- Subscribe from iCal
Using iCal you can subscribe to anyone’s Google calendar. Just open up iCal then right-click the calendar pane on the left and select “Subscribe…” At the prompt, just paste in the link to the .ics file you would like to subscribe to. If you want to send someone an iCal (.ics) file link open up Google calendar and go to “Settings” then select the Calendars tab. Each of your calendars has Sharing settings that lists private and public links to your calendar. Send these to your friends and they can add you to their iCal. - Find or promote local events. Many people are starting to create public Google calendars to promote their events. A cursory search for “Dallas” turned up game schedules for the Mavericks and the Dallas Cowboys, as well as local concerts, and even event calendars for local churches and LARPers. If your group has something planned, add it to a public Google calendar.
- Organize your life. Calendaring is not new, but using an online calendar can help you keep track of all the different aspects of your life. Create separate calendars for work events, hobbies, family, birthdays, etc. Create a public family calendar you can use to schedule events and stay abreast of important family functions. Then just invite your family to the calendar as users.
24
Apr 06
Cool things you can do with Google Calendar
24
Apr 06
Untitled
New, tougher copyright legislation in the works “Some highlights from the proposed legislation (which has the backing of the Bush administration) include a toughening of the DMCA which would make attempting to infringe on copyright illegal. In addition, no one would be allowed to “make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess” hardware or software that could be used to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms. That’s an expansion on the DMCA’s current language, which prohibits the distribution of tools such as DeCSS that can be used to bypass copy-protection schemes.”
19
Apr 06
Untitled
Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen Buy Mont Blanc refills for use in cheapo pens.
17
Apr 06
asides
Interesting graphic on church bodies within the US. It looks like the Baptists own the Southeast.
Will retiring boomers brake U.S. growth? “While economists have known for years that the coming retirement of the baby boomers would be a drain on the labor force, the Fed study suggests that the United States is already feeling the effects and the impact in the next decade may be much bigger than previously thought.”
13
Apr 06
Tips on Getting Started With Web Design
Designing and creating websites is not difficult. As with anything else, with enough practice, experience and knowledge of the basics anyone can be a “web designer”. 
The important thing is to start somewhere and work from there. Here are a few suggestions:
- Learn basic HTML. HTML is not a programming language. Writing HTML is not programming. Disavow yourself of this idea immediately. It only creates a mental barrier for people like me who are intimidated by math and programming. While HTML has some things in common with classic programming languages (like the use of its own rules and syntax), it is better to think of it as a formatting language since you’re just using HTML to change the appearance of what would normally be just text and pictures. The great part is HTML is super simple. Really. If you’re a total newb where HTML is concerned bookmark w3schools.com. They have great beginning tutorials and even little sandboxes where you can write and render (view the output) HTML all in one place.
- Practice, practice, practice. Build your own starter website. Volunteer to build one for someone else. This is how everyone starts out. It’s fun, low pressure, and it’s for yourself. Make a website where you can putter around and change things any time you feel like it. Don’t hold yourself to an unrealistic standard by comparing your site to everyone else’s. Remember, you’re just a beginner, and you have a lot to learn. You’re going to make a lot of crap before you make something halfway decent. When we’re kids, we all start out drawing stick figures and sausage-headed people. Then gradually, with practice, you start filling in the blanks and progressing. It’s the same thing here. Don’t start out comparing yourself to the people who’ve been doing this stuff for 15 years. If you stay after it, you can be be better than 90% of people within days or weeks.
- “Plus it.” The biggest thing that will help you progress with designing and building web pages is knowing when something does or does not look good. I’m not talking about having good taste. I’m talking about knowing when something looks like crap. If you have high standards for how something should look, it will drive you so crazy when something does NOT look good that you will push yourself to figure out how to make it look better. This sense of dissatisfacton is central to the learning process. Walt Disney had a standard phrase he used to squeeze the best work out of his artists. He would tell them to “Plus it.” Even if you think something looks pretty good, “plus it”. Push it a little more.
