Cool Geek Tricks

CROC 2012

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I had an opportunity to head down to Pendleton for the tenth annual Century Ride of the Centuries (aka “CROC”).  This was my seventh visit in eight years — having skipped last year’s — and especially anticipated because the Bar M Ranch was reopened as a camping option. What a […]

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Online classes

This fall, Stanford has been offering free online classes this fall in three subject areas of computing: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Machine Learning.   It’s different from MIT’s excellent OpenCourseWare series in that Stanford is offering a course you can play along with while MIT is providing the materials for self-study. For two of the courses, two

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Hard Drive Destruction

Since I’m starting a new major project, the family wanted to spend a lot of time on a staycation this weekend.  One of the activities was a field trip to Creation Station, a store with, well, bunches of stuff that you would have tossed out, except when you see a lot of them neatly arranged, it

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My first iPhone hide

As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones.   Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good.  Usually these adjustments are anywhere from

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Mapnificent

The other day I came across Stefan Wehrmeyer‘s very interesting tool, Mapnificent, which estimates how far you can go by public transportation in a specific period of time (defaulting to 15 minutes). There is an option to indicate you have a bicycle available. Obvious uses of the tool are looking at commute times and evaluating

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iPhone 4 travel map

Since the phone tracks where I’ve been, I thought it’d be fun to map it out using Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker application.   I spend the most time in the Pacific Northwe’t: I had forgotten about my trips to San Jose: While I was in Houston and New Orleans (separate trips), there was some opportunistic geocaching, spreading

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Saved by Calculus

On the flight to Houston, I was seated two seats over from a very strange, inebriated young woman. Tammy, from Billings, Montana, struck up a conversation with the guy between us, soliciting information from Derek, Married Guy™ from Canada, sharing truisms like “anyone who doesn’t know what they want to with their life by the

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Notes from SC10

King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010.  (Sometimes my job has perks.)   I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective

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