Home on the Digital Range
I've just had a frustrating 15 minutes trying to get a custom "Info" directory working with Emacs on my Mac. I like to have my own texinfo files in a ~/my/doc/info directory. Unfortunately, I was having a hard job getting Emacs to incorporate the directory whenever I hit Ctl-h i.
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There is an interesting post over at pieria.co.uk called "The Financialisation of Labour". Frances Coppola compares the changing economic incentives between a company making a capital investment in a slave and an employee. She then suggests replacing the word "slave" with the word "robot".
Yesterday I found something super-cool - a desktop spectrometry kit (for $40, which is even cooler). A spectrometer is a device for determining the composition of chemicals using light. There is a public database over at SpectralWorkbench.org, where you can upload your spectrographs.
Jon Perry has written an interesting post listing some strategies for dealing with the Technological Unemployment Problem.
The Technological Unemployment Problem is the issue of technology replacing humans to the point that there is massive unemployment.
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.
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:
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.
Today my TI EZ430 Chronos Watch arrived, and I spent a little bit of time hacking it on my MacBook Air. It turns out that even though the documentation seems to require either a Windows machine or a Linux box, you can communicate with the watch from the Mac by modifying the serial port information in the TCL source. I learnt this from a Google Groups post, and I've copied the modified TCL source onto my Github account.
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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".
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.