StealLearn from other people. As the old saying goes, good artists borrow, great artists steal. Everything you need to learn, someone else has already learned. Use their knowledge and benefit from their experience. Don’t just borrow what other people know, steal it and make it your own. If you see something cool someone has done, right click their webpage and “View source” to see how they did it. This shows you the unrendered source code, which is the blueprint for how a website is put together. Acquaint yourself with every good resource you can get your hands on and soak it up. I’m a big believer in mental osmosis. If you listen to other people talk and write about something long enough, you’ll gradually pick up little lessons and bits of knowledge and experience. Here are a few places that will speed your education: Webmasterworld (a great place to ask questions and lurk), StyleGala (check out what the cool designers are building), A List Apart (the unofficial academic journal for ‘web designers’). There are tons of other equally good places. Just start reading and cribbing from your fellows. 99% of the ‘web designers’ out there are unremarkable (myself included). Do not be intimidated.- Know a few good tricks. Most web designers have a bag of tricks they use over and over. Little things like how to build a website that looks good, but is actually very simple. For example, check out Cameron Moll’s pretty website. As a well-known web designer, he knows how to make things look pretty sharp, but if you look closely you’ll see that his site is actually not that complex. It’s basically a header image, a background, and a two column CSS layout. There are a few complexities, but it doesn’t get much easier than that. If you look at this project he did recently, you’ll see that he uses many of the same tricks. While the site looks very nice, the actual architecture is not that difficult. It’s a navigation element, a large header, and three columns beneath the header. Cameron’s most effective trick is that he’s a whiz with Photoshop, which makes everything else he does look pretty snazzy. Most good designers are very good with Photoshop. I highly recommend spending lots of time in that application as it can account for 60-75% of your success with clients and projects. In my experience, most of the actual ‘designing’ is concepted and performed within Photoshop anyway. I don’t even mess with the HTML part of a project until everything is created in Photoshop. This guy has a similar workflow, which he outlines here. Buy, borrow, or steal a copy of Photoshop if you don’t already have one. It’s a necessary tool that everyone uses.
- You don’t need books or classes. You need to work. Some people will inevitably disagree with this, but I think books and classes (especially on web design) are almost universally worthless. Why? In any class, you are usually either way behind or way ahead of everyone else. This is a bad place to be. The teacher’s job is to make sure everyone gets through the class together, so you’ll usually only end up learning the very basics. Someone else is always more stupid than you are and holding everyone back. Furthermore, most people who write books and teach classes are not that great. The great designers are out designing and creating. Writers on the other hand are not paid to simplify and teach a subject. They’re paid to trick people into buying massive, expensive books that have no resale value. Most truly great designer / writers freely part with their pearls of wisdom to any with the ears to listen. They’re not interested in foisting more unreadable, unnecessary garbage onto the world to further confuse people who just want to learn. There are a few good classes worth taking, but try very hard to learn on your own first. If you spend 1-2 hours a day just playing around building webpages and graphics, you will eventually learn everything you need to know.
I hope you find some of these tips useful. Remember that you can do anything anyone else can do. Do not be afraid to make mistakes or ask questions.
13
Apr 06
Martin Random: Bullshit Genius or White House Insider?
This guy is either a great liar or he knows some things. It doesn’t have to be true to be entertaining. Be sure to read the whole thread. From Something Awful:
Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.
Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.
12
Apr 06
Solutions to Laptop Theft
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story recently on an increase in laptop theft in San Francisco coffee houses. One victim was stabbed in the chest for his laptop during a recent robbery.
Lynch said people working on the high-priced computers are easy targets. “You walk by any Starbucks and you see people with a laptop, it’s so tempting for the crooks. They walk in, right on top of the person, and the person has all their attention on the laptop. They snatch it right out from underneath their fingertips. ‘
It’s surprising that there aren’t more incidents of laptop theft considering how expensive laptops can be, especially a nice Mac with titanium case and 17″ LCD. There are tons of people out there who walk around with thousands of dollars in their bags: laptops, ipods, digicams, etc. Luckily, there are a couple of options out there to help prevent laptop theft:
- Get a laptop cable lock. Lock down your laptop with a cable lock that snaps into a specially designed loop on most laptops. Then loop the cable around something that can’t be moved. Unless thieves threaten you with body violence this is a good solution since it actually prevents theft.
- Install Laptop Lojack. There’s a company called Computrace that makes a product by the name of Lojack for Laptops. They even licensed the name and everything. The idea behind it is simple: as soon as your laptop is stolen, you call the police to file a police report then you call Computrace and they set your laptop into “I’ve been stolen” mode. Basically, once the stolen laptop is connected to the Internet it sends notifications back to Computrace that help pinpoint its location by using the IP address, which is tied to your physical address. Computrace then notifies the police with information sufficient to serve as a search warrent. This is a good solution unless the thief wipes the hard drive before he connects to the Internet. Computrace has partnered with Lenovo, the maker of IBM Thinkpads, which now include the Computrace software on the actual BIOS chip. So, even if the hard-drive is wiped the software is still able to run and report back when stolen. Eventually all laptops could include something like this. Computrace claims that 90% of the laptops its customers report lost or stolen are either recovered or the data on them is destroyed using remote commands.
