Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Jaw-dropping for geeks, probably an utter bore for everyone else. Download this perl script to a machine with perl installed and run it from the command line. Whoop-dee-doo, right? Now, open it up in an editor. Holy mother of Shiva. As mneptok says, “Some people have too much time on their hands.”
Very proud of our News21 (News Initiative for the Future of Journalism) team for the work they did on the Moral Compass, which asks the question “How do different religions view certain issues on sex and morality?” Spin the wheel and get answers on a host of questions covering masturbation, homosexuality, premarital sex, etc. from representatives of faiths including Catholicism, Judaism, Muslim, Buddhism, Methodist, Baptist, and more. Video interviews with clergy and others included. Nice work on the Flash interface!
The Moral Compass is part of Berkeley’s contribution to this year’s News21 project, Faces of Faith in America.
Over at Stuck Between Stations, we’ve posted a Francophile follow-on to last week’s Stuck on the Fourth of July to celebrate Bastille Day, this one titled Globe of Frogs: Stuck on Bastille Day.
For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves.
Roger, Malcolm, Christian and me on the French and French-Connected music that stirs our souls, rattles our cages, rocks our worlds, and powers our trips. Serge Gainsbourg, Malajube, Magma, Jonathan Richman, Gong, and lots more.
Miles: “I’m going to sprinkle magic dust on your head and make you a rock and roll star! You’ll play drums and I’ll play xylophone.”
We then proceeded to form a series of bands with the following names, each of them dutifully introduced to an audience of one (Amy) with a shouted “El Cerrito, are you read to rock and roll?,” changing instrumentation with each iteration, none of them lasting longer than a few minutes:
The Electric Motors
Plato of the USA
The Growing Plant of the Maraca That’s Been Fired
Chocolate Powder of England
Blue Bamboo
The Electric Pennies
Chalk Dust Slipper
Update: gpx2txt has been superceded by gpx2ipod – please visit that page for up-to-date info and discussions.
Downside of geocaching: The time it takes to prepare notes, making sure you’ll have access to hints and other people’s logs when you get there, etc. And the printing it requires doesn’t feel good from an eco perspective. All this data is available in .gpx files on geocaching.com, but most GPS units won’t display that data.
Paperless caching is where it’s at, but generally assumes you have a PDA. So what if you have an iPod but no PDA? The iPod has this much-overlooked “Notes” feature – mount an iPod, look in the Finder for the Notes folder, and drop in text files.
Amazingly, I haven’t been able to find anything that does this cleanly on the Mac. MacCaching is interesting, but (strangely) sends entries to Address Book rather to Notes, and doesn’t preserve any of the metadata you need on the trail. The workhorse utility gpsbabel is able to convert .gpx files to plain text (usable with iPod Notes), but the GUI version isn’t capable of batch operations. So I wrapped a shell script around the command-line version of gpsbabel to help Mac users do paperless caching with an iPod.
gpx2ipod takes a folder full of .gpx files and converts them to plain text, then injects them directly into an iPod’s Notes folder.
In the future I’ll try and re-package this as an Automator action, no Terminal required.
Update: Version 0.2 is now available, and handles both individual .gpx files and Pocket Query-generated multiple-cache .gpx files.
Update 2: gpx2txt has been completely rewritten as gpx2ipod – now much more user-friendly, with stored preferences and all kinds of bells and whistles.
With all the iPhone hype we’ve heard over the past couple of months, one burning question has remained unanswered. Until now.
Miles has been riding with training wheels on his bike for half a year now. Somehow, a sunny summer evening seemed like the perfect time to try ditching them and flying free. He had a bit of trepidation, and after his first wipe-out he declared his “new” bike “stupid” – said he wanted to give it as a present to a 7-year-old. Then he said he wanted to try again. Riding on the grass turned out to be the magic ticket, and made wipeouts fun. Within half an hour he was flying free and ecstatic. Strange, almost comical coincidence – practically every crash was complemented by the ping of a baseball on aluminum bat in the diamond we shared a field with.
Before there were Shriners driving tiny cars in stupendous fezzes, before the advent of tinfoil-helmet-wearing denizens of alt.black.helicopters, before there was Rogaine and hair transplants and “Ladies will love you” infomercials, there were ordinary Joes just like me seeking ever-elusive hair re-growth methods. Available solutions were on par with perpetual motion machines – like this marvelous Hair Hat advertised in Popular Mechanics, 1928.
This new invention—the result of an experience gained in treating thousands of cases of baldness—is in the form of a new kind of hat. It is worn on the head just 10 minutes a day. No unnecessary fuss of any kind. Just put the hat on your head. Wear it 10 minutes. And that’s all there is to it. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? All right. Then let me emphasize this fact. I don’t care how thin your hair is. I don’t care how many treatments you have taken without results. Unless my discovery actually produces a new growth of hair on your head in 30 days, then all you need do is tell me so. And without asking one question, I will instantly— and gladly—mail you a check refunding you every penny you have paid me.
How does it work? “My new invention gets right to the cause of most of hair troubles — the starving dormant roots.” I’m thinking the technology was more akin to the placebo effect, but who am I to say?
Amazing weekend hiking, geocaching, playing with Dad at El Dorado National Forest near Tahoe (not near the burned area). Saturday at Pipi Creek, grooving with the boulders and the foliage and dragonflies. Found a natural swimming hole, Miles stoked to swim and climb the slippery face of a mini-waterfall.
Sunday on the backside of Silver Lake, hiking up to the well-hidden natural treasure Granite Lake, a great stone basin under pristine skies. Found a water snake, which Miles followed along the banks until disappeared with a ripple beneath the surface. Lunch on the banks of nearby Hidden Lake, watching postcard reflections dance in the afternoon heat.
Had some excellent geocaching adventures. Saturday evening, traipsing through thickets with M, running out of time, Miles held up a thick stick: “Daddy, what’s this funny log?” Noticed the saw mark around the middle, and had him pull one end. Cacher had hollowed out just enough space for a medicine bottle containing a log book and pencil. So creative. Would I have found it without M’s help?
Sunday thought we were getting close to Minkalo Cliffs cache, when the GPSr started pointing uphill. Realized we’d have to backtrack and scale a butte overlooking Silver Lake. Gorgeous. Got to the cliff edge and found the compass pointing down again. That’s when I realized some climbing was involved. “Remember, no one is forcing you to do this,” said the cache page. Decided to go for it. 20 ft. down, found an ammo box wedged into a crack. Yelled the prizes down to Miles, who was hanging out in the trees with Amy. Left a travel bug that had originated in Hawaii and was asking to be left at Tahoe views… only to find later that evening that it already done a Tahoe circuit and was headed back for Hawaii. Heh – that’s the game.
Total recharge of a weekend. Ready for anything.
A couple days late, but hey – tardiness is a hallmark of countless great musicians, so I guess we can ride that wagon too. The crew of Stuck Between Stations has teamed up to compile a comprehensive, all-over-the-map, annotated 4th of July audio/video playlist: Stuck on the Fourth of July. From James Brown and Gerald Ford to Wilco and Public Enemy to Robert Wyatt and Sleater Kinney to Wendy Rene and Funkadelic, to XTC and the Minutemen. It’s what America means to us.
Many thanks to Roger for the nutty amount of legwork required to pull this one together.