A year or so ago I purchased a card for my digital camera from http://www.eye.fi/. This simple little card makes me happy at least once a week. It's genius: it is wifi aware. Which means that once you take a picture, it tries to connect to the internet and upload the new pictures. You can have it save just to your computer, or automatically upload to Flckr, Picasa, or a number of other sites.
Here is my happy use case. Often while at work, I'll get an email that looks like this:
Which means that the family at home has been taking pictures, and my day is interrupted by a cute and often candid update of what my fantastic family is up to today.
The new cards will also upload videos, which means that I rarely, if ever take my card out of my camera anymore.
Overall, this is one technical gadget that makes my life easier and has extremely low friction. Exactly what a quality item should be.
I grew up admiring my father's Montblanc fountain pen, having worked through scores of fountain pens myself I have yet to make the leap. Maybe when I grow up.
Here is a long soliloquy of an article, with lots of nice pictures.
http://www.luxist.com/2010/11/16/birth-of-a-montblanc-making-the-worlds-finest-pen-and-why-you-sh/
Firing coming up soon. I suppose I should do some backwards math. If I'm heading out Thursday night, then I need Thursday to cool the bisque kiln, which means I need to fire on Wednesday. Since I don't own a microwave anymore to quick dry pieces, I should give it a day or two or more to dry which means Sunday wheelwork would even be pushing it. Ahhh the excitement of the chase.
Mostly keeping up with making something every day. The last couple days have been working on mote digital creations. Went to a great networking event tonight with some very smart techie folks. Got some good ideas on how to make the Macalester web apps.
Today's creating is admitadly a bit techie. I wanted to port a glaze storage application I had made some years ago to python and hosted on Google App Engine, then I got distracted by the shiny object that is GWT. So I made a GWT app hosted on Google App Engine.
Second sitting working with the glaze decals. Seemed a little different on stoneware than porcelain. And I think I am getting a sense for when to peel away the tissue paper. Not that tricky, but tricky at the same time.
I am really enjoying these decals, getting a little creative with cutting and piecing them together we'll see if any of the details hold up durring the woodfire later this month.
So now, I make the bread for our family every week with a much simpler method.
--In a large mixing bowl add--
4 c. wheat flour
3 c. white flour
2 t. salt
1 palm full of sugar (so anywhere from 1/4 c to 3/4c depending on your mood, or skip it, whatevs.)
2 T. yeast (or two packets)
[optional] Add 1/4 wheat germ
**mix dry ingredients**
--add to dry--
3 1/3 C tap water.
a couple glugs of oil. Olive oil is nice, canola is good, caster is not. (couple glugs would be anywhere from 1/4-1/2 C depending on your mood)
-Mix with a wooden spoon, or the fork you used to mix the dry until all the flour is decently well moistened.
-Place mixing bowl in the fridge overnight. (you could do this on the counter and wait an hour and a half but since we are skipping the kneading step, if you let it sit for a long time that gives the mixture time to self saturate with the liquids.)
-In the morning (or whenever you feel like it) turn the oven to 375, place a baking sheet on the bottom rack and put some (4-8C) boiling water in it. (this will keep the oven moist)
- break the dough into two pieces, place in greased loaf pans, or on a cookie sheet if making a boule.
-let rise about 20 minutes and place in the oven for 45 minutes give or take. Loaf should be evenly brown when turned out of the pan.
This makes two loaves which is just a bit more than our family of 4 needs for a week.
We sometimes make one loaf and save the other half for pizza crust.
The picture above has the two loaves, then I also made a half recipie and upped the sugar (a heaping handful) and added some chocolate to the dough. then in the morning I smushed [techincal bread term] the dough out, sprinkled a healthy coating of brown sugar, some cinamon, and more chocolate powder on it and rolled it up. Baked it with the other loaves and it was great. I don't have a picture of the finished product because there is such a short window of time before the loaf is mostly gone. As you see above. :)
Some time ago I made my wife some bulk bags. We a big fans of shopping at our local co-op. And there is something satisfying about buying goods that you will later combine into a meal and feed your family, and buying the goods without the unnecessary packaging. The last batch of bags that I made were unbleached muslin. And it has been immensely satisfying to be in the checkout line buying our groceries nicely packed in bags I made myself, for meals that we will make ourselves later this week.
Ok, enough waxing poetic, the big bags that are particularly useful for oats and flour seem to be in short supply. So I stopped into the nice folks down at Treadle Yard Goods and bought a yard of this cute fabric. It was a bit more expensive than unbleached muslin, but I decided it was one of those relativistic scenarios and threw down the extra $6 for the designer fabric. How lavish of me. I really spare no expense for my lovely wife.
Oh, and it was a fun father/son activity to work with my 4 year old boy to setup the sewing machine and sew up a bag. Start 'em young and all.
I got some decals from Gary Erickson a few days back. I tried applying them to some pots today.
From
Some parts worked really well, some not so much. Gary's information sheet said that you would eventually get a feel for it. I thought I did for a couple, but then, just as quickly, it was gone.
