Goodbye Posterous

As with all things which are too good to be true, posterous is going the way of the dodo. They were bought out by twitter a while back and finally twitter are pulling the plug on the best free blogging service I'd found. It was so simple!

I've now exported my content from posterous and imported it here to wordpress.com. I've never been a huge fan of wordpress but it had been some time since I'd checked it out. Since they offer a free hosted blog service and they seem to have a solid business model which should mean they'll be around for at least a few more years, I decided to move to it.

This is really just a test post to check that my code to integrate the feed from the new wordpress blog into my system on fuzzyslogic.com.

2012 Through Fuzzy Eyes

I'm taking a spin back through the things I collected in my diigo feed, fav'd on youtube, liked on vimeo, posted on facebook and spammed into IRC. Here's the cream of the crop:

Web Sites

• Trello

I've never been good at being organised. Over the years I've tried a heap of different project management / todo list software and for some reason only Trello has ever worked for me.

• GoodReads.com

I've got calibre (the software I manage my kindle books with) hooked into GoodReads so I'm able to track what I've read, what I want to read next and get recommendations for more books.

• OpenPhoto.me

Simple online photo management and hosting (when combined with dropbox, box.net or similar).

Articles

• What does the year 2512 look like?

Charles Stross' predictions of what the world will look like in 500 years.

• Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate

Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet.

• How We Won the Hominid Wars, and All the Others Died Out

The unique adaptability of Homo sapiens is what allowed us to survive when so many other species died out, paleoanthropologist Rick Potts contends.

• Hacking is Important

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

• Bob Brown delivers the 3rd Annual (Australian) Green Oration

I hope this goes down as one of the all time best speaches given by a human. More people should be aware of these words.

YouTube

• The Final Table

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyl_KbHFmQY?list=PLham2Zudq-cblHeq5xCd9EYDidngCCYHB]

6 wonderfully produced videos which focus on professional poker player Russell Thomas in the 3 month lead up to the 2012 World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table. Russell contacted fellow professional Jason Somerville to help prepare.

• Jeb Corliss Grinding The Crack

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWfph3iNC-k]

Incredible footage of Jeb piloting his wingsuit through the infamous "crack".

• Shit NEVER said during the Olympics

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oss0bTL14eE]

Aussie comedian Troy Kinne and his mates sum up the olympics in typical Oz gutter mouth style.

• Push to add drama!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OIJRMqYAA0]

TV channel TNT in Belgium placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town. A sign with the text "Push to add drama" invited people to use the button.

• Eye-Level Camera Formula 1

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBbPGQ3Bpug]

The closest most of us will ever get to a hot lap behind the wheel of an F1 car.

• Longboarding: Let Go

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkviQ41u0eQ]

This video perfectly captures the thrill and freedom of downhill longboarding, with out the risk of losing your own skin.

Vimeo

• 5D Wingsuit Soul Flyers Camp

[vimeo 35114449 w=425 h=240]

This amazing footage makes me so excited to fall out of a plane again.

• Urban Side

[vimeo 35981251 w=425 h=240]

Armed with a paraglider, amazing skills and a kick ass camera, Jean-Baptiste Chandelier created an amazing video.

• Cheetahs on the Edge

[vimeo 53914149 w=425 h=240]

1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, brilliant.

Books

• Dune by Frank Herbert

I finally got around to reading this master piece and it didn't disapoint. I trudged through the next two books in the series, but they don't come anywhere near the heights of the original.

• Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Sensational. Stephenson has always been one of my favourite story tellers and in Reamde he delivers again.

• The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

One of my all time favourite books, I re-read this book during the year and the sequel, The Gripping Hand for the first time. Both are highly recommended.

TV Shows

• Suits

Don't be put off by the fact that it is about Manhattan's top corporate lawyers; this show is funny, smart, sexy and deep.

• Castle

My lovely wife is addicted to this show and dragged me into her obsession. Highly watchable and witty. The Castle drinking game is also pretty awesome.

