Ryan Collins

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Category: Geek

  • The 911 Christmas Present edition – This Geek in Review for 28 Dec 2018

    The 911 Christmas Present edition – This Geek in Review for 28 Dec 2018

    Sometimes, even seven year olds can teach adults a thing or two, especially when it comes to getting clothes at Christmas. In Ontario, a seven year old called 911 after getting snow pants for Christmas.

    Every year, the city of Gavle, Sweden erects the world’s largest straw goat for Christmas, and then spends the rest of the season protecting it from vandals and drunks. For the last 51 years it has only survived 15 times, so here’s hoping for the best this year. There is a live webcam available, so far, so good!

    Every booby trap in Home Alone, in Flipbook form:

    Some confused parents with their gift of a portrait of Obi Wan Kenobi. And to continue odd Christmas items that exist, how about a twerking, Alexa enabled bear, Christmas bear, and Santa.

    If you were wondering why I’ve been getting turned off about social media such as Facebook, articles that suggest 60% of internet traffic is fake is one of the factors. If you share something on Facebook, there is a good chance that what you are sharing is fake and not real. If you are reading this, how do you know it’s real? You’ll just have to take my word for it. A Facebook bug giving access to private photos doesn’t help, but if you are uploading photos you want to keep private to Facebook, you’ve got other problems. Facebook also gave Microsoft’s Bing search engine access to everyone’s Friends list, and gave Netflix and Spotify access to everyone’s private messenger conversations. 

    Check out Wired’s video profile of the creator of the Hoberman Sphere:

    The shoes we’ve been waiting for since may finally become reality in 2019.

  • Interactive fiction and more – This Geek in Review for 21 December 2018

    Interactive fiction and more – This Geek in Review for 21 December 2018

    A huge genre of videogames in the 80s and early 90s was the text adventure. Because there were memory and graphic limits on the machines available at the time, the interactive text adventures took a page out of books, and used words to describe the world in the game. These were more than just books, you would have to interact with the objects and characters in the game. It’s kind of like the Choose your own adventure books, but with a lot more interaction. Although text adventures are not commericially viable anymore, they are still being created. A new one called Cragne Manor’ has been released, the culmination of TK of people who worked on the game.

    Infocom was huge in the interactive text adventure world, but that didn’t stop other companies from also being successful. Leisure Suit Larry started out as a more adult text adventure, one where your goal was to be… shall I say, “successful” with three of the women in the game. One of the programmers found his backup copy of the source code to some of the Leisure Suit Larry games and attempted to auction it off. Companies don’t really like that, and unfortunately, the auction has been pulled.

    Final proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie

    What do you need to go with that ugly Christmas sweater? What about some ugly Christmas shoes

    Fortnite, from Epic Games, is a cultural phenomenom, and that in and of itself invites lawsuits. In the game, players can buy emotes, which are dancing that the player’s character can perform during the game. Epic Games is now being sued by Rapper 2 Milly for stealing his dance. Donald Faison, Turk from the TV show Scrubs is also ticked. The default emote in Fortnite is one that he created. Even the Carlton isn’t safe. No one know where this will end up since short dance steps and moves are not copyrightable.

    Did you feel an earthquake last week because Microsoft confirmed that its Edge browser is going to be based on Chromium. Every browser has an engine underneath that powers it. This engine interprets the code for a website, and then displays the website. Just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, there is more than one way to display a website. In the beginning we had Netscape Navigator, and currently we have Chromium, Gecko, EdgeHTML, and Webkit. Chromium is the most popular, used by Google’s Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, and a host of other browsers. Gecko is used by Mozilla’s Firefox. Microsoft currently used EdgeHTML with their edge browser, and Apple uses Webkit in the Safari browser on macOS and iOS. Techies are concerned that we are entering an online world of Chromium.

    Buffy Summers’ birthday is coming up on January 19th, which prompted the question, How much time do I need to watch the entire Buffy series? Well, like all things on the internet there is a site for that. BingeClock will let you know how long it will take you to watch that TV series that you just haven’t had time to get around to watching.

    KFC has some of the most ingenius marketing ads. Whether it is using their Twitter account or sending chicken in to space, KFC is always looking for something that makes them stand out. The newest? A Fire Log that smells like KFC.