I have not decided if I would put these in the wood firing this month, or try and work them in to an electric firing.
Over the years access to lookup tables for geolocation come up occasionally. A few years ago we settled on paying every year or so for an updated zipcode file. For around $80 or so, we could be assured that we were looking up accurate data.
I just ran across http://ipinfodb.com/ip_location_api.php, which offers a load of usefull FREE databases. IP lookup. Zipcode lookup. Very cool. And most with free APIs to boot.
I am going put these to use and test them out on some low impact pages and see how they handle things.
Now that Twitter requires OAuth, a simple curl to the twitter api will fail. Luckily there are some super smart folks in this community. Check out this great writeup on tweeting form the command line, with our old friend Python. It's a great writeup and I had it working on all three of my twitter accounts in about 5 minutes.
No, I dorked around and added a line to my single-click batch file (which currently commits to SVN, robocopies out to a fresh directory, compiles the website with visual studio, 7zips up the package, puts a copy on the network for archive, and puts a copy on the server with a flagged file for the server to check and extract and publish the update). The line I added was
tweetupdate
Here are the steps
Grab the code from Jason Fowler (here) to get yourself tweeting from the command line. His "application" is a little bit of my favorite type. Basically, you need wget.exe (wget for windows), and a simple .bat file which you set your twitter username and password, then because twitter uses the dead simple REST API, you can hit URI with a single wget command which will tweet you status update.
Getting the current version of you HEAD is not as straightforward, but not bad. Thanks to the invaluable StackOverflow. (I lost the solution link now, but something like SVN command line version). You can drop for /f "tokens=5" %%i in ('SubWCRev .^|find "Last committed at revision"') do set version=%%i
echo %version%
into a batch file and you are all set (note that this batch file needs to be in the directory you are versioning from becuase I am calling "SubWCRev"* on " . ". If you want to test it out, you need to replace "." with the path to your current working directory. Anyhow, this will return the current version.
Put step 2 with setp 1
twitter "MyAPP just did svn commit number %version%"
will update your twitter status with "MyAPP just did svn commit number 1099", assuming you are on commit # 109. :) Like here.
That's it. How easy could that be? (well, I combined step 2 and three and made a file called tweetupdate.bat and now execute it from my publish script.
*SubWCRev is a command that comes installed when you install TortoiseSVN on your windows machine.
At times it's easiest to wire up your own ajax page with a sprinkle of XMLHttpRequest() here and .readystatechage there. Other times, it's pretty handy to use a well packaged library, like jQuery, where most of the heavy lifting has been done for you.
Let's say you have two simple pages
search.html
which, when you type in some text into "namesearch" and click "search" will POST to the page
results.php
<?php $name = $_POST["name"]; $con = mysql_connect("localhost","root",""); if (!$con){ die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());} mysql_select_db("friendface", $con); $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users where name like" . " '%" . $name . "%'"); //output the results to an unordered list echo "
Now, let's fire a function in the "onkeyup" event from the search box:
which will call a javascript funtion "suggest" and pass it the value of the textbox. Now, we have to let the page know what that function should do. What we want it to do is to call the results page, get the results, and display them on the page. All using Ajax.
So, let's make a <div> area for the results to be displayed. place the following after the button
which gives the page a div to drop some results into, and back up in the header, let's make out js function.
so by this point, your whole page should look like this
search.html
Now, when you type int he text box you should get the results showing up just below the search field.
Of course, it would be nice to pretty it up a bit. Add a line in the head section
Do they really have to be so awesome? Here is the shipping confirmation page: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lloyd Cledwyn Your order has been shipped! Better World Books Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 9:23 AM
Hello Lloyd,
(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)
Holy canasta! It's me... it's me! I can't believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I've got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can't believe I'm leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don't have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it's time to see the world!
I can't wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol' brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?
I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I've had, I'm ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn't take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I've found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.
But hey, enough about me, I've been asked to brief you on a few things:
We sent your order to the following address:
Lloyd Cledwyn *************** SAINT PAUL, MN 55105 USA
Order #: 10****
We provide quick shipping service to all our customers. You chose USPS Standard Mail shipping, your book should arrive within 4 - 14 business days. The Postal Service may occasionally take slightly longer to deliver your book.
At this time, we are not able to offer tracking on our USPS Standard Mail shipments.
If you have any questions or concerns, please email my friends in Customer Care at help@betterworldbooks.com. If you could please include your order number (10867312) that would be very helpful.
Eagerly awaiting our meeting,
Walt Disney's Peter Pan (Illustrated Classic) Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy (World's Classics)
book and mostly enjoyed it. The thing that was nice about it was that they tried to take much of the pressure off of the process of making bread. They were good salesmen on the topic. Then with the second book 
I thought it would be even better, but then I realized that even though they were saying how simple things could be, they were still suggesting that you buy a specialized food container for the bread, specialized ingredients (wheat gluten, wheat germ, etc) and I thought, forget that.
