When I was young, my friend James and I liked to fish. Other kids would be dropped at the mall for the day, but we’d get our parents to drop us at Joe Pool Lake. We were strange.
Dec 15 2015
#fear
At first, the google engineer cheered, knowing he or she had contributed to the world. It felt good knowing their contribution would save eons of man years of productivity that would have otherwise been wasted. They gladly marked their name down in wikipedia right beside bill gates.
Dec 10 2015
Music to Code By – 2015, or, how I learned to love the Dire Straits
Standard Disclaimer: My favorite band ever is The Smashing Pumpkins, or possibly Nine Inch Nails. In recent years my favorite genres of music have been EDM and Post Rock. If it’s dark, and/or mopey, I probably love it. If it starts off slow and sad and crescendos with catharsis 9 minutes later, I probably love it. Consider yourself warned.
Aug 26 2015
Yet Another OSX Yosemite Wifi / Bluetooth Connectivity Fix
Some users have problems with OSX Mavericks/Yosemite wifi connectivity – there’s all sorts of things that can go wrong.
This stackexchange thread has a variety of solutions that you should probably try.
Jun 13 2015
The Coder Diet
A college friend of mine randomly decided that nutritional guidelines were bullshit. At the time, he was deliriously lost in a pipe dream of being rich before 30.
This may or may not have been the same time frame when he bought a house in California and rented it out to too many roommates at once. The theory was, California real estate value was only going upward – so buy, have some other fools pay the mortgage, and then sell for complete profit.
My friend was the extremely frugal sort, and a nerd, like myself. He examined his RichBy30.xls spreadsheet and tried to cut as many corners as he could expense wise. One evening, knee-deep in RichBy30.xls data, my friend decided he didn’t believe in nutritional advice – all his body needed was calories to consume, so why not optimize for the most cost effective calories there are?
Thus, the Ramen Diet.
Continue readingApr 29 2015
Act 2: The Surveillance State as Public Utility
A friend confides in me that they don’t feel as if their job is a ‘career’, because they didn’t need a degree for the career path they’ve been on for nearly 15 years. No degree, not management, not ‘career’.
I respond that if a career means endless promotion resulting in management positions, then I never want to have a career.
—
Early 2003.
I’ve recently broken up with a long time girlfriend, feeling as if I’ve been asleep for the previous four years of life – missing everything important. I sit in a daze, watching our country invade the middle east with non-stop televised live footage of the war at hand, this is a first. “Shock and Awe”, indeed.
Continue readingApr 03 2015
Erosion of Privacy
See, this is why the erosion of privacy and data convergence worry me.
Sometime in the future, I will skype video conference my doctor for my yearly physical. It will be convenient, because I won’t have to wait in a waiting room for an hour for my appointment. Bonus: No blood draws or treadmill tests, because my fitbit 5000 health tracker gizmo will tell my physician everything she needs to know.
My doctor will inquire about my health, and I will, as always, say everything is fine.
Unsatisfied, my doctor will grill me with further questions, testing my lying skills from differing angles. I will, as always, masterfully weave a magnificent tale of ‘truth’ about how healthy I’ve been eating and how I exercise all the time (thinking about exercise counts, right?).
Continue readingMar 18 2015
Link Dump – March 2015
Time for another collection of random amazing things.
Long Reads
- Ask Slashdot: Terminally Ill – What Wisdom Should I Pass On To My Geek Daughter? – if you read nothing else, read this (the post, and the comments!).
- The subtle art of not giving a fuck.
- What 4chan thinks of Hacker News
- “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from
- The borderlands gun collectors club.
New websites worth following or bookmarking:
- Polygon – game news.
- Gamasutra – in depth game articles, developer/designer/creator centric topics.
- Programming humor: Code Chef, Devops Borat, I Am Devloper, W3C Memes.
- Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley – amazing.
- SXSW Douchebags – same as above, but for Austin.
- People I Want to Punch In The Throat.
- Write 365 – a blog about taking a year off to write a novel.
- Cool Tools – often linked from boingboing, random articles about gadgets and tools you didn’t know you needed.
- Dude, I want that. – similar to cool tools, but more like “if I had a trillion dollars and world hunger was solved, I’d buy these things.”
- More Pushups Than U.
- Banksy’s roommate.
- Bill Nye Tho (Facebook) (Twitter), different groups, rotating admins, usually amazing.
- Pinball Map – find your favorite pinball game, anywhere in the US.
- The Wirecutter – in depth gadget comparisons, think ‘best of’ articles.
- Geekbench Browser – compare performance of computers, processors, and mobile devices.
- Unsuck it – google translator for office buzzwords.
Important Images
Video
- Street Fighter Motion Sculptures
- Star Wars Bloopers Turned Into Hilarious Star Wars Trailer
- A Short introduction about occupied Palestine
- Pensado’s Place – famous record producer’s youtube show in which he interviews other record producers about music geekery. Be sure to watch the Butch Vig, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and Charlie Clouser videos, at the very least.
- See how much color correction can change the feel of a movie
Games
- Gridland – minecraft meets puzzle quest.
- Catlateral Damage Should Really Be Called Jerk Cat Simulator 2014
- Bombermine is 1000 player Bomberman
- FlapMMO – play flappy birds live online against other people, addicting.
