This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I am not running. Just walking the dog. But with an app that makes maps like the above (Nike+ GPS) I just can’t help wanting to go a little faster or farther each time! I mean, look how fun that map is!
Those of you who are Facebook friends have probably seen the little updates the app makes after each time I walk the dog. :-) At some point though I may have to ditch the dog if I want to actually go much faster than our current strolls, as he keeps wanting to stop and do the things dogs do on strolls, and that slows me down! :-)
So, I’ve been whipping through books lately. So here is the updated Kindle ratio as it stood after I finished The Elegant Universe. We’re up to 12 of the last 20 books I have read, or 60%, being available on Kindle. As I’ve mentioned before, starting with this book, my choice of books is now biased toward books available on Kindle, so this percentage should increase relatively quickly, although I don’t expect it to pop to 100% any time soon. For reference, the last 20 books were:
- YES – The Elegant Universe
- YES – Children of the Mind
- NO – Introduction to Algorithms
- YES – Xenocide
- YES – The Geography of Bliss
- YES – Speaker for the Dead
- NO – First Break all the Rules
- YES – Ender’s Game
- YES – Until the Sea Shall Free Them
- YES – Foucoult’s Pendulum
- YES – Java The Complete Reference
- NO – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- YES – The Audacity of Hope
- NO – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
- NO – Data Mining
- YES – The Children of Hurin
- YES – Dreams from my Father
- NO – The Odyssey
- NO – Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (Vol II)
- NO – A Morbid Taste for Bones
Note in the case of The Odyssey and Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, other editions are available on Kindle, just not the specific edition I read.
So, an update after Children of the Mind which was the last book I selected under pre-Kindle rules. Of the previous 20 books read, 55% were available on Kindle. After this update, future updates will reflect the fact that I am giving preference to books available on Kindle in my selection process. Not that anybody cares, but for reference, those 20 books were:
- YES – Children of the Mind
- NO – Introduction to Algorithms
- YES – Xenocide
- YES – The Geography of Bliss
- YES – Speaker for the Dead
- NO – First Break all the Rules
- YES – Ender’s Game
- YES – Until the Sea Shall Free Them
- YES – Foucoult’s Pendulum
- YES – Java The Complete Reference
- NO – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
- YES – The Audacity of Hope
- NO – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
- NO – Data Mining
- YES – The Children of Hurin
- YES – Dreams from my Father
- NO – The Odyssey
- NO – Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (Vol II)
- NO – A Morbid Taste for Bones
- NO – Aylesbury in Old Picture Postcards
Note in the case of The Odyssey and Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, other editions are available on Kindle, just not the specific edition I read.
So, having finished a book lately, time for another updated Kindle ratio. (I did the counting a few days before actually getting the post done, thus this being the ratio for the 7th not the 10th.) This is basically what percentage of the last 20 books I have read are available on Kindle. Last time I updated this this percentage went over 50% for the first time, thus triggering my determination that I “officially wanted a Kindle”. There were a couple of books already in the queue though, but this meant that my method of determining what I read next would now be biased toward books available on Kindle, and the first time a Kindle book was scheduled, I would go ahead and order the Kindle.
The book I finished prior to regenerating these stats was still a physical book though. As will be the next book finished. After that though, it has now been determined, a Kindle book. So the Kindle was ordered and is now in my hands. Woo! This means though that from this point forward my “Kindle Ratio” will be biased since my method of choosing books will be biased. It might still be interesting to see how long it takes this to get to 100% though, as my system does still allow me to pick non-Kindle books in several different situations. So for at least a little while, I’ll keep doing these updates. Until I get bored anyway. For now, we hold steady at 55%, or 11 out of the last 20 books I’ve read available on Kindle.
On October 26th 2004, I became, at least according to Google, the first one to use the word “antihypersyllabicsesquipedalian” on the web. That was this blog post where I talked about what the word meant and how I found out about it. Since then, as you can see on the chart above, usage of the word on the web (once again based on the number of Google search results) increased slowly from 2004 through 2009. But toward the end of 2009, a dramatic decline began. Now, I know that how Google reports the number of search results probably has a big effect on this, not just how often people are using the word. However, to combat this decline, more people have to use the word and use it more often. So, antihypersyllabicsesquipedalian… a person who hates long words… use it as often as you can!
