the personal weblog of raffy banks

Camcorder on Sushi Conveyor Belt

Watch the people’s reactions as a camera makes the rounds at a local sushi restaurant in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, Japan. - patora911

This is actually a very interesting video of someone who placed a video camera on a conveyor belt at a sushi bar; As the belt moves around, the camera records the diners. Some take note, making an interesting interaction between the camera while other chow unaware, forever caught in their ravenous state. The camera even makes its way into the kitchen…

It’s an interesting play on a style of documentary photography.

Dharmesh Shah’s Talk at the Business of Software Conference 2008

The other day I came across a talk given by Dharmesh Shah at the Business of Software 2008 conference entitled Insights From in and Around MIT.

In the talk, Dharmesh touches on just about every aspect and cycle that a young software startup will go through, all from personal, tangible experience; Idea inception, sales and marketing, Google adwords, VCs and funding, partnerships, data mining, being small vs going for the golden ticket, etc. But my favorite bullet point, “Your product sucks. Get over it.”.

Dharmesh highly advocates getting the business rolling, getting your product out there no matter what it is or how much it sucks because it is going to change. And the only way it can change to become software that people actually want is to present 1. something to them and then 2. listen.

Dharmesh is really good at keeping the process of building a software business simple, making it feel attainable and not complicating the things with anecdotal “proof”. This is one of my favorites talks I’ve watched in awhile. Enjoy.

Students’ Rights Trampled On in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

It’s one of those stories that makes my blood boil:

Judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. - NYTimes

One of their victims:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment. - NYTimes

It hurts to think of all the lives they destroyed. Disgusting.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ei=kASWSevTGZjeM5GhgI4M&resnum=4&ncl=1303722996

First Screens of Google Chrome on OS X

Venture Beat: Early pictures: Google Chrome on the Mac

Paul Boag’s list of things a web designer will never tell you

Great post by Paul Boag over at BoagWorld.com entitled 10 things a web designer would never tell you

#7 is my favorite:

Fit as much on the homepage as possible

Without a doubt the homepage is by far the most important page on your site. If I look at my own website statistics the majority of people who come to my site never get further than the homepage (I have no idea why this is the case!) This is a problem. - Paul Boag from 10 things a web designer would never tell you

Whenever I come across a site that adheres to this “rule”, I’m halted, my sub-conscience broken, and I begin to explore all that the site has to offer.

havenworks-screenshot

Ha! Funny stuff…

Using MarcoPolo to Lock Down Your Mac When Connected to a Public WiFi Network

On my PowerBook I run quite a few sharing services, things like Web Sharing, Bonjour for file sharing and Screen Sharing. But the thing is, I only need these services running when I am at home; I’d rather not “publish” theses services when I am surfing at my local Internet cafe.

I’d also like to enable some sort of password protection for when I walk away from my PowerBook momentarily.

Enter MarcoPolo

MarcoPolo lets you switch your Mac between locations; Which it can do automatically or you can manually switch it. This means that when I am at home, I can switch to my “Home” location profile have any password protection disabled and all my services flipped on. When I am at a cafe, I can switch to my “Public” profile I can enable a screensaver password protection and have all my services flipped off.

MarcoPolo Switching Locations

Rules enable automatic switching between locations.

MarcoPolo Rules


The only problem I found with MarcoPolo was the poor help documentation and poor verbage within the app itself. So, here is…

How to use MarcoPolo to enable a screensaver password

Once downloaded and installed, click the compass icon on the menu bar and select “Preferences…”.

1. Click the context tab and then the plus symbol and add a profile named “Public”.

2. Click the actions tab, then the plus symbol and select “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…” and enter info as below:
MarcoPolo ScreenSaver

3. You will now want to create another “Add ScreenSaver Password Action…”, but with the context set to “Automatic” that is set to disable the screensaver password so you don’t have the password prompt when at home.

That’s it. Now when you flip to your “Public” location there will be a password that flips on when your screensaver kicks in.


