CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2012-06-30 01:32:30 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

I've stopped even trying to keep up with Google+ because every time I go to plus.google.com, it leads me through a 7-page intro sequence ("find people you know" and so on) with no button to click for "just give me the damn stream or home page". Does Google really want to drive people away? Is there some secret URL that would take me straight to my stream?

Here's what clicking through those intro screens makes me feel like:
(actually a photo from a hike this afternoon)

2012-06-26 04:37:06 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Gearing up for my Arduino workshop for high school girls this Thursday ... I finally wrote up the cheap motor control circuit I'll be using. http://shallowsky.com/blog/hardware/cheap-motors-with-arduino.html

Any women in the bay area want to help out with the workshop? We could really use a couple more helpers ... especially women comfortable with either simple programming, or electronics.

2012-06-06 19:26:18 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Got a great view of yesterday's Venus transit, including some nice sunset pictures. http://shallowsky.com/images/venustransit/
Also wrote up a longer observing report: http://shallowsky.com/blog/science/astro/venus-transit-2012.html

2012-05-22 17:51:33 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Adventures in watching the annular eclipse: http://shallowsky.com/blog/science/astro/ring-of-fire-annular-eclipse-2012.html and photos: http://shallowsky.com/images/annular-eclipse-2012/

2012-05-17 03:57:50 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

I wrote up some details and tips on observing Sunday's annular eclipse (for those in the western US, anyway). http://shallowsky.com/blog/science/astro/annular-eclipse-2012.html

And it was a good excuse to unpack that solar filter and take a look at the sun -- there are some nice sunspots today! I even dug out a long-unused eyepiece projection rig and snapped some photos to make sure I could get some on Sunday. Not spectacular, but at least you can see the sunspots, and it should show the eclipse just ifne.

2012-04-11 19:17:14 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Putting together some demos for my GIMP talk tonight in Palo Alto. It's for CodeChix, but it's open to everyone: http://codechix-gimp.eventbrite.com/

I'll be giving pretty much the same talk again next Monday in Davis for LUGoD.

2012-03-07 00:39:47 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I'll be giving my Arduino talk Wednesday night at SVLUG. Come see my Linux-controlled flying roboshark if you missed it at SCALE! (It's not far from PyCon and there is Python code involved.) http://www.svlug.org/meetings.php

2011-12-03 18:13:27 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

So tired of getting notifications that total strangers have tagged me in random photos of events halfway around the world. Google+ doesn't seem to offer any solution -- I can't see a list of these tagged photos (just the email notifications), I can't send a message to the person (because they're not in my circles). Google's photo tagging is really messed up.

2011-11-30 03:31:33 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

SCALE (the Southern California Linux Expo) has a new mini-conference called "SCALE: The Next Generation" for kids to present their Linux tips, ideas and projects. Any students in the LA area with interest in Linux, take note! SCALE is a really friendly and fun conference, highly recommended. http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/blog/scale-next-generation-invitation-participation

2011-10-03 22:58:25 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

I got to thinking about fixing things, and how it relates to makers, and how one gets started in any of this stuff, and it turned into a long article: http://shallowsky.com/blog/hardware/making-and-fixing.html

2011-10-02 19:23:30 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Spider in the backyard this morning. Wish the wind would stop blowing the web around so I could get a sharper shot.

2011-10-01 18:18:41 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

OK. Let's all make a commitment to vote out of office any congressman who votes for this bill. The bill supposedly still prohibits telemarketers from calling cellphones, but I doubt there's much in the way of teeth there.

As the article says "If that's the list of supporters, you can be pretty sure it sucks for you."

These are, after all, the same people that Danny Sullivan is reporting on in his post:

https://plus.google.com/113217924531763968801/posts/ZDT9Goji3QV

2011-09-28 03:42:39 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Everybody's marvelling at suddenly getting floods of follows here now that G+ is open. I feel left out! Maybe I should post more often. :-) I did figure out this morning how to get rid of stuck tooltips in X from a Python program ... http://shallowsky.com/blog/programming/killing-tooltips.html

2011-09-25 01:40:45 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Went by the San Jose TechShop open house today. Wow, that's an amazing place! Pretty much every wood, metal and plastic working machinery you've ever heard of, plus more. Wish I could afford it.

2011-09-21 01:27:51 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Anyone know of a Linux program to read PETscan data (DICOM format)?

There are a zillion programs that claim to view DICOM, but they all seem to want a single file (in some unspecified format). What the lab gave me is two directories of .dcm image files that are correlated somehow.

I found that GIMP can batch-convert the images to JPG, which is cool, but it would be nicer to have the 3D reconstruction.

2011-09-18 23:00:13 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A fun project I worked on a couple months back: echolocation with an Arduino. http://shallowsky.com/blog/hardware/sonarduino.html

2011-09-17 18:10:02 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

So, Obama just signed this patent-reform bill. Early in the process, the tech press was making the bill sound like an improvement; but now, all I see is scanty mainstream press coverage, and most details I read make it sound like a step in the wrong direction (streamlining the process to make patents even easier to get, rewarding money interests rather than inventors, no mention of guards against trivial software patents). Is anybody who knows the field writing about this stuff? Anyone seen any good articles?