• Homeland

If you haven't seen this yet, don't read anything about it. Just go watch both season. In order. Go. Seriously.

• The Newsroom

From the opening scene I knew I was going to love this show. Its Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame) at his best.

• Sherlock

A modern spin on the old classic. It is thrilling, funny, and outrageous. Just as advertised.

• The League

A show about a bunch of friends who are in a fantasy football league. Doesn't sound like much does it? It is awesome.

Movies

• Lawless

Set in Depression-era Franklin County, Virginia, a bootlegging gang is threatened by a new deputy and other authorities who want a cut of their profits.

• In the Shadow of the Moon

The surviving crew members from NASA's Apollo missions tell their story in their own words.

Diablo3, Starcraft2, Trackmania, Poker

For me the shine of Diablo 3's gameplay has faded away into the controversial reality of the option of either grinding for gold or investing real money to continue to be able to progress through the end game deathfest which is Inferno difficulty. I found myself being pulled back to my Starcraft 2 addiction which I'd put on hold while I hacked and slashed my Demonhunter's way to level 60 in Diablo 3, but after completing my placement matches I couldn't help but consider my options.

My enjoyment of Starcraft 2 stems from the deep learning curve and the process of progressing along it. The Starcraft 2 ladder system naturally leads to a Peter Principle; you will be promoted until you reach your own skill ceiling and will then play only matches with those who are of equal skill. I just don't feel that I enjoy the game enough to warrent the amount of time, effort and study which would be required for me to progress beyond my current diamond ranking. Unless you're enjoying that process you've got to ponder why you're doing it at all.

Starcraft 2 has that cycle of learning and development to draw you in, Diablo 3's end game reliance on items and gear to allow you to continue to progress it comes down to receiving lucky item drops, investing further real money into the game to purchase items or grinding for in game gold (which Blizard continuously make harder and harder by patching sections of the game which are found to be the most rewarding in terms of gold collection).

With these thoughts flowing through my mind, I had a flash backs to other games which satisfied my desire for a learning cycle which results in the enjoyment of realising that your skills and knowledge are improving and thus your skill at the game increases. On which I hadn't thought of for some time was Trackmania. As a racing game, at its heart, it is quite simple. The tracks are created using premade sections and can therefore tend to be a little samey, but like most things in life the restrictions lead to amazing creativitiy and imagination. The game puts the track editor into the hands of the players and a huge number of tracks are available. Some which push the boundies of the game engine in spectatular and interesting ways. Players race on these tracks against a number of players from all over the world and an extremely broad and welcoming community has sprung up. It is a real thrill to be battling against players who are playing from countries you only rarely hear about in the news.

The Trackmania end game is an endlessly repetitive, frustrating and punishing thing. Players are driven to shave hundredths of a second off their record times, eeking out the slimmest of advantages and generally getting into "the zone" to produce near perfect laps. I returned to the game for the 1st time in 853 days (I know this because the game told me when I logged back in) and found myself ranked ~2,700,000th on the ladder. After a few sessions I passed other players on the ladder who were also inactive and climbed to around 1,200,000th and decided that I was enjoying myself enough to challenge myself to break into the top million. After a few more enjoyable sessions I reached my goal and also felt that I'd got back to the level of skill I'd had when I played the game all this time ago.

So I was left again pondering if I was enjoying this game enough to invest the time and effort to progress in skill further? Because while I really do get a kick out of chatting with other players who are spread all over the world, in the end my enjoyment of any game hinges on constant learning and development.

I realised that if I was going to go through a reset and invest in a game I should seriously consider diving back into poker. If I'm going to invest time and brain power into something, then poker has the large advantage of actually resulting in money.

After a week, 2,000 hands of cash games and 32 tournaments I'm ahead $500 (roughly 10 buyins for the stakes I'm playing) and really enjoying being back at the tables and more importantly; getting enjoyment from studying the game and learning.