    Finally, in the I didn’t know this was a problem category we come to K-Swiss selling shoes for E-Sports gamers. Is foot temperature really an issue?

  • Yes Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie – This Geek in Review for 14 Dec 2018

    Yes Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie – This Geek in Review for 14 Dec 2018

    The nets are raging this week over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Maybe people raged every year and I didn’t know. Anyway, is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Of course, someone had to survey people on this question, and the results overwhelmingly say that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie. Those people are wrong, and to prove it, we go to see what Christmas movies people stream and search for this time of year. A big thank you to the people in Washington, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Virginia, you are correct. For giggles, you can read Roger Ebert’s Die Hard review from 1988 and make your own Die Hard Christmas tree ornament.

    Finally, the definitive proof that Die Hard is a Christmas movie:

    Seeing Tom Cruise in a public service announcement seems uncharacteristic for him, and I’m sure he’s tilting at windmills. People still record vertical video and force quit their apps on the iPhone even though the first makes for a crappy viewing experience and there is overwhelming evidence against the second. I’m sure motion smoothing on TVs will be this century’s blinking 12:00.

    Copyrights and the public domain

    Back in the late 90s, half of a dynamic singing duo from the 70s was elected to Congress. Sonny Bono, from Sonny and Cher. While Cher became pretty famous, Sonny became a forgotten politician. His time in Congress was short lived after he died in a freak skiing accident. To honor him, a copyright extension bill that was making its way through Congress was renamed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. The law extended copyrights for another 20 years, depriving us of works entering the public domain. Which means no works in 20 years has entered the public domain. The extension runs out on January 25, 2019, so the Creative Commons is having a party. 

    Scifi

    Better Worlds looks like it’s going to be some awesome science fiction come the new year.

    The 80s

    Apparently, Chubby Checkers wasn’t afraid of attaching his name to anything, including singing a song for Dig Dug. Luckily, the recording has been found and uploaded to SoundCloud.

    Betamaxmas is pure gold and awesomeness.

    Now this is what I call a throwback:

    And, in case you forgot about one of the first computerized fitness trainers, Puma is rereleasing its classic 1986 RS – Computer running shoe.

    The Bumblebee trailer looks amazing, showing the live action Transformer movie we’ve wanted since the 1986 The Transformers: The Movie. The fact that it takes place in 1987 is icing on the cake. I am pumped.

    Not the 80s, but still awesome.

    Still awesome

    Via Reddit

  • Checking out my Twitter past with the Twitter archive

    Checking out my Twitter past with the Twitter archive

    I joined twitter in March of 2007, and my first tweet was not Shakespeare by any means.

    To find this piece of internet history, I had to download my archive of tweets from Twitter. This doesn’t sound like it would be to tough of a job, but of course there is a gotcha.

    After logging in to Twitter, go to your settings page. Once there, DO NOT go to the obvious Your Twitter Data, scroll to the bottom and select Download Data.

    No, DO NOT USE THIS! It is a cruel joke played on you by Twitter.

    One would think this is where you get your archive, but one would be WRONG! That link will only get you data that Twitter thinks you’ll find useful, and the data is in a bunch of files in JSON format. Don’t go there, just don’t.

    Instead, select Account on the left and scroll down to Request your Twitter Archive

    This .zip file, once it is ready, will contain your entire history. Download and unzip the file. Open up the newly created folder and double-click on the index.html file. This will open the file up in your default browser, giving you an interface into a world that you might have forgotten exists.

    I have no idea what I was doing with Tweets like this in 2007:

  • This Geek in Review for December 7th, 2018

    This Geek in Review for December 7th, 2018

    Welcome to the first This Geek in Review, a weekly column where I share some of the internet’s geek side.

    Last week we lost the creator of Spongebob Squarepants, Stephen Hillenburg, to Lou Gehrig’s disease. One of his early animations from animation school is available on Youtube.

    The Guardian has posted some great pictures from the production of the original Star Wars Trilogy. I love all of the model work, especially of the Imperial Walkers on Hoth.

    Researchers have concluded that Wizard of OZ is the most influential movie of all time (via ArsTechnica). Star Wars was number 2, and the top 20 movies all were made before 1978.