Random
- These Before and After GIFs Show Just How Fake Ad Photography Can Be – articles like these are a dime a dozen, but this is real movie/magazine grade photoshopping, fascinating.
- Community Immunity – Herd immunity explained in pictures your whole-foods-friends can understand.
- Bill Watterson – A Cartoonist’s Advice
Want more? See past link dumps.
Jan 16 2015
Letters to my father: Building a Desktop computer in 2015
Arguably, in 2015, if you need to ask someone what to get to build a desktop machine, then you don’t need to build a desktop machine.
Commodity (consumer, everyday, best buy-buyable) machines are fast enough for any home user who’s not a computing professional. If your job or video games require a beefy machine, you may build one and get a little bit better performance for a better price, but if that’s not you – don’t build a desktop, buy one.
If I needed a new desktop machine today, I’d just buy a mac mini instead of building one.
I’d buy the 2.6ghz model, upgrade to the i7 processor and 16GB of ram, making the machine about $1100 before taxes.
I really wish the mac mini line was competitive with their all-in-one iMac line processing horsepower wise, but it’s not. There was a ‘server’ edition of mac mini a few years back with server-level processing horsepower (read: quad core cpu inside), but they don’t do that anymore. For the quad core processing power you have to buy an iMac…
With an iMac, you pay the same price or maybe a little more than a mac mini and you get this all in one sleek machine that’s a monitor with the computer inside it. To me, this seems like a waste, because I still have and use a nice 24” monitor from nearly 10 years ago and I like to buy my hardware and monitors separate from each other. BUT, if you really want horsepower in an apple desktop, the iMac models would be the best purchasing choice today in early 2015.
If I absolutely *had* to install windows on it for some reason, I would use VirtualBox (a free virtual machine program) to run Windows “In A Window” inside the OS X Operating system, or I’d just install windows on the machine with the Apple Boot Camp installer that comes with the machine. Boot camp is a program they made just to simplify installing windows on Apple machines.
If I were buying a laptop today, I’d also buy an Apple laptop.
Apple hardware costs more than other commodity hardware from the likes of Dell and Acer and such, but my high-end Apple laptop from 2011 will last 7 or 8 years, whereas a $600 or $800 laptop will run like trash after 2 to 3 years.
If you’re going to build a machine, be sure to buy a SSD hard drive – this is by far the biggest computer upgrade in the past decade, it’s a hard drive with no moving parts that reads and writes 10x faster than regular spinning-disk hard drives. The Samsung 840 or 830 series is the SSD to buy, and just get a 128GB or 256GB model, make it your primary (C:) drive and put your programs on it. It does not make sense now to buy 500GB+ SSD due to cost, but in 5 or 10 years you’ll buy 1TB SSD without a second thought because it’ll cost much less at that point.
If you have the cash to spend, there’s also Samsung 840 “Pro” lines that have even more blazing read/write speed.
SSD Vs Non-SSD: What’s the difference?
Again, I wouldn’t waste the time or effort to build a desktop machine today. I’d just buy a mac mini and optionally install Windows on that if I needed to. Then I’d buy another one 5 or 7 years from now.
But, if I were to build a machine these days I’d look at either Tom’s Hardware or Ars Technica’s recommendations they put out each year.
I would figure out a build they recommend, usually its the low price tier, mid, and high – i’d look at low or mid – then I’d buy the parts they recommend – with perhaps the case or video card being different from their recommendations.
For the different components here’s what matters if you wanted to use a diff brand or model than they recommend:
- Motherboard: needs to be same ram type (IE DDR3 1600 vs DDR3 800 vs DDR2 800 or whatever), and same CPU socket type (IE LGA 775 vs LGA something else)
- Power supply: Needs to be same wattage or more than they recommend
- Hard Drive: get a Samsung SSD 840 or 830 model for the c: drive, super fast – the biggest fastest upgrade in the past ten years.
- Ram: Needs to be the same DDR3 whatever the motherboard supports.
- CPU: needs to be the same CPU socket type as motherboard supports (LGA whatever for Intel, something else for AMD chips)
- Case: just needs to fit the motherboard – i would almost definitely pick up a case I like at frys rather than the one they recommend
- Video Card: Just needs to fit the motherboard slot, 5 or ten years ago there were two types of slot, I don’t even know what there is now, just make sure the motherboard matches the video card.
Get windows 7 system builder edition for $100 instead of the $200 or $300 version, the $200 version you can install on different machines, but by the time you have a new machine, we’ll be on Windows 11 or 12 five years from now.
Windows 7 is almost EOL (end of life) too, you could just go for windows 8 but its different in a few ways from what you’re used to, it’s fine for casual users who just use the browser all day, but it would drive me mad in certain ways.
Make sure its 64 bit windows, not 32 bit.
I would buy my parts at frys first (at the store) and order other parts from amazon and/or newegg.com.
While you’re at frys go over to the apple aisle and look at how small the mac mini is and perhaps fiddle with one or two of their iMac machines – remember that they can run windows “in a window” or as the full OS, and that generally speaking with Apple you’re not getting a bunch of bloatware added and you’re buying a machine that’ll last longer than 18 months without frustration.
About
Jason Baker is a software engineer. He works on enterprise infrastructure for big companies. He also enjoys creating smaller scale software products and scripts in his spare time.