I turned 32 this year and we celebrated at Hacker Drinkup since our waitress Alia turned 40 and @n3wscott turned 29. I still live in Santa Monica and I’ve been unemployed for nearly a year. My last company, Tecca, closed last fall. I have been doing a lot of freelance technical work for friends’ companies like Virsix/Two Bit Circus and Angel Valley Media. It’s really interesting and fun work, I just wish I had more of it. I’ve been updating my LinkedIn profile as I go. I recently started a Tumblr for random nonsense that I would have shared on Google Reader Sharing if it still existed. On April 1st, I’ll have been in LA 5 years.
32
March 9th, 2013Cross Campus
October 26th, 2012
I’ve spent part of this summer working at Cross Campus in Santa Monica. It’s a workspace for individuals and small companies. You can read more about it in this recent Forbes post. I originally met the founders Ronen and Dan at a JS.LA meetup almost immediately after they signed the lease on the space. I liked their ideas for the space and tackled various projects for them as the built it out over the following months. I also built the Ninja Cola machine there. Here are a couple things I built for Cross Campus: Read the rest of this entry »
Space Shuttle Endeavour lands at LAX
September 21st, 2012
I caught a ride with pinguino to El Segundo this morning to watch the Space Shuttle Endeavour land at LAX. It was on top of the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. The SCA, Endeavour, and its two T-38 escorts entered LA via Santa Monica at 11:50AM. It flew by many LA landmarks before doing a flyby of LAX’s north runway. It toured more of LA and then did a pass of the south runway complex (pictured above) before coming around one more time to land. There were a ton of people on the hillside where I was viewing and the El Segundo police warned us if we fell off the hill we’d be in LAPD territory and wouldn’t be rescued for days. From our vantage point, we saw people on top of the tallest hangars along with all of the construction workers from the Tom Bradley terminal covering the ground and scaffolding. You can see a few more of my pictures on Flickr. Endeavour will be removed and prepped for ground transport over the next month and I hope to see it on the road in October as it travels to its new home at the California Science Center.
Update: Pinguino posted her photos to Flickr.
Punctuation isn’t part of the word, Kindle
August 13th, 2012
I do most of my eBook reading using the Kindle app on my iPad. It’s very simple and works well except for one obnoxious bug. When you highlight a word or passage, the app automatically looks it up. Unfortunately, the highlighting assumes that any string of characters without a space is a word. You can see above that it has selected ‘Time?”‘ as the final word. The most frustrating bit is that it won’t let you adjust the selection to trim off those extra characters, you can only remove whole ‘words’. If you could trim off the last two characters, it would have easily found In Search of Lost Time. I assume this feature is intended mostly for dictionary lookups; imagine how frustrating it is to be unable to look up a word because it comes at the end of a sentence. Unconscionable!
iPad 3 back up doesn’t work: solved
August 12th, 2012
Since getting my iPad 3 at launch, it has never backed itself up. It always displayed “Unknown” and the “Back Up” option was missing from the right-click menu. Today I finally found a forum post with the solution. I’m reposting it here in hopes that more people find it:
o At first, close iTunes.
o Then, open Terminal and type the following commands in:defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false
defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false
Chase QuickPay is not so quick
August 9th, 2012I asked a friend to send me money for a ticket the other day via PayPal or in person. They sent it via Chase QuickPay an app that lets Chase customers send money to an email address or phone number. I was mildly annoyed but remembered that I tried to make him use PayPal which no one should be forced to use. Read the rest of this entry »
Analog static is coming back!
August 7th, 2012YouTube now shows you analog static when embedding has been disabled. They used to just show you a black screen. This seems a bizarre addition. I guess it fits with their logos reminiscent of curved screens and “tube” in their name, but really, how much longer will people actually know what television snow is? YouTube’s core audience certainly skews towards people who have seen very little static in their lives thanks to DVDs, digital satellite tv, digital cable boxes, and finally digital television broadcasts that ended almost all analog tv in 2009. Hollywood hasn’t learned this lesson yet either. I remember watching 2012 in 2009 with scenes of television broadcasts being cut short and tvs going to static. I thought at that time, “Great, now we have to reinvent analog static before the end of the world.”
Yes, people kayak in LA
August 6th, 2012
Last Friday, I heard from tacitus about a Hidden LA event to kayak the Los Angeles river. cstone was able to get a pair of the very limited tickets and Dave and I went this morning. Read the rest of this entry »
Ninja Cola, a wirelessly accessible vending machine
August 3rd, 2012
A couple months ago Chris suggested we hack a vending machine so that you could use non-traditional input to make it serve beverages. I had some experience converting a machine to free mode during our Rainfall project so it didn’t seem too hard. Vending machines are readily available on Craiglist but I made sure to ask amongst friends to avoid the hassle. Craig offered the old vending machine that was sitting in his datacenter, “as long as it comes back eventually and more awesome”. Easy. Read the rest of this entry »
NinjaTel, the hacker cellphone network
August 2nd, 2012
The social group Ninja Networks throws a massive party at Defcon almost every year. In the last few years that I’ve been involved, they’ve taken on larger scale projects and built custom badges for the exclusive Ninja Party. This year we took on our largest project yet: building an entire cellphone network. Read the rest of this entry »