    If you’ve ever used a USB cable, you know that they defy the laws of physics and mathematics, whereas 80-90% of the time you will be holding the end wrong when you attempt to plug it in. Now Amazon has you covered with a 3-pack of reversible micro USB cables. I added these to my Amazon Christmas wishlist, maybe I’ll get a set and see if they work as well as the reviews state. And along with these technological marvels comes the Amazon Alexa enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass which is now available for preorder. Unfortunately, it needs to be paired with an existing Echo, you can’t use it by itself. For some reason, all I can think of is Jeff Goldblum:

    Barnes & Noble Announces New NOOK® 7” Tablet Just in Time for Holiday Shopping. Amazon has had a cheap 7″ Kindle Fire tablet for a couple of years, but this Nook has something the Kindle Fire does not have, the Google Play store. That means the Nook has access to all of the apps in the Google Play store, where as the Kindle Fire tablet can only use the Amazon App store. For bonus points, install the Kindle app on the new Nook and buy books from both Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

    Meanwhile, in Beilstein, Rhineland-Palatinate.

  • An update to managing my tasks in plaintext using the Taskpaper format

    An update to managing my tasks in plaintext using the Taskpaper format

    I’ve talked about my set up for lists a couple of times, but it’s been awhile so I believe it is time for an update. For those that don’t remember, I keep my to do lists in plain text files and store them in a Dropbox folder. I use a specific format for these to do files called taskpaper.

    Taskpaper format primer

    The taskpaper format is pretty simple. Tasks are lines that start with a hyphen:

    - task 1
- task 2
- task 3

    Tasks can be organized by projects. A project is a line of text that ends with a colon:

    Project 1:
- task 1
- task 2
- task 3

    Finally, context can be added to an item by prefixing the context with the ampersand:

    Project 1:
- task 1 @due(2018-12-25) @home
- task 2 @phone
- task 3 @errands

    My to do files

    I have two main to do files: daily.taskpaper and today.taskpaper. The daily.taskpaper has a list of tasks that need to be completed every day or almost every day. This list gets reset every morning. The today.taskpaper file is my main list of tasks that need to be completed at some time.

    In addition to these two files, I also keep a workdaily.taskpaper and worktoday.taskpaper. These two files have the same functions as the previous two, except them are for work.

    Software used

    To manage my to do lists I use 3 pieces of software: Drafts for iOS & Editorial on my iPhone and vim on my various desktops and laptops.

    Drafts for iOS (Drafts 5 is $20 a year, Drafts 4 is $5)

    It’s hard to explain what Drafts is. On a first look, you may say it’s a notes app, but it does far more than just take notes. Drafts is my first stop for data entry. What Drafts does is allow you to put together workflows that can manipulate your text in various ways. I have an action that takes whatever I entered and prepends that information to the designated taskpaper file. This is what I use to quickly enter tasks on the fly.

    Unfortunately, Drafts 5 is now a $20 year subscription. I haven’t upgraded from Drafts 4 yet, with me having a tough time justifying $20 a year. Drafts 4 Legacy is still available, although I believe I could write a shortcut in the Shortcuts app to add items to my to do list.

    Editorial ($5)

    Editorialis a programmable text processor that just so happens to have a taskpaper mode. When a .taskpaper file is opened, each task as a check box and you can drag and drop tasks to move them. There are two workflows that I have added to Editorial for use with taskpaper files. One archives @done tasks and puts them at the bottom of the file. The other lets me focus on tasks with a particular tag, such as @today.

    A free text editor for iOS is Pretext. It won’t be as easy as Editorial, but it will work.

    VIM for the win!

    This solution won’t work for most people, but it works for me. VIM is a command line text editor that can be extended with various scripts. If you want to use a mouse, then the Atom Editor along with the Tasks plugin works pretty well.

    For VIM I have two addons installed, vim-taskpaper and Autosave. Vim-taskpaper adds several keyboard commands to make it easy to complete and archive tasks. The Autosave addon saves the .taskpaper file automatically after changes. Since I use several different machines, there are times when I forget to save and quit, which means I could lose information.

    In practice

    I start my day be resetting my two daily lists, and work my way through completing the tasks that need to be done each day.

    In the today.taskpaper file I will go through and mark items to work on that day with @today. I’ll also check any @due dates to see what is coming up or what is due and mark them with @today so I can get them completed.

    I follow the Getting Things Done philosophy in my lists, using the projects in my today.taskpaper as contexts. This means I have the following projects in my today.taskpaper file: Errands, Computer, Home, Phone, and Someday.