SPACE

How language transformed humanity

Hi There

Things are wonderful here in Fuzzy land, I hope things are also excellent in your land as you read this blog entry.

A Quote I lIke

Luck is probability taken personally.

have a great easter!

Be safe. Eat chocolate. Say hi to your Mum for me.

Kraken

I recently finished listening to an audio book version of China Mieville's Kraken. I grabbed it after mis-reading that it was some
kind of follow on from Mieville's Perdido Street Station, as it plodded through a fairly realistic
London during the 1st part of the book I realised I was misinformed.

I was beginning to think it was going to be a pretty normal who-dun-it.

Then the cracks in Mieville's London opened up and I was swallowed
into a magical and seedy underworld. Much like the protagonist my mind
was left spinning as a long cast of strange and wonderful people enter
into the storyline. I can definitely recommend this book to anyone who
enjoys a good dose of unique fantasy. If you can suspend disbelief and
wrap your head around a ganglord who is a tattoo on another man's back
or that someone can be folded up into a box and re-emerge without any
harm, then dive into Kraken.

coding

I’ve been tinkering and hacking together some extensions for GoogleChrome, even going to the step of setting up a github account where I can managerevisioning. It was while bouncing around other people’s projects ongithub that I became reacquainted with markdown, as there is an optionto save your readme files in markdown format. After realising how daftI’ve been for not employing markdown in my various projects I’ve takena step to rectify this by now parsing posts I make via posterous formarkdown formatting.

yay markdown

• markdown is so easy and cool

yes

yes it is

if ($displaying=="nicely formatted") { $fuzzy="happy"; }else { $fuzzy="unhappy"; }

Firefox to Chrome?

You know you're a geek when you decide to make a post about switching web browsers....

With the release of Chrome 10 I'd decided to give it another go. For the last few years I've been a big advocate of Firefox, but the sheer 'cleanliness' and speed of Chrome can not be denied. Until now I'd always found little things with Chrome that kept me from truly falling in love with it. Until a recent release it didn't display my InfoAgent page correctly, taking a dislike to the table intensive layout. I even went so far as haxing up a new pure css based layout just so I could use Chrome for a while, as my InfoAgent page is where I launch virtually all my web surfing from. A few releases back Google decided to be a little more flexible on table layouts and the original version of the page worked again. Side stepping this complaint.

Over my years of Firefox use I'd collected a number of extensions which I now couldn't live with out. Over time, almost all of these (or similar addons) have become available for Chrome; Diigo, Readability, Adblock. However there still isn't versions of the Photobucket uploader (important for me since this is how I collect images to be displayed here on fuzzy's logic) and TabMixPlus.

I was then left with a dislike of the fact that I couldn't move the tab bar from the top of the Chrome window to the bottom, where I'm used to it being. I started using TabMixPlus for Firefox before Firefox ever added native support for tabbed browsing, and the habit was hard to break. It just makes sense to me.... I use a windows manager at the bottom of the screen, surely managing browsing tabs from the bottom of the browser is the logical place. If nothing else, to simply avoid racking up mouse miles. TabMixPlus also added a number of features such as always opening new tabs when I search or type an address into the address bar. Chrome doesn't natively allow this, but there is the alt+enter hotkey to do the same. It'll take me a while to remember to do this every time and I really don't understand why I can't just set an option to make this the default behaviour....

On the Photobucket front, I've found that another similar image collection site does have an uploader addon for Chrome, so I'm now testing Image Spark out. If I don't find any compelling reason not to make the switch from Photobucket to Image Spark I'll continue to consider a permanent switch from Firefox to Chrome. I'll also continue looking for ways to gain more control over Chrome's tab system. Stay tuned for updates on this incredibly interesting topic!

meta: soundcloud added

As you can see below I've added automatic posting of tracks that I add
to my favourites list over at soundcloud. For those not in the know, its a site
where artists are able to upload their music and get feedback from the
community. It has become the place I go to find dubstep or drum and
bass tracks to listen to while doing mindless data entry at work.

