Texas, Real Soon Now

Blogging goes on hold until I move to Texas. That should finish in June 2008's second week.

My Current Location

Over on the left sidebar, you see an inset Google Map showing the last location read from the GPS receiver in my phone and reported by ipoki client. What's ipoki? From ipoki's FAQ:

Ipoki lets you share your current location with others in real-time. Also, you can see where your friends are and track them on Google Maps and Google Earth. Ipoki lets you keep track of your routes and use it to geolocate photos in flickr automatically. Invite your friends to see where you are and find and follow them across the world. Feel free to sign up. It's free

By broadcasting a position record to Ipoki, you can tell what longitude, latitude, altitude, speed, and heading you had at a given time with a 1 Hz sample speed. Just the thing for fighting a speeding ticket, and evidence the surveillance society's tools work for transparency.

Ipoki has open sign-up, but let me know if you'd like an invitation. It also supports geolocation for Flickr and Twitter. The former works well, the latter rather less well. I'd also appreciate advice on the layout of the sidebar Google Map. It looks wrong to me, but the numbers look right. As usual, leave a comment, or come pay me a visit. Just call first.

Clevo D90T Laptop Disassembly

Everything Out, Topside, originally uploaded by Jay Dugger.

My three-year old, much used laptop from Widow PC finally broke early last Saturday morning. I decided to disassemble it and see if I could make any repairs.

Laptops do not get designed for repair, but for irreversible one-way assembly. Taking apart the entire machine taught me a lot. One such lesson taught me the value of the mantra "It can't be this hard. It's built in China by unskilled labor, for pity's sake." Another such lesson: "Don't try this at home."

Another thing you might not know, laptop service manuals don't get made freely available. As a public service, I photographed the last-quarter of disassembly and all of the reassembly. These appear on Flickr as the set Clevo D90T Laptop Disassembly. Why only the last quarter of disassembly? Oh, I didn't think of taking photographs until that point.

And what do you do with a broken laptop? Why, part it out on eBay, of course.

Geotagged DIY Food Porn

Mushroom Ravioli, originally uploaded by Jay Dugger.

I really enjoy this dish, and I rarely eat anything else from the restaurant's menu.

I like food porn best when it vividly reminds me of the meal. Cravings have little resistance against an evocative memory. The trick of imagining a dish I craved instead of eating it helped me quit eating sweets.

Images versus real hunger, well...a wise Pole wrote the following.

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.

Leave a comment if you know the quote, or if the post title wins your local game of buzzword bingo.

Dr. Albert Hofmann Died Today.

Dr. Albert Hofmann lived one hundred and two years, a very long time for a human of his era, and he changed lives.

I Have Evernote Invitations.

The day I started using multiple computers introduced me to the now-common problem of data mis-match. Information needed at one machine might exist on another machine. Worse, I might not know which machine had the data I needed. Worse yet, I might have no way to synchronize information across the machines I used.

I've tried various ladders to climb out of these data oubliettes.

• Keeping $HOME under CVS, or Subversion, or Git;
• moving on-line to the greatest possible extent through services such as Gmail, Google Reader, and Odeo;
• using media storage services like Flickr, Grazr, Mappio, or Openomy.

Each helps in its own way, but a general-purpose synchronization tool would greatly help.

This brought me to Evernote, which looks as if it might do exactly what I want. You can learn more about the service and its products by listening to this podcast or watching this video. From the web page,

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.

So far I've used it mainly to cheaply OCR newspaper and magazine clippings, but I will test in more in the future, the great and glorious period I tag "someday-perhaps."

As of Sunday, 27 April 2008, Evernote costs nothing and sits in invitation-only beta. If you want a Evernote invitation, or just like the idea of synchronizing across your machines, send me an email address by commenting, emailing, or by voice mail at +1 (314) 766-4426. I need an email address to send the invitations.

Surreal Advertising Caught My Eye

Surreal Advertising Caught My Eye, originally uploaded by Jay Dugger.

I saw this today while visiting Subterranean Books in the University City district of Saint Louis, Missouri. The shop has a bubble machine mounted just above its door, and its spray of bubbles catches the sunlight and the wind.

Whimsy saves a public unsolicited display from spam-hood. It caught my eye, but I didn't enter the store. I don't need any furniture.