    Under the projects I have the tasks to be completed in each context.

    Errands:
- Pick up Ho Hos @today

Phone:
- Call Hostess and tell them how awesome Ho Hos are 

Computer:
- Tweet about Ho Hos
- Write a blog post about the wonders of Ho Hos

    You don’t need special software to manage your lists, you only need something that can read & write plain text files.

  • Tempest and Galaga save the high score on the 1Up cabinets

    Tempest and Galaga save the high score on the 1Up cabinets

    Even if the machine is powered off. I didn’t try unplugging them.

  • Using the Shortcuts app to keep track of my Christmas Vacation viewings

    Using the Shortcuts app to keep track of my Christmas Vacation viewings

    As some of you know, I watch a lot of Christmas Vacation during the holidays. I watch it so many times that I feel it is my duty to inform the world that not only have I watched Christmas Vacation, but also how many times I’ve watched it.

    At first, I used a simple tally sheet in the form of a note on my phone, but that was too much work. I have this powerful phone, it should do the work for me! My first attempt at automation used a combination of Pythonista and Dropbox. It worked, but wasn’t elegant. And I’m all about the elegance.

    Two years ago, I bought the Workflow app for iOS. With Workflow, I was able to write a small set of instructions that kept track of how many viewings I have completed. The Workflow had the added capability of creating my status message so I didn’t have to. All of this was under a simple tap of an icon on my home screen.

    Workflow was purchased by Apple, and is now a part of iOS 12 and called Shortcuts. You can use it to automate all sorts of task, but today my goal is to keep track of how many times I’ve watched Christmas Vacation.

    Show me the Shortcut

    Whoa, slow down there cowboy, at least buy me dinner first. If you don’t want to wait and learn the nitty gritty, then go grab the Shortcut from any iOS device running iOS 12.

    Creating a shortcut

    Counting up

    There is one piece of information that I need to store somewhere, the number of viewings. Shortcuts doesn’t have anyway of storing this information in itself, so I settled on iCloud Drive. Shortcuts already has a folder in iCloud Drive called, are you ready for this, Shortcuts. In that folder I store a text file named cv.txt whose contents are the number of viewings of Christmas Vacation.

    The first few steps of the Shortcut check and see if the file exists. If it doesn’t, a file named cv.txt will be created in /Shortcuts with the contents of 0. If the file exists, the Shortcut sets a variable to the number of viewings, incrementing it by 1. Since the Shortcut creates the file if it isn’t there, to reset the number of viewings each year I only need to delete the current cv.txt file.

    We now have a number of viewings, let’s add one to it.

    And convert it to a dictionary for the next step.

    Ordinal steps

    I want to share out the phrase “I’ve watched Christmas Vacation for the 5th time in 2018“, replacing the number of viewings with the ordinal number. Yes, ordinal is the correct word, go look it up. The easiest way to get the ordinal was to set up a dictionary of values, where 1 equals 1st, 2 equals 2nd, 3 equals 3rd, and so on, up to 25. The Shortcut looks up the value based on count.

    The above creates a dictionary, and sets the variable Ordinal to the looked up value based on Count. The dictionary is for Javascript, so the format is { “1”:”1st”, “2”:”2nd”, “3”:”3rd” }.

    Verification

    Once we have the ordinal, the Shortcut asks for verification to increment the number of viewings and post it. If they cancel at this step, no harm no foul, the Shortcut ends.

    Selecting Post will save the current number of views to cv.txt in iCloud Drive, overwriting the current file.

    Posting

    Finally, the time has come to compose the status message and share it.

    The Text block composes the message, using the variable Ordinal and the special variable Current Date. Current Date is a custom format of yyyy, which will be the current year. This way I don’t have to update the Shortcut every year.

    Now that we have our message, I’ll use the standard Share sheet to share it to the world.

  • Walmart is my home now

    Walmart is my home now

    Walmart has turned on the Arcade 1Up displays, so after school I can play arcade games!

    The spinner for Tempest is terrible, but the game is still sort of playable. I set the high score, and it appears to save the high score even after the cabinet is turned off.

  • We’re going to need a bigger house

    We’re going to need a bigger house

    It only takes up 800 square feet, but it seems to be a lot more than that! Here’s his website.