Flutterby™!

From Shadow: Worn-Out, Pre-Skidded Tires for ‘Fixie’ Fashion Victims. Yep, Retired Belts is making belts out of worn out bike tires.

Insert eye roll, followed by head slap because I didn't think of it first, here.

The headline reads Study: Multitasking hinders youth social skills:

Young girls who spend the most time multitasking between various digital devices, communicating online or watching video are the least likely to develop normal social tendencies, according to the survey of 3,461 American girls aged 8 to 12 who volunteered responses.

Now I'm not one to suggest that technology mediated interactions are necessarily a good thing, but "normal social skills" are, even by the terms of this article, normal only in a world without "...various digital devices communicating online".

Dear All Things Considered. I haven't listened to you in a long while. I haven't been driving anywhere, and when I have, podcasts are generally much better quality than radio. However, I now have a real job, with a commute, and yesterday afternoon on the drive home the podcast wasn't making it for me so I switched on the radio for some variety.

I tuned in in time to hear Billboards Slather On The Guilt With Anti-Cheese Campaign, in which the crank behind this campaign was complaining that:

DR. NEAL BARNARD: If you look at the chemical makeup of what's in cheese, it's mostly saturated fats - the kind that's linked to heart disease. It's very high in cholesterol. Ounce per ounce about the same as any steak you can find, and surprisingly high in sodium. So, how often do you want to eat such an unhealthy food? I would argue never.

You mentioned that Americans are eating 31 lbs of cheese a year. You then went on to call up the French Embassy, in which a charming cultural attaché said a few nice things but... well... It was all I could do to keep from grabbing my smart phone and fact-checking.

You could have mentioned that U.S. cheese consumption isn't all that far out of line, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and more, all consume over 40 lbs of cheese per capita per year. You could have mentioned that the evidence against dietary cholesterol is kinda thin, and the war on salt is being reconsidered.

In fact, you could have just dropped the story altogether, and filled those 5 minutes with something that made me smarter.

Back to the podcasts.

iPad users: DD vision impaired adult needs note pad app that can be configured to use large text. Recommendations?

Software which is expected to be a part of a complex system and run indefinitely is very different from needing to ship for Christmas...

Last night, as Asha called me up to help her with a common task in Gmail, I realized a major flaw in Google's Continuous Delivery software development model. Some people, especially computer programmers, are used to a constantly changing environment. They know they that software A should have feature X and that it may be hidden inside UI element Q (despite the fact that it was in UI element P just the day before). It doesn't bother us that our software is changing all the time.

For people like my wife who just gave up her Windows XP laptop and Internet Explorer only because I enticed her away with a Macbook, this change causes constant reinforcement of their distrust of software. In my house, I hear "The Internet is broke again" multiple times a day. Asha is always befuddled because all that is needed for "the Internet to work again" is my physically standing next to her or touching her computer. This, of course, one of the basic tenants of Quantum Bogodynamics. I am a bogon sink. When I step near her computer, I absorb the bogons that are causing her computer to malfunction.

I get annoyed when people ask me "How do you know much about computers?" or "How did you learn to do XYZ?" I really know very little. What I do know is that if I click a button on a computer, it probably won't blow up. So I just start clicking buttons until I get the results I want. Nowadays we have this wonderful thing called "undo" that lets me fix things when I get bad results. It's not like you have to type your computer job on punch cards, submit them to the system operators, and hope you get a print out in the morning that matches your expectations. Click the button already!

Why am I able to format Asha's documents in Apple Pages? I've never touched the software before she did. But I know that there ought to be buttons somewhere to make it work and I just need to find them and click them. It's not like the DOS or Unix shell days when you needed to know these arcane incantations to do simple things like navigate a folder hierarchy. Just start clicking buttons already!

And here's a secret that the geek intelligentsia will string me up for sharing: If you can't figure out how to do something, just type a description of what you want to do into Google. Want to know how to change a lightbulb? Want to know how to change a light switch? Want to know how to format a table in Apple Pages?

And this continues just as complex as you want. Rocket Science, Brain Surgery, and even super complex subjects like downloading pictures from email, are just a Google search away. You can even click the "I'm feeling lucky button" if you don't want to decide which search result to try first.

So please, please, just start clicking buttons. Observe what the computer does. If you don't like the results. Try another button. Eventually, you'll know what the buttons do and not too long after, you'll be able to predict whether or not the button should exist. And if the button doesn't exist, then notify the software developers and we'll add the button you need. Unless, of course, all of our time isn't spent helping our wives download photos in email attachments for the ten thousandth time!