Dots are individual daily readings of the percent of time I spent asleep in the prior 7 days. The red line is a smoothed trend line (even though the points themselves are already smoothed by virtue of being over 7 days). I was on a “staycation” August 19th through 31st. The increase in time spent asleep is clearly visible.
Yesterday Brandy and Amy went to Bumbershoot and Alex and I stayed home. 12+ hours without Mommy, which I think is a new record. We did fine. But today Amy has a friend with her and so Brandy wanted company since we knew Amy and friend would immediately go off on their own. So Alex and I are here with Brandy for the day. Woo!
Taken yesterday, but my gateway from email->Flickr->blog didn’t work. Testing to see if was a temporary problem and all is well now, or if I need to actually spend time troubleshooting. After an hour in the line here, we successfully got into Bumbershoot and spent the rest of the day there and fun was had by all. Today and tomorrow Alex and I will be staying home while Amy, Brandy and perhaps one of Amy’s friends do the Bumbershoot thing.
So, last week I got a new external wireless network camera to play with. It has been set up for awhile now, but I’ve been tweaking various things, so I hadn’t posted about it now. But you should all of course take a look. The image above should be updating live, but go to the full AbulCam to see the timelapse of the previous day, send messages to me, etc. Because it is wireless, and because it has the whole night vision thing going on, it isn’t limited to pointing at things near my computer. I’ve pointed it at various things in our front or back yard, in a few different rooms of the house, etc. Fun stuff. As I write this it is once again pointing at me sitting at my computer, but I’ve been moving it around and will probably continue to move it around. Brandy made me promise not to put it anyplace inside the house other than my office without her advance knowledge and her ability to veto, but still, there will probably be fun stuff to see sometimes, and more fun exciting daily timelapses. So peek in often!
While setting it up I spent a bunch of time improving various aspects of the AbulCam since I was messing around anyway.
- The main live image now uses server push instead of a cranky Java applet, so it works more reliably and in more places. (For instance, now you can see it update live on an iPhone.)
- I’ve also improved the reliability of the push of the daily timelapse. In the past it would not always actually have the previous day’s timelapse because the pushing of the file up to the server would fail. That should work much more reliably now.
- If you are using Safari, the timelapse is HTML5 instead of a Quicktime plugin. Other browsers will still use Quicktime.
- The mini view of the camera on the front page of Abulsme.com also now updates live for most browsers. (The current version of Firefox has a glitch in how it deals with server push, so I have Firefox use the older thumbnails which update once a minute or so.)
- The “make my iMac say something out loud” feature, which had been broken for awhile, is now fixed and fully operational again.
- Since the new camera is a network camera and not sharing USB with the internal camera, I don’t have to turn it off to have a video chat using the internal camera.
The new camera also lets me pan and tilt it from a password protected control page served by the camera itself inside my network. Aside from exposing that control page publicly and publishing the UID/PW for the camera, I haven’t figured out a way to just put the appropriate control knobs on my public webpage to let anybody pan and tilt the camera. I’d already spent enough time on other aspects of the camera, so I had to cut things off somewhere. But if anybody out there knows how to do that with a TrendNet camera, let me know. I think it would be fun to let the internet control where the camera was pointing. :-)
Anyway, updated camera. Peek in and enjoy.
I can’t even begin to imagine how bad an idea this is.
Johnny Depp playing the Doctor in a big-screen Doctor Who movie?
(Charlie Anders, io9, 2010 Jun 29)
It sounds like a ridiculous internet rumor. But Tor.Com claims to have confirmed the casting, and a release date of 2012, with “movie studio sources.” (They don’t say which studio.) And Russell T. Davies may be the writer.
They say take it with a few pounds of salt, so I will.
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