Tab Sweep – June 19

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The most diverse place in America:

Remember Sarah Palin’s much-parodied 2008 interview with Katie Couric? One segment ended with this line: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Five Thirty-Eight: Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?

Compared with the OECD, America is a Violent Country. Is it getting worse?

Indie publishing tips: Get a Spine and Get a Blurb (for your book’s cover), and The Economics of Indie Publishing.

John C. Wright explains why he doesn’t worry about an author’s politics.

There are other authors (Milton among them) who were visited nightly by the muse and dictated to him. … But her voice is there, or the story is merely words without spirit. … I do not care that Leigh Brackett was a lady or Lord Dunsany a lord. I also care very little what the author thinks in his private life when he is speaking for himself. This is why I prefer the juveniles of Robert Heinlein over his seniles. His later books were too much Bob and not enough Bob’s muse.

Lifehack: John Brandon’s 7-minute routine to change your work life and a follow-up article about implementing it. (I hate the auto-scrolling at that site, by the way.)

Acton Institute: Why the Price System is One of God’s Artworks. (Which reminds me: I need to read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

Dieting doesn’t shrink your stomach, quite:

The latest science suggests that chronic food restriction can actually affect how much you need to eat to feel full—with caveats. … Numerous imaging studies have shown that the stomachs of obese people are really not that different from those of the rest of the population, indicating that there is little relationship between body size and baseline stomach size….

Thoughts about effective logo design.

Kurt Schlichter says it’s not cool when a high school graduating class has 72 valedictorians.

Shut down the TSA. Really.

This deserves more than a mention in a tab sweep: The Founders’ Model of Welfare Actually Reduced Poverty. I don’t know how well things worked before the modern social welfare system (since Roosevelt’s New Deal, say) but today it’s hard to spend almost any effort trying to alleviate poverty without giving in to despair.

Tech Links – May 29

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Three open-source Python shells.

Don’t catch Exceptions. I must have known why I always do rescue => boom to catch exceptions. The reason is that Ruby makes that shorthand for rescue StandardError => boom. Nifty.

libgrader: find quality gems for your next project. It knows about two of my favorites gems: pericope and titleize. (Unlike awesome-ruby.)

Sequel: the database toolkit for Ruby. (Here’s an introductory screencast at RubyTapas.) I keep thinking I should do something with sqlite. Well, really I think I should do something with a database, but I’d rather put it on Drobox than try to figure out how to have a mysql server out on the internet and not regret it.

The reason? Once you’ve used a join you’ll never be content using a spreadsheet for a database. Here’s a quick introduction to joins.

Mac audio graphing tool FuzzMeasure updated. I didn’t remember that it had a name of its own. I thought it was just SuperMegaUltraGroovy. Anyway, every time I look at this I think to myself about the software I wrote in the mid-90s and all the cool graphs I’d like to have implemented.

Tech Links

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Simple Audio Conversion with FFMpeg. Is that still a thing? I can’t keep up with all the forks.

On-demand System Tray. I can’t stand the Unity Panel. Give me back my WindowMaker. (Like that’s going to happen. Even MacOSX is disowning the awesome NeXT UX.)

How to add extra airplanes on FlightGear Flight Simulator. I’m not much of a gamer so I didn’t know there was such a game. But, judging from the screenshots, Linux games have sure improved.

Windows 8 Setup (Continued)

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I’m moving from a Mac to a Windows PC at work, and I’ve been blogging some of the things I’m doing to set up my computer.

There’s two things I wish I could just set up: rsync and a decent command shell.

Rsync

I don’t know how you write a server for Windows, but it’s amazing to me that Rsync hasn’t caught on there. Especially since it was developed by the same guy who gave us Samba. (Maybe that’s the point. Note the direction of the copying arrow.) (Don’t tell me about DeltaCopy. It may be great for moving things between Windows machines, but I’m not hoping to do that a lot. I want a cross-platform solution. I need to explore cwrsync.)

Shell

Cygwin gives you a pretty good set of proper command line utilities. The biggest problem is that it needs a command-line tool like apt or yum to keep it up-to-date. I’m looking into apt-cyg.

But a shell needs a terminal emulator to run in, and Cmd.exe doesn’t cut it. Again, I’m puzzled by the dearth of alternatives, especially since the one Microsoft included was so crappy. There are probably a dozen decent terminal emulators in the Linux world, and a couple for Mac OS X.

So right now I’m trying to figure out cmder. It appears to be a fresh implementation of a terminal emulator.

Windows PC Start-up List

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Download a copy of PC-Decrapifier (or Decrap) and Should I Remove It. (You’ll need to get other things from Ninite (below) but start by getting Revo Uninstaller in case you’re having trouble decrapifying something.)

Product Key Finder by Magical Jellybean.

From Ninite.com create installers for:

  • Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. You can’t have too many alternatives to Exploder.
  • Dropbox and Google Drive.
  • Notepad++, Python, WinSCP, Putty, and WinMerge
  • LibreOffice

vim and gow (Gnu on Windows) and maybe Cygwin.

Ruby Windows Installer.

pdftk

Telegram Desktop

MarkdownPad (or pay $15 and get Pro)

Be not slow to consult Alternative To.

And when you’re ready, make a backup image using Clonezilla. Or at least a system restore point.