Monthly Archives: October 2009

Gmaps Pedometer + Google Calc = 8.94607843 minutes per mile

I just got a new pair of running shoes and I wanted to take them for a spin. I have no idea how fast I run because I only run with an ID. I don’t have a watch, a GPS or anything else. Well, OK, I do have my first ever pair of running shorts. However, those don’t tell you where you are or what your mile splits are.

You know how to most easily track your route and distance (again, with out a GPS)? Gmaps Pedometer! It’s a google maps mashup that allows you to easily double click your local (or remote) running route.

After I had done this, and I had noted the time I left and returned, I had this math to do: 4.08 miles per 36.5 minutes to minutes per mile. I thought, heck, why don’t I drop it into google and maybe they’re that smart? Sure enough, they are. Thanks Google!

PhotoRec to the rescue!

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Recently the SDHC card for our new camera went bad. All computers and the camera said that the card needed to be formatted and could not be read. Running windows “chkdsk” reported that “The type of the file system is RAW.” After googling around I found a great app called PhotoRec. This is an open source app for all OSes that focuses on recovering images and movies from a hard drive, USB drive or flash memory. It is DOS based, but is extremely easy to use and does not require you to install anything, just extract the zip contents and away you go.

It not only recovered the images that we recently took and wanted to restore, but also found EVERY photo we’d EVER taken. This, when I think about it, isn’t that surprising given how computers delete data, but I like that it worked so well. I gave a donation with in minutes of seeing my photos restored. I encourage you to download and donate today if you’re data is in peril!

WordPress Exploit, Fog, Fruit, Plants and Plates

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Here’s a random collection of items that happened over the last 10 or so days.

My friend’s blog got hacked! This is because of a WordPress exploit that allows a user to create an admin user and log into your blog. They can then upload random stuffs to do all sorts of nasties. Your best bet is to first check that your blog hasn’t been hacked and then upgrade to the latest version. Sadly, if you’ve already been hacked, the new admin user in there and upgrading won’t boot this user. Plip has upgraded as we weren’t hacked, but we lost our Plipish theme. That’ll come back soon, promise.

Our friend from twtitw joined us for a commute on the Ferry to SF. It’s a lovely way to commute, they take bicycles and sometimes you get spooky fog! Then, when you get to SF, you’re at the ferry building where you can get tasty treats. See pics below.

I was commuting home from a friends house on Wednesday night and there was a big sign that said “Wet plates ahead”. Just before there was one that said “Dirty Knives on Left” and after one said “Sporks in Road”.

Our fave famers market still has strawberries. OMG, do they! Look at this huge one. Can you believe it’s organic?

With the sunlight fading sooner and sooner each night, I’m going for more and more sunset rides. Here’s another pic for the latest on Thursday night.

Finally, our venus fly trap is blooming! Fun.

Every vehicle is a Prius!

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I was riding into work in casual carpool this morning when I noticed a sticker in the rear passenger window: “PZEV”. This stands for “Partial Zero Emission Vehicle”. What!? Isn’t every vehicle a partial zero emissions vehicle? That’s just silly to document something as such. It reminds me of Simpons episode where the newspaper lady says “And to protect Mother Earth, each copy contains a certain percentage of recycled paper.” Lisa asks what percent and she replies “Zero percent…what, zero is a percent!” Which then reminded me of a recent XKCD citing more or less the same issue about asbestos in cereal.

Firefox “reset” is really “launch in safe mode”

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I know that it’s not that hard to find out how to do it , but I am still disappointed two fold in how hard it is to reset Firefox 3.5. First, if you look at Safari, it’s super easy to reset it. Secondly, it’s not called ‘resetting’, it’s called ‘safe mode’. Further, your mom doesn’t want to do this on her mac:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -safe-mode

Yeah, I guess for the most part your mom isn’t doing bleeding edge AJAX development that hoses her browser so she needs to do a full factory reset like I was today. But still, make it easier for me?

Sadly, the lil’ ol’ plip blog probably isn’t popular enough to give ‘reset ff3.5’ a higher ranking in google to turn up ‘use safe mode, silly!’

For those who read our Safari full time post of yore, you ask, “what’s the verdict?” The verdict is I use both. I would say that on a Mac, Safari is hands down an insanely fast browser. Faster that FF3 or FF3.5. However, firebug is the absolute no contest, pack it up and go home winner of JS debugging, DOM tweaking, ad hoc CSS styling, OMG there’s-another-feature-I-didn’t-know-about web developers god send life raft. Indeed. So, I use both. Yes, it does help to have a silly amount of screen real estate:

Update: Firefox 3 had the feature want, I just remembered!

Update 2: I’m wrong. Firefox 3.5 does have it.

I got four cores but a distributed load aint [on] one

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Hi there way too powerful desktop, why don’t you distribute a high load across more cores? I know your authors would have to work to make the process multithreaded and who would have thought that a lil’ mp3 player would every be networked and asked to download the XML library of 5 remote mp3 collections simultaneously, but still?! I want me fast computer now. Thanks.

Photos: Food, Bikes, Sunsets and Stars

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The other night we made fried okra. Tasty! This past Sunday I went for another sunseterific MTB ride in Tilden and Wildcat parks. Since taking some initial photos, I’ve since figured how to take long 60 second photos. We got stars on film; this is a first for me since back in my analog film days. Enjoy!