Janky but cool: mini container gardening with cinder blocks.

In the long tradition of faux-Zen unix lore, here are some Git koans.

Boston Dynamics, makers of the BigDog quadruped robot, have developed a humanoid biped robot they call PETMAN. It has a surprisingly decent sense of rhythm.

Grimwire appears to be an interesting answer to the problem where web-apps are convenient and useful, but require you to give all your data to the app publisher and let them store it for you, rendering them disastrous from a security and privacy point of view.

The page does a poor job of explaining this, but as far as I can tell Grimwire is a system for decoupling web-apps from storage mechanisms. It aims to provide a common interface between frontend applications and backend storage providers, so that you can pick the tools you want to use and retain control of the data you want to manipulate with them.

Something like this ought to exist, and I wish them luck. I have my own server, after all – you’re looking at it – and I often use a webmail client to read & send mail on my own server when I’m not at home. I’d be much more interested in using systems like Google Docs if I could store the data on my own server in a similar fashion.

Bitcoin makes journalists say stupid things: bitcoin appears to be in another period of heavy public attention, and while the system is relatively straightforward from a cypherpunk point of view, financial journalists haven’t had to pay much attention to this sort of thing before, and some of them are clearly struggling to get a grip on it.

Oh, no. No, no no. Iain Banks is dying of cancer:

The bottom line, now, I’m afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.

From IO9, an introduction to The Culture, the galactic civilization threaded through most of Banks’ SF novels.

Ava and I spent the weekend in Portland with Thomas & Alison. We got tickets for the Vampire Masquerade Ball, which was good gothy fun and a nice excuse to dress up. I wore my tux, and Ava wore the beaded, trained wedding dress she picked up at Goodwill. It was fun and the music was all the good classic goth stuff. The sound quality was terrible, but I think I have become a snob, so it probably didn’t matter.

This morning we took the tram down to the Saturday Market (which operates on Sundays too) and had a great time wandering around in the sunny, happy crowd. We bought a couple of Nepalese scarves, had pierogis for lunch, listened to a talented cellist, and chatted with a lovely couple from Bend who do beautiful marquetry.

Tonight, had dinner at the Twilight in the last fading light of sunset; Barry joined us with his dog Muppet.

Very nice sunny weekend, and it is only March!

Grant Thompson cooks up four different variations of solid rocket fuel using sugar & potassium nitrate. And I do mean “cooks” – his lab equipment consists of a portable two-burner stove, a skillet, and a spatula. Slick production, and he actually builds a small, working rocket using his homemade fuel at the end.

Also useful is his video explaining how to build a fuse, which begins with the immortal words “When experimenting with homemade pyrotechnics” and proceeds with a level of fearlessness I haven’t seen since a ’50s-era science-experiments-for-kids book I checked out of the library back in the ’80s.

Git-annex Assistant is a program which synchronizes folders on different machines – a bit like Dropbox, but it’s all under your control.

I felt so good riding my motorcycle today that I couldn’t keep the laughter in. The morning was foggy and very cold – I had to cook the engine with a space heater for ten minutes before it would start – but there’s something about piloting the fastest, nimblest vehicle on the road that makes me feel like a superhero. I’m just flying, out in space, wind and air and rain all around me; the cars and trucks are just obstacles, not really part of my world at all. Everything else fades, it’s just me and the bike and the world around me, all right there, nothing else to worry about.

I feel a little silly sometimes to get such a kick out of this. Riding fast and beating traffic makes me feel special and awesome, larger than life, but it’s just the bike: anyone else on any other motorcycle could do the same. So where are they? Why are all these people poking along in their cars, feet shifting on the pedals as traffic waves ebb and flow? Why don’t they ditch those cages and come join me out here where life is great and commuting is fun? It’s not that hard! You just have to take the course and buy a bike and wear a bunch of safety gear and then ride a lot so you get comfortable on the highway and then just not care about the weather or the risk…

From Metafilter, LiarTownUSA: “an alternate USA where our products, signage, headlines, and fads are all slightly more surreal, sinister, and threatening.” Hilarious. I especially like the ads from “Apple Cabin Foods”, which are all just perfectly wrong, and the fake movies, at which I am laughing so hard my face is starting to hurt.

Leo Villareal’s project The Bay Lights is the most impressive piece of LED art ever made. It is impressive in a technical sense – 25,000 individually controlled LEDs, lining the vertical stringers along the Bay Bridge – but it also demonstrates a graceful, elegant subtlety of creative thought. There’s no disco strobe effect here, there’s no HEY LOOK AT ME pulsing and hard-edged geometry; the awesome power of the $8 million light network serves subtle, detailed, gently evolving animation effects. Shadows, glows, particles, waves; motions that feel like the sweep of car headlights around a distant curve, the glow under rising fog, the sparkle of frost on a February morning.

If it’s night in the Bay Area, you should watch it for a while. Don’t expect it to do anything remarkable right away – you need to watch it for a few minutes.

Went up to Crystal today with Eric S. The snow wasn’t fresh but we had a good time anyway. The weather was strange – the sky was totally overcast, but the clouds floated above the level of the mountains, so you could see clearly across ridge after ridge. The light was even but not bright so it was unusually easy to see the volume of space and peak – the ridges didn’t just foreshorten down on themselves like they usually do when it’s bright. It would have made a good picture if I’d brought a camera… but who brings a camera skiing?

I skied hard and took advantage of the wide-open slopes – fast, fast, fast, skis biting into the snow… Oh, it’s fun. I could go on but you know what I mean if you’ve tried it, and I don’t have the energy tonight to really dig in and explain what it’s all about if you haven’t. I just feel tired in that really good way, my knees are sore, my cheeks are still warm, and I’ll sleep well tonight.

From ZDNet, good news about the open-source phone OS, including confirmation that it will run on my Galaxy Nexus:

Six weeks after Canonical first revealed that they were throwing their Ubuntu Linux hat into the smartphone ring, the company announced that on February 21, they’ll be releasing the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu. According to Canonical, “Images and open source code for the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be published on Thursday 21st February, supporting the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones.”

People who are less concerned about the openness of source code may be excited by the observation that this is the first time it will be possible to develop a single app which will run on either a phone or a PC. Bits will be downloadable here.

EVERY time you purchase an app on Google Play, your name, address and email is passed on to the developer:

The “flaw” – which appears to be by design – was discovered by Sydney app developer, Dan Nolan who told news.com.au that he was uncomfortable being the custodian of this information and that there was no reason for any developer to have this information at their finger tips.
…
“I can’t see any way to opt out of providing that information and it seems to be a feature of the Google checkout process. I don’t know whether it applies to free apps, but there are hundreds of thousands of apps that are available for pay on the play store and there are millions of people who buy Android apps out there, I’d say easily millions or tens of millions of people.”
“It’s active in every market that Google accepts payment for apps. That’s a lot of people having their personal information handed over without them knowing.”

Right, well, now I feel like my paranoid decision never to sign up for Google Play was justified. The article’s a bit sensationalistic – I don’t think anyone’s really going to get bank account details out of this – but quietly giving away someone’s contact info is not cool regardless.