Brett Hutley's Blog

OK, here is an idea I had this morning: It's called "Mnemonic Tagging". The idea is that you create a list of keywords (or tags) that you use to mentally file mnemonic visualizations. For each of these tags you imagine something that represents the tag, followed by a chain of mnemonics that relate to that tag.

Continue reading “Mnemonic Tagging”

I have been studying maths for quite a few years now, but I still find it a struggle to remember various formulas/equations, especially when starting a new topic. I've been thinking about developing my own mnemonic system for math symbols to help me memorize equations easily.

I would need to relate various mathematical operators to something else that is easy to visualize. The bracketing of expressions is problematic, you would need to have a way of visualizing a collection of things that the operator acts on.

I think that having a mnemonic system for maths would help internalize the ideas and models within a domain. It's obviously still a work in progress!

There is a very scary article on the Atlantic about how you essentially become shunned by employers after 6 months of unemployment. It is about an experiment by Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University. He applied for 600 job openings using fake resumes, within which he varied 3 factors - how long the applicant had been out of work, how often they had switched jobs, and how much experience they have. What he found is that how long you've been out of work is the most important thing that employers look at. People prefer to hire someone with no experience, than someone that has been out of a job for more than 6 months. Scary stuff.

Last weekend I competed in the qualification round of Google Code Jam. I went into it cold (i.e. not having read any of the previous problem sets), and found it a little harder than I expected. The first 2 questions were easy. The last 2 were easy in principle, but I found my implementation didn't scale well to the large data sets, given the limits involved. I still got well over the required score to get me into the next round.

My take-aways from the process are as follows:

Continue reading “Reflections on Google Code Jam”

So it appears that there is a occasionally a problem in streaming music to the Apple TV from the Mac. The symptom is that you can see the "Audio TV" device in your Sound -> Output window, but every time you try to select it, the selection reverts to the "Internal Speakers" line.

The easiest way to reset this, is to go up to the menu bar at the top of the screen and switch off your Wifi Network, leave it off for a second, then switch it back on. When you reconnect to your wifi network you should be able to select the "Apple TV" device in your Sound/Output pane in the System Preferences.

Well, it's been ages since I posted last. Not terribly good, seeing as one of my New Year's resolution was to write a lot more. To be fair, I have actually been writing. Just not on my blog.

Reflections on 2012

2012 was a pretty good year for Helen and I. Probably the highlight of the year was going over to the Emmy Awards in New York. Helen was one of the people nominated for an award for her work on a TV documentary episode with Adam Savage "Curiosity - Can you live forever?". We had an absolute blast in New York.

Continue reading “Reflections on 2012”

I seem to have a problem with my Fitbit Ultra and my Mac Air running OS/X 10.8. What happens is the fitbit daemon doesn't seem to work properly if I suspend the notebook by closing the lid. After awakening, my Fitbit profile never seems to update with the latest data from the device. A solution to this problem is to restart the fitbit daemon. You can use launchctl to stop and restart the daemon, which should mean that your data then gets transferred from the device properly.

sudo launchctl stop com.fitbit.fitbitd sudo launchctl start com.fitbit.fitbitd

I found an instructable for a DIY book scanner. There seems to be a thriving online community based around building DIY book scanners as well. I have a lot of books I'd like to scan into electronic format. There's a startup called One Dollar Scan that will scan your books for a dollar. Unfortunately it's based in the US. It would cost me a fortune to send my books over there to be scanned. A DIY book scanner sounds like the ideal solution for me.

A nice little transhumanist sci-fi short film with a Blade Runner feel:

TRUE SKIN from H1 on Vimeo.

My media centre for the past 7 years has been a Mac Mini with an external hard disk. I've been playing music through iTunes and either watching movies from DVDs I've ripped to the hard-drive, or renting movies from iTunes. I've decided that this setup is antediluvian. I am slowly moving to a media setup for the 21st century. I've decided that everything needs to be stored on the cloud. No local storage. This means I use Spotify for music and Netflix for movies/tv. I also don't want to have to go over to a computer in order to search for movies or music. I want to be able to search for media on my iPad and stream it to the TV/stereo. In order to accomplish this, I've bought an Apple TV. This is connected to my TV via HDMI, and will shortly be connected to my stereo (once the Optical Digital to Stereo converter arrives). I set it up last night, and everything seems to be working well.