Author Archives: mrjones

5 x 5 Anthem East Trail

0 minutes, 41 seconds

Ever since Hans showed me the way with his 5×5 of Sibley, I’ve been mildly obsessed with this format. It’s so quick to put together and forces to you to think about what’s really necessary to tell the story. That said, I think I failed in my recent attempt to tell a *good* story, but it was really fun to shoot and even more fun to ride:

http://vimeo.com/57996219

Video was shot just a 10 minute ride from our house in Henderson, NV on/around Anthem East Trail (PDF). I’m spending all my rides (all 3 of them) exploring this area as it’s so close to our house.

Video is 1080/30P and shot on my “Faux Pro” (ya know, instead of a Go Pro), my new Galaxy S3 in an OtterBox. I never would have though of shooting first person cycling videos, but the Otter clipped so nicely on my camel back strap!

Free Idea: Abstracted Facebook Anonymizer

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1 minute, 25 seconds

Welcome to my first post in the oft thought of, but rarely written, category of free ideas. These are ideas that if I had more time I might execute on. However, being a full time employee, husband and father of two, I don’t have time to build, create or code them. Instead, I shall give them away for free here in hopes that some one else will at least get a kick out of them, if not actual do something with ’em!

Y’all remember I wrote the 404er plugin for wordpress, right? This plugin was created out of the desire to give people the ability to publish a blog only for human consumption. Search engines would see the 404 header on every page of your blog and not index a lick of information. While not entirely practical, you could publish a blog that wouldn’t exist (if a tree falls and google hasn’t indexed it…) unless some one sent you a link directly.

In that same vein, I’ve never been on Facebook as I don’t trust their privacy policy and intentions. I’m not alone. However, everyone and their mother (OMG! almost a billion people) is on Facebook. This means you miss out on photos, invites and such your friends are sharing.

Enter the Abstracted Facebook Anonymizer, first up in the free idea category. An SDK would be written against the Facebook API. The SDK would somehow create one Facebook account per friend. It would then re-assemble all the posts from your many accounts with one friend each into a single wall, as if you had a single account. The net result would be that you could use Facebook via this SDK proxy and Facebook wouldn’t ever have the full data picture of who you were friends with and what you were sharing.

I await the creation of www.Abstracted-Facebook-Anonymizer.com, though I’m sure Facebook’s TOS wouldn’t stand for it!

More Bee Pictures

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0 minutes, 10 seconds

I’m not up on my bees, but this was a big bee! He was very docile (…dying?) and in my in-laws yard. Easy target for the camera! Same yard as the baby spiders from way back when! Just two pics:

How I Make Coffee

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0 minutes, 38 seconds

Steps:

Start kettle on the stove
Measure 24 grams of beans
Grind beans in bur grinder
Wet Chemex filter
Put grinds in Chemex filter
Pour 30-60 grams by weight of water to bloom grinds
Wait
Poor a total of 240 grams by weight of water
Enjoy

Notes:

I use a scale
My target is 10 to 1, water to grinds. For 24 grams, I would use 240 grams of water, by weight.
My grinder is Kitchen Aid KPCG100OB Bur Grinder
I use a small Chemex
I get my beans from the wonderful Bica Coffee House
The grind is set to be as course or fine as Bica grinds their poor overs
I drink my coffee black
I try to use beans that were roasted less than 3 weeks ago
I store my beans in a hermetically sealed, light proof jar
8oz fluid ounces of coffee per serving is just right for me!

7″ Android Tablet Spec Comparison

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1 minute, 38 seconds

For a long time I’ve always thought that tablets are not of much use until you reach the 3rd or 4th use case. You know, you have a laptop on which you can have 20 tabs of browsers open, have a full blown IDE to code in or even run a local instance of your dev environment. The second use case is your smart phone for when you’re on the go, don’t want any bulk or weight but still want to surf and check emails and listen to music. It’s not until you’ve got all those covered that you’ll consider spending hundreds of dollars on a 3rd device (or 4th if you have a desktop).

