Amazon Pilots: Browsers

2013-04-24 3 min read Movies Marco

[Note: Amazon has published a series of pilots for a variety of shows, asking viewers for their opinion on which ones should continue. It’s an innovative way to farm out a choice the company is not really capable of making, since this is their first attempt at content production.]

Imagine Ugly Betty. With four unpaid Betties. And musical numbers. That’s Browsers in a nutshell.

Four enterprising young folks start their internship at the online magazine, Gush. They are told they are to browse the web and find interesting content, to the tune of 40 amazing links a day. After one week, one of them is going to get fired. Justin, annoying fifth-of-six-executive-assistants to the vicious Johanna*,* seems amused at the turmoil he inflicts. Johanna, when she shows up, is a veritable meanbag. Turmoil ensues, and in the end nobody is as evil as they seemed.

Colleges and Open Source

2013-04-15 4 min read Computers Marco

An online buddy of mine is in college. Enrolled in a class in computing, he asked me for help in installing MathLab on his Windows 8 computer. This turned out to be a major nightmare that kept us online for the better part of a week: starting from the need to install Java, to the requirement to download a Gigabyte of software from the Mathlab servers in Sweden, to figuring out where the installer ended up and what it was doing there.

Chasing Mavericks (2012)

2013-04-14 5 min read Uncategorized Marco

<youtube>jh09vEGNrXc</youtube>Everybody had been telling me I should watch Chasing Mavericks, but I somehow didn’t feel inclined. Surf movies – and movies about surfing, which is not the same thing – tend to be depressingly fictionalized. They portray the world as a surfer would love it to be, and not as it is. The waves are always perfect, the bros are always on a spiritual quest of communion with the ocean, and somehow there are always more ladies in the water than anyone has witnessed in a lifetime.

Chasing Mavericks (2012)

2013-04-14 6 min read Movies Marco

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Everybody had been telling me I should watch Chasing Mavericks, but I somehow didn’t feel inclined. Surf movies – and movies about surfing, which is not the same thing – tend to be depressingly fictionalized. They portray the world as a surfer would love it to be, and not as it is. The waves are always perfect, the bros are always on a spiritual quest of communion with the ocean, and somehow there are always more ladies in the water than anyone has witnessed in a lifetime.

SparkFun Arduino Pro Micro and Linux

2013-03-16 4 min read Hardware Marco

Lately, I’ve been working with Arduinos. If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially a way for anyone to build their own intelligent hardware. There is a microcontroller (essentially, a really small and underpowered CPU), infrastructure to support programming it, and a series of ports that can be connected to sensors, motors, and the like.

The Arduino has two major advantages that catapulted it into consciousness: it is open source, which makes it really easy to debug and extend; and it is exceedingly well-documented and reliable. That means that your projects will typically be hindered by your soldering and plugging skills, and not by figuring out how to work around some limitation of the IDE or software libraries.

Skyfall (2012)

2013-02-15 3 min read Movies Marco

Wait! I already watched this movie!

It was the distant year 1982. The first movie of a successful franchise had been very disappointing. The producers could smell the money, but knew there was nothing to be won by continuing on the trodden path. So, the very keen decision: kill one of the main characters, add an amazing and disposable super-villain, and allow for a reboot with fresh blood.

The movie in 1982 was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ricardo Montalban was the titular character, Khan, an antagonist with an old grudge and a score to settle. The beloved character that had to go was Spock, the Vulcan science officer whose actor, Leonard Nimoy, was probably sick of the pointy ears and who had a lot more to offer than “Fascinating.”

Causality: My Cats Know About It

2013-02-13 4 min read Musings Marco

img 1752 20121212 1237163022 When trying to pinpoint the root accomplishment of human intelligence, we are frequently tempted to use our inquisitive nature as an explanation. The relentless “why?” of a five-year-old seems to be as good an indicator and instigator of intellectual progress as any. We humans are intelligent because we want to find out.

Nice theory. Only it’s not true. We ask why? to determine causality. We have this notion that for something to be, something else has to have made it that way. Why is the sky blue? Because scattering of light favors high-energy photons, and blue light is at the high energy end of the spectrum. First, the spectrum. Then, scattering and back-reflected color.

Switching Back From Chrome to Firefox

2013-02-12 4 min read Software Marco

It was a while back that I started using Chrome. Firefox had the major problem that it all ran in one process, which means that if one tab froze, the entire browser did. To compound the problem, there was no easy way to start Firefox standalone – whenever I started a new browser instance, it would just detect that Firefox was already running, and piggy-back on the running product.

Chrome worked well for me – still does. I started out running only the more troublesome web sites in it, but relied on it more and more, especially after it became clear that running both browsers required so much memory, my system would slow down as a whole.

Kubuntu 12.10 Quantal on a Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3D)

2013-02-12 6 min read Hardware Marco

Samsung Series 9 I had been following Ultrabooks for a while, but they seemed constantly overpriced. I loved the form factor, but the aesthetics and better hardware didn’t seem to justify a 100% increase in price. Especially since I am not really short on laptops.

Something about the Series 9, though, was different. It was faster, lighter, thinner, and had a better screen resolution than other Ultrabooks, and those were my requirements to a tee. It also runs Windows 8, which I hadn’t used before, and I needed a test machine.

authorized_keys

2013-02-07 1 min read Latest Marco

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