitter, Facebook, Google+). If you’re subscribed to a feed, it’s just a single click to share a feed item with your followers. If it’s content you find while browsing the web, there’s a handy Note in Reader bookmarklet that will share what you highlight on a page.

The Note in Reader bookmarklet works fairly well but usually you’ll see some weird formatting as it struggles with a chunk of HTML divorced from its stylesheet. The following is what I try to do instead of using the bookmarklet: I click on the page’s RSS icon like I normally would when subscribing to a new feed. This loads the feed into Google Reader and shows you a preview of how the feed will appear. Instead of clicking the Subscribe button, I scroll through the feed and find the item I want and use the share buttons as I would normally. It shares the item and I don’t have to do any sort of cleanup removing the feed since I never actually subscribed.

The key benefits of doing this are: The shared item will look way better since it’s appearing exactly like it does in the RSS feed and not scraped from the site. The item you’re sharing is the canonical version; you’ll see Likes by other users and if someone you follow is a feed subscriber and shares the same item you’ll see it globbed in with yours. Finally, it’s only one more click than sharing an item from a feed you’ve already subscribed to and you don’t have to mess around highlighting a selection.

… okay, so the benefits aren’t that crazy, but they’ll certainly keep your Reader shares neat and tidy.

My Droid X is running Verizon’s official build of Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) which is version 4.5.588. Luckily, there’s a very easy tool for rooting this: GingerBreak. Once you have root access you can run the BusyBox installer. I then used adb to get a shell and remount the /system filesystem read/write. I edited build.prop using vi to change two lines so the phone would pass Netflix’s model check. After that, the Netflix app just works. You do need the latest version and not the original leaked apk.