Here, let me hold that for you...

Just a few shots from a wedding I attended this weekend.

Instapaper is one of those “neat” web services that I signed up for once-upon-a-time and quickly discovered I didn’t really have a good use for. “Yay, I can save things from the web to read later!” I thought, and then quickly realized thats what bookmarks and todo lists were for.

Then this Christmas my awesome girlfriend surprised me with an Amazon Kindle. I love it. It’s lightweight, gets incredible battery life, and is as easy to read as a paperback book, plus I love being able to buy books on the go. But I still found myself stuck in front of my computer too much, catching up on my backlog of blog posts, news stories, and other articles that are too much commitment to finish reading within a feedreader.

This continued until I found out about Instapaper’s updated support for the Kindle. It’s so simple it’s almost magical. I tag a couple of blog posts and news articles using Instapaper’s bookmarklet, and if I don’t get around to reading them on their site or with the iPhone app, they’re automatically emailed to my Kindle once per week. The format of the converted articles works great with the Kindle, and is complete with images, section headings, and links back to the original articles.

Of course Amazon does charge for the data transfer of the converted document, but it’s quite inexpensive. My last Instapaper update, which weighed in at probably 15 articles and about 500kb, only cost me $0.15.

Epic. I love the “first descent” of Mt. Washington. Makes me wish just a little that I was still in Pittsburgh.

Update: I’m totally addicted to the Miike Snow song they used as a soundtrack. Buy it, its worth the $.99.

When SSH’ed into remote machines, usually Linux boxes running Debian, I’ve found that my backspace key doesn’t work properly in OSX Terminal. There’s a fix you can do in termcap that’s probably more robust, but I’ve found that setting your terminal type to rxvt does the trick nicely:

• Worry less
• Play more
• Lose 20 pounds (and help my cat lose three)
• Climb Mt. Rainier
• Cut back
• Invest smartly
• Advance in my career
• Take 50 photos a week, and post 10 of them
• Blog at least once per week
• Volunteer once per month

Photo from SparkyLeigh’s CC-licensed Flickr photo stream

Update: Well, as you can tell, I’ve failed miserably on the resolutions involving blogging and Flickring. Well, there’s always the last two quarters of the year…

See you next year!

One of the annoying things about this spec is that it involves dozens of examples in XML and JSON that are embedded in <pre> tags. I wanted to be able to develop and edit these samples as native XML and JSON files for convenience, but it was becoming a real pain to keep them updated in the main document via cut and paste. The obvious solution to this problem is a text preprocessor that would allow you to include a .xml file in the main .wiki document. There are dozens of these, but they’re all a pain in the butt to use and I didn’t feel like setting them up.

The solution, which couldn’t possibly be more obvious, was suggested, somewhat jokingly, by a coworker of mine:

cpp

Yup, the good old GNU C Preprocessor. If you run Linux, or you have a Mac (basically, any *nix), or you do any development whatsoever, chances are you have one hiding out on your machine somewhere. Chances are you’re also familiar with the #include "foo.h", which you’ve used since freshman year to have the preprocessor include the header for another C file before it passes it off to the actual compiler. But you never thought about using it to help you with your homework (or your specs) before.

Well cpp has a handy -P parameter that tells it to forgo the inclusion of the normal linemarkers it includes for the benefit of the compiler. This makes it perfect for simple stuff like embedding one text file in another.

In your main document, use a #include statement to include your example file:

document.txt:

== XML Example ==
The following is an example of the server's response in XML:

<pre>
#include "example.xml"
</pre>

example.xml:

<example>
      <message>Hello World!</message>
</example>

Then use a simple Makefile to build your output document:

Makefile:

all:
        cpp -P document.txt document.out.txt

Using a Makefile means you can use TextMate’s Makefile bundle to quickly and easily build your document.

There you go, a completely “duh” way of doing simple text includes on any *nix system.

A month or two ago, I was lucky enough to spot a pair of very cool vintage theater seats with a big “FREE!” sign on them sitting on them down the street from my apartment. After my eyes lit up with the possibilities, I convinced an anonymous neighbor to help me haul them to the elevator.

Then I asked my awesome father for some carpentry assistance, since I can’t fit a table saw in my apartment.

He totally came through for me with a great “floorboard” made from some gorgeous teak/holly flooring (commonly found in sailboats) edged in oak. Mounting it to the seats was pretty straightforward – just some 10-24 stainless bolts backed by fender washers and nylock nuts. I added some standoffs made from nail-on nylon “magic mover” pads to make them easy to move around.

The result is awesome. They work great as a couple of extra seats for guests that stay out of the way when I’m not using them. And I love the quizzical look friends get on their faces when they try to figure out how I managed to steal them from the movie theater.

Monday was the big-two-seven for me. My god I’m getting old…

Photo from luvtequila2005’s CC-licensed photostream