2011-09-16 17:51:20 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

2011-09-13 18:06:14 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I finally finished writing up our alternative to a paper shredder. http://shallowsky.com/blog/misc/paper-bricks.html

2011-09-05 02:20:54 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Every time I try to read my G+ stream, I eventually get to some photo I want to see, middleclick to open it in a new tab, and get reminded that Google has somehow disabled this on photos. So instead, firefox does content-middleclick-load in the current tab. Then Back doesn't take me back to where I was, and takes me back to a rearranged stream, everything in different order, and usually the thing I was trying to open in a new tab isn't there at all any more.

Is there any solution for this, besides getting it through my thick skull never, ever to use middlemouse on a G+ page? (No, I don't want to disable content middleclick load, which is a wonderful feature everywhere except on G+ pages.) Maybe a greasemonkey script that changes the cursor to something other than the "this is a regular link" pointing-hand cursor?

2011-09-03 04:42:58 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Comet C/2009 P1 Garradd is super easy tonight -- it's right off the tip of the hook of the Coathanger. (Moving fast, though ... it won't be so easy tomorrow.) Alas, you do need a telescope, at least from my light-polluted backyard ... I had no luck in binoculars. Made one sketch which I'll scan tomorrow. Not a super impressive comet, but any comet is nice to see!

2011-08-28 22:40:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Finally had time to finish writing up my (long) thoughts on using "Program a Person" as an exercise in a beginning programming class. Summary: it worked pretty well, and I'll use it again. http://shallowsky.com/blog/education/program-a-person.html

2011-08-28 02:47:29 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Wish I could have been at the Linux Picnic! But I did make productive use of some of the afternoon: took some half-written code for a download dialog in pytopo and finished it and checked it in. Now it's easy to get maps for any area in multiple zoom levels. And with that checked in, I can finally clean up a couple other issues that need it, like where to store the pin icon, and not saving multiple copies of saved sites.

2011-08-26 02:58:13 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Out for an after-dinner walk with d. We see a jogger barrelling toward us, her head down and eyes glued to her smartphone. D says loudly, "Watch out, she won't see you!" I move over to the right side of the sidewalk in front of him. Just then she raises her eyes a bit, jumps about three feet and shrieks "Eek! sorry! I didn't see you!" She passes, we dissolve in giggles.

2011-08-22 01:56:11 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Can you guess the real physics paper titles? I was doing pretty well at first, but things went downhill fast. http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/

2011-08-20 01:56:20 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Didn't post a Python lesson today -- the Python course seems to have slowed down and only a couple of students are still keeping up. But I did find a good example where it really paid off to define a class, so I could sort by whatever I wanted, for a podcast-copying script. http://shallowsky.com/blog/education/python-sort-objects.html

2011-08-19 18:39:12 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Absolutely disgusting.

2011-08-17 04:18:42 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

In case anyone else is UI challenged like me and having trouble figuring it out: if clicking on "5 comments" doesn't expand the comments even though it's styled as a link, move to the far right of the "12 comments" link and look for the extremely tiny and subtle light grey chevrons. That's where you have to click now. I'm sure some UI genius decided the other way was too easy.

2011-08-10 02:10:19 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Linux folks: I want a tool that's just like rsync -av, except it also preserves atimes, and (ideally) it has a mode where it displays the list of files it's about to change, waits for confirmation than does it (so you don't have to run it twice, once with -n). Is there such a tool? Please save me from trying to hack the rsync code!

2011-07-29 16:42:43 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 2 +1s)

Great article on G+ -- I'm loving j to move through posts (especially since spacebar to page down doesn't work a lot of the time). http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/186949/40-google-tips-and-tricks-power-users

2011-07-28 16:19:39 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Will be trying a "program a person" exercise at Toastmasters today -- get people to list the steps to get me to walk across the room and touch the wall, bang the gavel on the table, etc. -- to illustrate programming techniques.This exercise is something I've seen mentioned a lot, but nobody ever writes about details of how it's actually done. I'm hoping to figure it out for my Javascript workshop for high school girls next Tuesday. I wish I had a clue.

2011-07-27 02:54:18 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Finally got to play with an ebook reader -- my mom got a Nook Touch. It's really cute and the screen is lovely, but it has a nasty bug where it can't remember its position in books. Kind of a flaw in a dedicated ebook reader, don't you think? http://shallowsky.com/blog/tech/nook-touch.html

2011-07-23 19:20:58 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Pretty iris shadow and bee.

2011-07-20 02:59:00 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Any Linux users using a Nook, Sony Reader, Kindle or similar to check out books from a public library? I'm helping mom research e-readers, and her library's website says it needs "Adobe Digital Editions" -- Windows/Mac only, apparently doesn't work well in wine because it doesn't see the device on USB. Is there a way around that? How about with a full Android device (like a Nook color) -- might it be able to run something that could browse to the library's website directly?

2011-07-18 18:50:49 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Seems like there's an easy solution to that, with this particular car. And it was a beautiful day, too, warm and sunny but not too hot. There's just no understanding why some people buy convertibles.

2011-07-17 19:13:26 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I keep getting invites to non-gmail addresses, from friends I'd like to connect with, but if I search for them on g+, they're not findable. Is there some way to get to someone's profile page from an invite without tying my other, non-google addresses to g+?

2011-07-11 16:44:42 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Be careful about planting vegetables -- you might get in trouble with the city!

2011-07-10 19:48:19 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Yesterday was a nice day for a hike ... and we found newt tadpoles, with both legs and gills, in the ponds at Sanborn. http://shallowsky.com/blog/nature/newtlets-sanborn.html

2011-07-07 03:27:32 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Akkana Peck changed her profile photo.