Category: Code

Setting up a new mac

I bought a new iMac recently and figured it would be worthwhile to write down everything I did to get it to where I wanted it. Install bootstraps: Chrome – Preferred browser Iterm2 – Terminal Homebrew – The missing package manager Atom – Text editor for code Install brew packages and ruby

Configure git

Copy across SSH keys […]

Unevenly spaced time series analysis

A number of years ago I bought a Withings connected scale. It’s great. You get on every morning, it logs your weight and uploads it to the internet where it can be analyzed. Recently, I decided to use the Withing API to build a plot that I could include on my homepage to keep an […]

Keyboard modified clicks

In case you’re ever wondering, here is a full list of the “key modified clicks” that the major browsers look for: (Note that on Windows, “cmd” is “ctrl”) Chrome, Firefox: shift: new active window cmd: new tab cmd-shift: new active tab Safari: cmd: new tab cmd-shift: new active tab cmd-opt: new window cmd-opt-shift: new active window IE: […]

Wow Google Spreadsheets

I’ve long been a fan of Google Spreadsheet. Like all disruptive technologies, it doesn’t meet the needs of most customers of the incumbent product, Excel. I’m no banker, but even my relatively neophyte hands keep trying to hit F4 to lock a cell reference or hit F2 to edit a cell. I miss being able […]

PicasaWeb Downloader

In the genuinely useful software dept., here is a little app written in C# (source included!) that will download an entire google web album. Great for grabbing copies of all of your friends photos.

Theme weirdness

I upgraded WordPress to the latest version and my theme seemed to be interacting poorly with the new Schema. So I’ve reverted to the default theme and I’ll find a new one I like at some point soon.

Computing distances with Lat/Lon

Have you ever wanted to compute distances with latitude and longitude? At first it seems so simple. We all learned the pythagorean theorem in elementary school: d=sqrt((x2 – x1)^2 + (y2 – y1)^2) So if we have our two points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) then we should be able to find (x2-x1,y2-y1) and find the distance […]

The joys of screenscraping

A while back, I ran across a great HackDiary entry extolling the virtues of using TagSoup and XPATH to do screenscraping from the web. TagSoup is a library that coerces all the ugly nasty HTML you find out in the wild into well-formed (although not necessarily valid) XML. While there’s no guarantee that the results […]

Postfix

My rimu host hosts a number of domains, including oroup.com, openrelay.com, cadabraco.com and drugmaps.com. I want to be able to send and receive email to those domains, but (at least for now) I don’t really want to set up dovecot locally and actually deal with mail. So the ideal thing is just to forward your […]