There are actually quite a few actions your Mac can take, based on your location:

  • Setting your default printer
  • Changing your desktop background
  • Enable or disable particular firewall rules
  • Setting iChat status message
  • Setting the default IMAP or SMTP server for Mail.app
  • Mounting network shares (smb://, afp://, etc.)
  • Muting or Unmuting system audio
  • Changing OS X network location
  • Opening a file (an application, a document, etc.)
  • Quit an application
  • Enabling or disabling screen saver password
  • Start/stop screen saver
  • Changing screen saver idle timeout
  • Running a shell script (or any other kind of script, via Platypus)
  • Turning on or off Bluetooth
  • Turning on or off WiFi (AirPort)
  • Establish or disconnect VPN

You can also set you Mac to automatically switch between locations automatically based on quite a few rules

  • Visible WiFi networks
  • Current Audio Output device (headphones/internal speakers)
  • Discoverable Bluetooth devices
  • Advertised Bonjour (Zeroconf) services
  • Attached FireWire devices
  • Assigned IP addresses
  • Ambient Light level
  • Attached Monitors
  • Active Network Links
  • Power source (power adapter/battery)
  • Running Applications
  • Current Time Of Day
  • Attached USB devices

You can even run AppleScript or shell script actions when switching between locations…

Very cool!

iJackpot; NPR interview with Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software

Great interview with Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software on NPR’s The Story this afternoon. Topics include games, software development and the iPhone.

http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_703_iPhone_Apps.mp3/view

Feedly is a great way to start the day

Feedly is a website+browser-plugin that creates a customized newspaper-like start page based on your media subscriptions; RSS, Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.

So basically you install the Firefox plugin, tell feedly about the various subscriptions you have scattered around the web and presto! A custom news feed. From there you can do things like share articles to your Twitter or FriendFeed account, etc.

What I like the most is the clean design and layout; Full articles are pulled in to the software so flipping between articles is fast and not as jaunting when moving from site to site. (Of course you lose the aesthetic of the site the article belongs to)

Feedly Cover Thumbnail

I’ve only just begun using it, but so far I love it.

Jen-Hsun Huang on the Future of Computing, Graphics, Processing

VentureBeat has a fascinating interview with Nvidia exec Jen-Hsun Huang which focuses on what Huang asks, “what is the soul of a new PC?”.

For Huang it is not a question of when the recession will lift, getting things back to normal, but what will the landscape look like. Specifically the PC and chip industries.

Better, smaller, faster, more efficient chips and computers.

But the core change: Cheaper computing instruments.

Q: What is the next-generation user interface?
A: I may sound old fashioned. I want a MacBook Air with battery life that lasts forever for $199. I like that big keyboard. - http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/28/jen-hsun-huangs-quest-to-spread-graphics-beyond-pcs/

Bringing up Apple is very interesting. They are off in their own world and if the rest of the world changes, what does that mean for them?

Sales of netbooks are growing.

Maybe it’s better for Apple; Creating more value for them.

I’m often asked, “are those cheap Acer laptops really any good?”; Questioning their intention, going ahead the purchase no matter what my answer.

Honestly, as long as PCs and Laptops start coming stripped down, no unnecessary 3rd party software, all will be good.

But I really want one of these: TechCrunch Tablet

Importing EML mail messages into Outlook and/or Exchange mailbox

Have an EML file that you want to import into your Outlook mailbox? No problem.

It’s real easy and everything you need is already built into all versions of Windows. Here’s how:

  1. Open the folder with the EML file in it. Set aside.
  2. Open Outlook Express. (Does not need to be a “real” account so if you get any prompts, just fill it with some bogus info. Consequentially, if Outlook Express does have emails in the inbox, you will need to remove them if you do not want them added to Outlook.)
  3. Drag the EML messages in question over into the Inbox of Outlook Express. (Hint: If you want any of the messages to be marked as “un-read” within Outlook you will need to mark them as “un-read” within Outlook Express)
  4. Open Outlook, select File > Import > Import Internet Mail and Addresses > Select Outlook Express 4.x, 5.x, 6.x (Remove Check marks from Address Book and Rules) > Click OK (Not Save in Inbox)

Done.

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