- For Mac Users: Orbicule Undercover. Orbicule makes a similar program called Undercover that dials home when the laptop has been stolen. It also features support for iSight if you have a built-in webcam and will take snapshots of the thief. One interesting feature is that it simulates a hardware failure by gradually darkening the screen. The hope is that if the laptop is sent to Apple for repairs and connects to the Internet while at Apple, Undercover will detect the network settings and launch a special screen with instructions on how to return the stolen laptop to its rightful owner. It’s a novel approach, but who knows how well that works.
12
Apr 06
Cheap Human Capital With Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Some time last fall, Amazon launched a service called Mechanical Turk. The name comes from a well-known illusion:
In 1769, Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen astonished Europe by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelens “Turk” was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinets doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the Mechanical Turk: a human chess master cleverly concealed inside. (From What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?)
The idea behind Mechanical Turk is simple. It’s artificial, artificial intelligence. If you recruit human beings to do tasks that would otherwise require expensive software development it is more efficient and you ensure greater accuracy in the result. Simple tasks like image recognition can be performed easily by human beings and not at all easily by image recognition software. Here’s how it works: on the mturk site there is a listing of available HITs. A HIT is any task that needs to be performed whether it be writing descriptions, adding metadata, or image recognition and matching. Normally, the easier the HIT, the less the reward there will be for completing it. The most common types of HITs involve matching street-level photographs with their corresponding address. These normally have a reward of $.03 for the completion of each HIT. The most likely goal of this type of task is to help improve the accuracy of results for Amazon’s street-level mapping program through A9. Since Amazon has a long way to go to document every street in every city in every country in the world, these types of HIT’s will probably remain the most common. It’s a huge endeavor since the photographic data for these results will also need to be updated as businesses relocate from time to time.
When the mturk service first launched, I clicked through about 2,000 sets of street address images with an accuracy rating of 85% (according to Amazon) in a week’s time. Completing image HIT’s is the kind of thing you can do while on the phone or surfing the internet. Just leave the Window up and chew through 20 or 30 at a time. Since you’re looking at street level photos of cities like Portland and San Francisco it’s almost like taking a weird, boring vacation. Judging from the hundreds of photos I clicked through, Philadelphia looks like an interesting place to visit.
For each successful HIT completion, 85% of that 2,000, I got three pennies deposited in my Amazon account for a total of around $50. Once the HIT’s are completed and passed to your account, you are free to transfer the funds to your bank account. It’s a horribly boring and monotonous way to make money, but it works pretty well. After that first week as mturk became more well-known, the easy HIT’s dried up as human click bots around the world vied for the easy pennies. Now it’s so competitive (three cents is a lot of money to people in the Third World) that there’s no point in even bothering with it. You’re unlikely to get the large pools of easy HIT’s that were once available. It is, however, an amazing experiment in piecing out tasks to the global masses that no employee is going to want to spend their day doing.
Here is the coolest part. Amazon is now making this service available to other companies and individuals through their Requester program. This allows anyone to offer tasks to the mturk masses. Need some cheap market research? Send it to mturk and have your survey completed for $.01 a head. That’s 1,000 survey results for ten bucks. Other companies are paying for podcast transcription services at cut rate prices of $5-$10 per podcast. Transcription is an obvious winner for this type of service, but other services could include translation, editing / proofreading, OCR / handwriting, and content analysis. There are built-in mechanisms to ensure quality results. Before you can volunteer for more advanced jobs like transcription, you are often required to take a qualification test, which is prepared by the Requester. The other mechanism that ensures quality is simple, if the Requester is not satisfied with the result, they do not have to accept and pay for it. Companies like Hit Builder are springing up to build software and services for Requesters to streamline the process of using mturk. This is an idea that could really take off. As the broker between its army of mechanical Turks and companies who need human capital, Amazon could stand to make some serious money, but only if more companies start using it.
11
Apr 06
Changes in store
Some separation is in order. Starting today, all new personal blog entries will be written at www.sivori.org. All other content will remain here. The goal is to turn letterneversent.com into more of a topical resource with longer essay style blog entries rather than having a mix of the personal day to day and the topical. The two readerships (or potential readerships, rather) are not likely to overlap. We’ll experiment with it.