Packetizer OpenID Provider Server Software is a Perl/MySQL/Apache OpenID provider system. I'm not sure if OpenID has been completely run into the ground yet, but if it does become useful at some point I wanted this as a resource to look at.

A bunch from Shadow (well, okay, two and one that I got to from following a link):

• Wired looks at Ritte Van Vlaanderen bikes, seems like they're primarily about the graphic design and marketing plan, but it's an interesting little look at even that.
• BOXX Corp makes a little box shaped electric motorcycle, although the Engadget post that sent me off looking uses "bicycle". There is, however, no "pedal it" option.
• Yike Bike is a super lightweight folding electric motorcycle.

@midendian says

I missed this: truckers using GPS jammers to block their fleet managers prevented GPS approaches at EWR.

About this article about the FAA gearing up to do GPS policing that talks about problems near Newark International Airport with GBAS for tests using Continental Airlines equipment doing augmented approaches.

I'm not sure where the "truckers" and "fleet managers" assertion comes from, but even if it's some other source it's still interesting that GPS jamming is an off-the-shelf thing.

First day in years at a "real job": off to do amazing things in the operations group at Sonic.net!

Because my dad asked, picture of the garage reorg.

They say chicken soup feeds the soul, but they don't say what it feeds the soul to. Lovecraft was an optimist.

I'm going to be doing some photography for one of Asha's projects - yoga, not salads. I want to set up a good lighting system for the project. I could rent a real studio kit for a reasonable amount but I'd also like to try to assemble a kit using stuff that will see more use. I've done yoga photos for her before but we used a studio and completely rearranged the track lighting. I don't think Asha realized how lucky we were to have a space with 30-40 spots on tracks, so her expectations are higher than she realizes.

The crux of the question is:

1. Can I get away with taking all our table lamps and placing them in the room (with or without shades)?
2. Should I get 3-4 portable halogen work lights? If so, should I add some diffusion?
3. If I use lamps, like clamp-on portable work lights, should I use incandescent, halogen or fluorescent bulbs?

And has anyone tried just using bed sheets for backdrops and diffusers as opposed to hitting Michael's for a bolt of muslin?

My dad introduced Off The Mark into my regular morning comics, and it gets giggles.

If 2012's Oscar Nominated Movie Posters told the truth

Hey, if someone out there could go to http://002forb.nwsvr.com username "guest" password "guest" and tell me if they see my workshop, that'd rock. Thanks.

Just learned that in Australia "hacker spaces" and communal workshops go by the name "Community Shed". A whole new sociological vista opens.

Burgled in Philly

When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police

Energy.gov: where information goes to die. Dawn Stover goes seeking information on Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository on the Energy.gov web site, comes up with some problems.

Open data is hard for a lot of reasons, but I think a big one is that so many people still don't get the web. PDFs have slowed down the process of building useful electronic documents a whole hell of a lot, and learning how to move beyond the paper world into data even as minimally structured as HTML is something that eludes many web publishers.

It's a whole new mind set, and as anyone who's tried to navigate newspaper web sites effectively can tell you, something that people mired in the old processes are not coming over to easily.

Mess with cyclists and they will mess. you. up. Police: Man shot teens in self defense.

A 16-year-old boy was shot and killed and another teenager was wounded by a man they tried to rob as he rode his bicycle along a Schuylkill River trail Wednesday morning, police said.

Thanks, Larry.

First World Problems Rap

David Ogilvie writes to Ray McCalt:

I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

@borkware: "Hereby staking my claim on the code-review term codenoscopy."

@bagelturf: "@borkware Call yourself a Groktologist."

NineBullets.net: Lana Del Rey: Chicken McNugget, or McRib. A little musing on manufactured music that draws some good similés with food.

Okay, I hate to link to the New York Times, but two in one day: NY Times: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work:

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

Yep. To design a change now, you have to fly to China so that you can figure out how you can make the supply chain support that change. How long do you think we're gonna maintain our lead?

NY Times: Paying a ‘Sports Tax,’ Even if You Don’t Watch:

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

So not only are you paying out the nose for local tax breaks, additional policing costs, peak-load traffic, and other externalities to host their stadiums in your town, if you pay for TV you're also funnelling money into the giant economic sink that is professional sports.

I got to that via JWZ's rant about DirecTV's "deceptive business practices", which is also interesting because his reasoning for wanting to pay for television is the timeliness of the delivery of the product: To be watching what other people are watching.

The "something for the water cooler conversation" effect is part of what drives my bandwidth bet with TC, something I really need to dig deeper on the stats of.