Brett Hutley's Blog

Tim Ferris (of the The 4-Hour Work Week fame), has got a post out on "Hyper-decanting" wine to "age" it very quickly.

Continue reading “Immersion Blending Wine”

I've just been reading this Forbes article called "The Rise of Developeronomics". The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging your own capital. This article builds on an earlier article by David Kirpatick called "Now Every Company is a Software Company".

Continue reading “Developers as Capital”

An easy way to generate a unique, memorable but secure password for each website or service you visit is to apply the following recipe:

Continue reading “Unique, Secure, Memorable Passwords”

I've been listening to Slate's Negotiation Podcasts, which I think are excellent. There are currently 7 episodes (although more are on their way), each about 10-15 minutes in length. Below are my notes summarising what I've learned:

Continue reading “Negotiation”

Python's IMAPv4 client library imaplib is a really light-weight wrapper over the IMAP4 protocol. As such, it isn't that intuitive to use. The best reference I've found on it is a cheat-sheet over here.

Continue reading “IMAP4 and Python”

I have just been importing some music into iTunes from an external drive. Sometimes iTunes doesn't recognise songs as belonging to the same album, even if they have the same Album name. (Bad iTunes!)

Continue reading “Getting iTunes to recognise tracks as belonging to one Album”

I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I'd post my first impressions.

Continue reading “Bio-Monitoring and the Jawbone UP”

Bryan Morris has a post about how he has set up Emacs using org-mode to implement a Kanban board. He uses table mode within org-mode, and hyper-linking to link items within the table, to actual org-mode tasks. To me, this setup seems a little clunky, so I thought I'd describe my current system.

Continue reading “Emacs and Kanban”

This morning I was researching a fast yoga workout when I came across the Five Tibetan Rites. These exercises supposedly came from a retired British Army Colonel who was stationed in Tibet, and written up in the book "The Eye of Revelation" by Peter Kelder in 1939. Apparently the colonel stayed at a monastery populated by extremely long-lived monks who practiced these exercises every day.

Continue reading “The Five Tibetans”

There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain "was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn't being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord's private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers."

Continue reading “Rewiring the Brain”