Doing this has reminded me how cool my system is [insert horn tooting
here], as its very simple for me to suck in content from any site
around this wonderful internet.

Wonderful Photos

Today I remembered that a while back I'd hooked my InfoAgent up to a
couple of great feeds of photos. The system has collected about 12,000
photos from around the traps now. So I quickly threw together a
gallery: http://fuzzyslogic.com/gallery/

I'll work on it some more when I get time, as I'd like to have a way
to view the full size images. But yeah, I thought I'd share.

Musical Diversity

I take some kind of strange pride in the fact that our neighbours, if
they cared to listen, would perhaps doubt that the music they hear
wafting over their fences is coming from selections made by one
person.

From Feed Me
to Chick Corea.

I have to thank Radio Adelaide's Primetime Jazz program for getting me more and more
hooked on jazz.

Fringe Fest mini reviews

Over the past few days I've been lucky enough to get along to two
excellent shows at this year's Adelaide Fringe Festival; Tom Tom Crew
and Josh Thomas. Both were excellent and well worth the money.

Tom Tom Crew are an awesome mash up of acrobatics, break dancing, hip
hop, turntablism and incredible drumming, all jammed together in an
hour of frantic action. The skills on display during this show were
really top quality. Its hard to go wrong with buff dudes running and
jumping around with their shirts (and during one section, pants) off
to the thunderous beats of a DJ and live drummer.

I'd only seen Josh Thomas previous on TV and didn't really know what
to expect from his stand up. This year his show features retelling of
some pretty epic moments from his life as well as a hilarious wrap up
of his twitter fight with Ruby Rose. He's a witty bugger who manages
to take some very serious topics and turn them into fodder for some
massive laughs. Impeccable timing and incredible self deprecation all
add up to a wonderful evening of insight into this guy's strange life.

Fuzzy Hate: Clipboard Injection

I've noticed a few sites on the web starting to implement javascripts
which will add their URL to the bottom of any text you select and copy
onto your clipboard. The nydailynews.com site was the most recent that
I found doing it. I dug through the source code and found that they're
using a system created by a mob called Tracer. I found that adding
this to my adblockplus plugin for firefox has successfully blocked it:

||tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/*

Die in a fire tynt.com.

Welcome to the twittersphere!

I've been haxing around in the system I use on Fuzzy's Logic and also the backend
of my online rss feed aggregator InfoAgent, implementing a
few twitter related features. What these boil down to are two things:

1) Fuzzy's Logic now has a twitter account of its own;
http://twitter.com/fuzzyslogic which automatically updates with
headlines of any update to the site.

2) Any links which I click on from InfoAgent are sent to my
http://twitter.com/fuzzywah feed making it easy for any like minded
people to share in the things I find interesting around the internet.

Beyond this, I've done this as a bit of a learning experience to get
my head around the OAuth system which more and more sites are
requiring to access their APIs. I'm just a small step away from being
called a social media expert! Anyone who actually knows what that
means should be laughing along with me at this point, as it has become
somewhat of a slur to refer to someone as this corrupted term. SME's
are like marketing people who can't string together more than 140
characters.

lil test

Been working on some new behind the scenes stuff, hopefully this test works!

artsy not safe for work sites you should visit

I occassionally steal the safe for work images from kippage. There I said it. I've been reluctant to pimp the site before, because well.... it has photos of boobs on it alot. But some times it also has starwars and kitten related images, which I also like. To be honest though, when jadz0r finds an image which includes boobs, starwars AND kittens all at once it really cracks me up.

I predict that I'll also be stealing some of the safe for work images from image88. I also predict many classic boobs, formular 1, kitten and geek reference cross over images which will surely be amazingly entertaining too.

geeks who made iphone

I get a strange pleasure from realising that a fair number of the
geeks who developed the iphone are the types of nerds which people who
are in love with their iphone wouldn't be seen dead with.