Modus Operandi

How things work, or how I wish
they would.
September 9
Games and the Scientific Method Student interest in science is waning. But online, some gamers are using the Scientific Method to beat games. For example World of Warcraft players who compile spreadsheets of data about boss encounters to analyze for patterns and weaknesses and then proposing and testing hypotheses based on that data. Hey it’s science! The first question is whether the same kids who don’t like science in school are doing this at home or if the gamers in question are doing this because they’re already interested in science. The second question is what does this say about science curriculum? I would say that it’s indicative of a failure to make a compelling case to student about why this is important. The answer is not to make “educational” games but to find the opportunities for teaching your subject in the context of the things your students are already interested in.
August 30

On Your Team

Dear Candidate/NGO/NPO,

I have specifically told you that I’m interested in supporting your campaign/cause. I have donated in the past and plan to do so again in the future. Please, please, please put a feedback button somewhere in your communications that allows me to say “I get it, you’ve convinced me!” I will support your cause as much as I reasonably can while balancing that against the rest of my life. Please stop emailing me asking for money. It is starting to feel like spam.

Thanks.

June 10

Image Sequences

We take a lot of photos. At the end of the year I like to drop them all into a movie stop-action style. So far the best way that I’ve found to do this is with iStopMotion but it’s still really frustrating.

For starters, and I find this mystifying, you have to spec the frame rate when you create the movie file. I suspect that the target audience just works at a particular frame rate all the time, and finds this normal. It makes me crazy. Why can’t you load up images as a sequence and then output them at whatever frame-rate you want? Fundamentally any movie is just a stack of still images.

The other drag is that you have to import images at the file level. You can’t just tell iStopMotion to walk through a series of nested folders. Quicktime Pro will let you open an image sequence which almost gets me there. But the images already have to be in the same folder and they need to be named foo_000.jpg, foo_001.jpg, and so on. This means hand editing the file names of 500-2500 images. No thank you! At least iStopMotion doesn’t care what the files are called.

This is exactly the sort of highly repetitive work that computers are supposed to be good at doing. Why can’t I find a better solution?

June 9

Cargo

I have been trying to think of an elegant way to get weightlifting equipment (bars, bumper plates, dumbbells, kettlebells, etc.) to and from local parks for group workouts. Today I came across this cargo bike. 500 kg capacity fixed gear! Hot damn!
June 5
Saving the World Through Game Design

I’ve been enjoying the podcasts from the The New Yorker Conference. There are a few duds with some “Let’s Talk About Me” interviewers but most of the talks are interesting to great.

Standouts for me include: Morality, Surrendipity, Genius, and The Knockoff Economy. There is some other good stuff in there too, it’s worth checking out
April 15

Thing One on Music

  • Thing One: I like almost all the music we listen to.
  • Me: Yeah? I'm glad!
  • Thing One: Yeah, but my favorites are Bright Eyes and The Donut Song (Burl Ives)... and Hefner.
  • Thing One: Hefner makes me feel good.
April 3

Wake On LAN

EDIT: Apparently this worked exactly once for me. Booooo!

I use a MacBook, but I used to use a G5 PowerMac. Right now it holds the master iTunes Library and archived project files (this is not about back-ups). I don’t like to waste too much electricity, so I have it set to sleep after an hour of inactivity. No bother at all when I’m sitting right next to it in my office, but kind of a pain if I want to grab a file from somewhere else in the house. WakeOnLAN to the rescue! One caveat: This only works for target machines that are wired, so sleeping laptops still require a sneaker-net round trip. So think about that when cramming airport cards into home servers.

There are a few GUIs for it but I’ve used them and didn’t enjoy it much. I am using this CLI version (there may be others). There are installation instructions.

It took me a while to figure out the exact syntax so here it is:

wakeonlan -i TARGET.MACHINES.IP.ADDRESS TAR:GET:MAC:ADD:RES:S!!

I have reserved IPs (The option is under Internet>DHCP) for the various machines in the house with Airport Utility. Since I now know what those two numbers will always be I can add an alias to my .bash_login file:

alias wakeG5="wakeonlan -i 10.0.1.190 00:0a:95:b0:ad:a0"

So now I just type wakeG5 into Terminal and, voila, wakey wakey!

There is probably some hot-shit way to tie this into Quicksilver, but I’ve never really done any QS ninja stuff.

April 1
URL as UI I enjoyed watching Adam present at NewBCamp. He’s written up a nice distillation of a part of his talk. Use human readable (and manipulable) URLs! Nice work Adam!
March 23
Netflix Mobile Jim pointed out to me that Netflix does indeed have a mobile specific interface. It just isn’t linked anywhere I can see. Really nice for populating your queue when standing in the DVD section of a store. I made an iPhone icon for it.
March 21
Expelled! Laugh at Creationists, and mall security theater. (via Daring Fireball)