The wife is considering having a bigger screen than her Incredible to watch Netflix and read blog posts, news and library books on. This will likely spill over into reading kids books for our kids Emmett and Violet as well. Below are the tablets we’re considering. Each item has a product, review and purchase link in the first row. The second row is the presence or lack of a camera. While researching this piece I found Lisa G’s 7″ Tablet Smackdown on Mobile Tech and John P. Falcone’s Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad on CNET reviews quite helpful. Also, those that wanna blow past the 7″ screen (to 7.7″) and $400 price should consider waiting for the Samsung Tab 7.7 ($600-$800 at this writing). Of course that depends on where you fall in regards to my and Moore’s law. Finally, if you’re looking for cellular connectivity, consider the T-Mobile Springboard .

Samsung Tab 7+ $399	HTC Flyer $299	IdeaPad A1 $229	Kindle Fire $199	Nook Tablet $249
Product – Review – $	Product – Review – $	Product – Review – $	Product – Review – $	Product – Review – $
Front and Back	Front and Back	Front	None	None
1024 x 600	1024 x 600	1024 x 600	1024 x 600	1024 x 600
7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″	7.7″ x 4.8″ x 0.52″	7.68″ x 0.46″ x 4.90″	7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″	8.1″ x 5″ x 0.48″
12.1 oz	14.82 oz	14.08 oz	14.56 oz	14.08 oz
dual-core 1.2GHz	1.5GHz	1.0GHz	dual-core 1.0GHz	dual-core 1.0GHz
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS	WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS	WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS	WiFi	WiFi
16GB Int & MicroSD	16GB Int & MicroSD	16GB Int & MicroSD	8GB Internal	8GB Int & MicroSD
Android 3.2	Android 2.3.3	Android 2.3	Android 2.3	Android 2.3

Update: I’ve added lil’ thumbnails for each tablet.

.everyother { background:#ddd; } .tablettable {border:1px solid black;}

Ashley’s Law vs Moore’s Law

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1 minute, 3 seconds

I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s two laws out there when considering a new geek purchase. The first is Moore’s law which says:

The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months*.

– Gordon E. Moore, 1965

Most people round down to a year from 18 months. Additionally most people say that, “Shit gets twice as good, twice as fast, twice as small every year.” Moral of the story? If you wait longer the money spent on the gizmo will go twice as far than if you bought today (* Mr. Moore updated this be 2 every years, but I’m ignoring this).

Conversely, I’ve always given the buying advice I call Ashley’s law:

If you don’t have it, you can’t use it.

– Ashley Jones, 2011**

So, ya know, you’re limping along on that G4 iBook but don’t want to get a new laptop today because, “in just 8 months Apple’s gonna release the four gazillion hertz quintuple core laptop!!!” My logic says that the crazy slow laptop you’re using day in and day out really does suck. If you don’t have the new laptop, sure enough, you can’t use it (** I’ve been saying this for years, but am just now “publishing”).

Update: There’s a very unfortunate overlap with another much more serious, pre-existing Ashley’s Law. Well, they have disambiguation for a reason!

More water, more spider webs

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0 minutes, 11 seconds

Apparently the shutterbug in me loves spiders as well as their webs when wet. Or, maybe I just need an excuse to try to master my (still some what) new camera.

In any case, here’s some water in the setting sun light:

Spiders abound

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0 minutes, 13 seconds

I never really paid much attention, but apparently there is a spider season. We’re clearly in it! Tons of webs and tons of spiders. It’s cool.

Here’s one I found just around the corner of my house to compliment the web in my back yard from last post:

Spider web and Hard Drives

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0 minutes, 13 seconds

What to do on a sunny weekend? Why, hose down your local spider web, line up hard drives and take videos and photos of them all, of course! It is pretty insane just how fast that hard drive head moves. Check out the video below.

http://vimeo.com/29938469

Bees

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0 minutes, 0 seconds