Last night, looking at my bookshelf, I noticed my copy of Animal Farm and decided to re-read it. By the time I was finishing the first chapter, the entirety of the rest of the book flooded back into my memory, and I felt like weeping for the tragedy I knew was coming, eventually.

The autobox pragma first showed up a few years ago. It lets you do something like this:

Quite a while ago, I suggested to ABE.pm that we should get together and do some group hacking. When someone said, “HACKATHON??” I said, “Good grief, no!” I just wanted to do some messing about and have fun, without worrying about goals or accomplishments. Also, “hackathon” sounds like the hacking equivalent of running 26.2 miles: gruelling. I wanted to make sure it was clear that the point was to hang out, and that hacking was just the entertainment.

In case anyone has been thinking, “Gosh, I haven’t seen anything from rjbs lately,” the reason is ridiculous. It’s not that I’ve been busy (but I have) or lazy (but I am). It’s that I’ve been stupid.

Here’s an idea that occurs to me frequently when making slides for conference tutorials. Sometimes I make a slide and I know that it might be too advanced, but it’s a crap shoot. If the vast majority of the audience understands the slide, I can save several slides by not explaining it. If enough people look confused, I want to display those slides. I don’t mind making the slides up front, but I’d like to be able to only show them if I think it’s needed.

muxtape.com is a site where you can build mix tapes by uploading mp3 files. You can find other people’s uploads and listen to them. It’s the flea market tape swape of 2008. I like it.

The old FAT filesystem, still used by many USB mass storage devices like my new USB key drive, does not have a good concept of permissions. That is: not even as good a concept as UNIX. It’s common that the default behavior when mounting a FAT filesystem on unix is to set everything a+rwx. I’d rather not have files mounted a+x, so normally I could set a mask in my fstab options. On OS X, though an automounter is used that doesn’t seem to be configurable on a per-filesystem-type level.

Inspired by my recent adventures in on-plane USB flash drive git repository swapping, I ordered a USB storage device. It seemed like getting a micro SD reader would be fairly multipurpose and expandable, so I ordered a teeny tiny micro SD reader that came with a 2 GB card and adapters for mini and regular SD. This thing is tiny. If I put a quarter on top of it, you can barely see it.

I just spend twenty minutes or so on this nonsense.

Yesterday, Kip (and the rest of his clan) came over and we finished Phase II of Project Better Back Yard. I’d already dug up quite a bit of the earth around the two posts. I was “thrilled” to find that just beside the post nearer the house, there was another post! It had probably been cut off before the still-there post was planted, but I was still gobsmacked. It had a much more reasonable base, only a few inches across, and the concrete was awful. I broke out most of it with a hand sledge.