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Musical DNA

·9 words·1 min
via musicaldna.com and @jensmccabe Very interesting music visualization technique.

2009 in photos (part 1 of 3) - The Big Picture

·34 words·1 min
via boston.com As usual, awesome photo set from TBP, showing some of the good, the bad and the superbad of 2009. Photo 39 (above) is absolutely heartbreaking. "Why isn't dad reaching back to me?"

Drives On What Side?

·22 words·1 min
via reflectionof.me Interesting map. I didn't know Argentina used to drive on the left side (until 1945, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic#Argentina )

xkcd - A Webcomic - Scary

·51 words·1 min
via xkcd.com Scary indeed. From the alt text "I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year."

Crash test: 1959 Bel Air vs 2009 Malibu

·30 words·1 min
via iihs.org "[They] don't build cars like they used to. They build them better." The difference in the crash results is astonishing (look at both the photos and the video).

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine

·115 words·1 min
Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

30 Bad Practices of Web Designers

·74 words·1 min
Every once in a while you will come across a page that just doesn’t seem ‘right’. There are three elements of a website that can be harmed by bad practice:

Fix MacFusion on Snow Leopard | Racker Hacker

·127 words·1 min
First off, credit for this fix goes to Geoff Watts from his two tweets. If you’re using Snow Leopard, you’ll find that the current version of MacFusion refuses to complete a connection to a remote server. You can fix this in two steps:

Going home

·340 words·2 mins
Thirteen years ago, I left Mexico to study a Ph.D. in the U.S. In the meantime, apart from doing that, I got married, we moved to Switzerland, and we formed a beautiful family. I have learned so many things, I have changed in so many ways. In the words of my advisor, during one of our very early email exchanges, before I went to Purdue:

Send to Posterous directly from Google Reader

·213 words·2 mins
We're big fans of Google Reader. It's one of the easiest ways to view everyone's stuff fast. Yesterday, Google Reader added a new Send To feature that lets you post to your favorite places right from Google Reader while you're looking at stuff.

Posterous keeps getting better

·39 words·1 min
Posterous now supports even GitHub Gists - they keep adding support for more and more different sites, both for embedding and for auto-posting. I can't wait to get my iPhone, to use it more and more effectively everywhere.

How to trick an RHEL5 client install to use server RPMs

·55 words·1 min
For one of my projects at work, I am using a test install of RHEL5 in "workstation" mode, but I needed to install some packages that are only available in the "server" package list. To temporarily make yum search the server repositories, just change the following line in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date:

Easy video conversion in Mac OS X

·39 words·1 min
After a lot of searching (and trying iMovie) for how to convert a video file to flash (.flv) format, I found ffmpegX, a nice tool that does all the hard work, invoking other tools in the backend as needed.

Synchronizing 1Password data between two local accounts (howto)

·280 words·2 mins
I am a big fan of the incredibly useful 1Password. The latest beta release (2.8.3.BETA-11) introduces a new keychain format that, among other things, allows 1Password to detect changes made to the file by other programs and reload the changes on the fly. I am using this now to keep my 1P data synchronized between my work and personal accounts on my machine. Here's what I did:

Updated script for defining a new wallet item in 1Password

·53 words·1 min
If you have been using my method for defining new wallet items in 1Password, you may have noticed that in recent versions the display of those new items has been broken. I have updated the instructions and the script to work with the recent changes, you can get it from the same page.

Fixing Mail.app's recent mail addresses problem

·167 words·1 min
I had noticed for a while that somehow my Mail.app's "recent mail addresses" list was not updating (I never seemed to get any of my recently used addresses in Quicksilver). Today I noticed the following error message in /var/log/system.log:

Markdown support

·25 words·1 min
* Testing * if posterous * understands * markdown If not, it would be a nice feature to add. See [the markdown page](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) for reference.

My GTD system

·62 words·1 min
Here's my mapping from David Allen's GTD workflow to the parts in my system that implement each component. My main electronic tools are Things (http://culturedcode.com/things/ ), Journler (http://journler.com/ ), Mail.app and iCal. My main physical tools are my HPDA, my physical tickler file, my A-Z filing cabinets and my "inbox" and "pending" boxes.

Testing posterous

·55 words·1 min
Posterous looks quite nice, with the ability to "do the right thing" for different media types, and to autopost to other places. I have just set it up to autopost to my blog (http://zzamboni.org/brt/ ), we'll see if it does the right thing.