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Pinecone Catapult

Miles and I spent Saturday building a PVC catapult for hucking pinecones. Started with inspiration from some YouTube videos, but scaled up and modified designs we found there. Capable of throwing a pine cone around 45 feet with a single bungie! Spent around $25 on parts. Build time ~3 hours. Considering adding a second bungie for extra distance, but don’t want to make it too strenuous for the kiddos.

Working with PVC is great – cuts like butter with a chopsaw, pieces slip together like Legos. In fact, the fit is snug enough that we’re not gluing it for now -nice to be able to disassemble for storage.

Finding the perfect throwing cup was the biggest challenge. Considered sewer pipe caps, chopped down paint mixing buckets, and tupperware, before deciding on this perfectly sized electrical junction box. Unfortunately it had a metal plate riveted to the back, which I had to hacksaw off – easily the hardest part of the build.

See full-size images and captions at the Flickr set (captions not available in embedded slideshow).

Shot some video too, but did that dumb thing where you record when you think you’re paused and pause when you think you’re recording. D’oh! Will try the video again later.

Catapult is available for rental for birthday parties and bar mitzvahs.

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Goodbye Chronicle

I just did something really hard – called up the San Francisco Chronicle and canceled the home subscription we’ve kept up for more than a decade. Working at a journalism school, I know exactly how difficult things are for newspapers these days, and how there is no online revenue model available that comes anywhere close to replacing revenue from print subscriptions. I really don’t want to pull my financial support, but the print edition just doesn’t make sense for our lifestyles anymore.

I’ve got nothing against the Chronicle. I’ve enjoyed it for years. Granted, we generally  only read it in 5 or 10-minute skim-bursts in the mornings, but I always enjoyed those sessions. Unfortunately, over the past few months, we’ve stopped the skimming too. The sad truth is that right now I’m looking across the room at a week-old stack of unopened newspapers on the kitchen table. We haven’t even taken the rubber bands off a week’s worth of great journalism.

So where has that time gone? Mornings are a whirlwind of pushups and smoothie making, combing the boy’s hair and packing his lunch, going over the day’s plans. And then there’s the morning email – it usually takes close to 45 minutes just to parse all the stuff that comes in overnight, every night. And part of that email time includes skimming the daily email digests I get from NY Times, Washington Post, and the LA Times. It’s not like I’m not getting any news. Just that my lifestyle lends itself so much better to reading news on the computer than in print.

On top of that, my Twitter addiction has made a huge impact. Stories that really matter to me (rather than to the editors at the Chron) find their way to the top through the organic bubbling process of the hive mind. As much as I hate to admit it, I find that spending 15 minutes on Twitter is way more efficient at surfacing great daily reading than any single newspaper (and yes, some of the articles I end up reading will be at the web sites of mainstream media houses). In effect, I’m subscribed to the whole internet – why do I need a dead tree version of just one city’s paper?

Finally, there’s the iPad. We don’t own one – just borrowed one from work a few times. But from those tests, it became quickly apparent that the iPad could give us the best of both worlds. If we could replace all of our print subscriptions (oh yeah – there are five magazine subscriptions in this house that are also going mostly unread) with iPad versions, we’d feel less guilty about the wasted paper, have less clutter, and (ideally) pay much less. We’ll see how that plan pans out.

Chronicle – I love you and support you in principle. But it no longer makes sense to support you with our wallets. So long and thanks for the good times.

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Pogo for Grownups

The world has changed since you last rode a pogo stick. Namely, you’ve gotten bigger – too big to ride the spring-loaded stick that carried you down the block between ages six and twelve. But good news: A few companies are making pogos re-engineered for grown-ups, so you can recapture that marvelous elastic bounce. Even cooler – they’re not spring-loaded anymore – modern pogos are brought to you pneumatically, with cylinders of air that can be pressurized to work with your body weight and desired boing-ratio.

Lucked out at a picnic in the woods today when one of the guys pulled a Vurtego from the bed of his pickup and went for it. After watching for a while, I asked for a turn. Here are the results of my first three attempts. It had been 35 years since I’d been on one, but like riding a bicycle, the muscle memory never really leaves your body.

Grownup Pogo from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.

The rennaissance of grown-up pogo sticks has given rise to the tiny cottage sport of extreme pogo, championed by Pogo Fred.

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Blocked from App Store? (What’s In a Name)

Yesterday I got to spend some quality time with an Apple iPad, and quickly discovered that I could not log into the App Store to purchase software. The message I got was “This Apple ID has been disabled for security reasons.” But I purchase content through iTunes regularly on the desktop and iPhone. What’s up? Googling for the error message revealed mixed results. Apple’s official knowledge base article suggested that this can happen if you enter the wrong password too many times. I knew that wasn’t the problem. Then I discovered an article at Redmond Pie talking about how people were being banned from access to the App Store when their usernames included certain “suspicious-looking” strings. My real last name is “Hacker” and I’ve occasionally had trouble signing up for certain services because of it (my poor Dad can’t get a Facebook account to this day – they just ignore his signup attempts). I put two and two together and concluded that I was being banned on account of my name.

Spent half an hour on the phone with Apple, getting bounced from rep to rep, trying to get to the bottom of it. They re-set my account, but the problem remained. Then I realized what I had been doing wrong. Back in the day, Apple services took single-word usernames, like “shacker,” which I had long used to log into the Apple developer center, support forums, and other services. At a certain point, Apple converted these IDs to require a login in the form of an email address. I had simply forgotten this and was trying to use my old Apple ID rather than the email address associated with my Apple account.

The fact that Apple threw this confusing dialog, combined with the blog post I had found referencing hackers being locked out, combined with my previous experience being unable to sign up for certain services, all conspired to make me think I was being blocked because of my name. The truth turned out to be much simpler.

All is well.

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Stuck Between Stations Redux

The little music writing project I run with some friends, Stuck Between Stations, is now officially three years old. Until yesterday, we were still running with the original design, left over from a time when narrow content columns were in vogue (usability studies still say 420px is the ideal content column width for maximum readability). Trouble is, we run a lot of embedded video on the site, and YouTube/Vimeo have increasingly been defaulting to much wider video dimensions since more and more people have high-resolution displays. Web developers started assuming a baseline pixel resolution of 1024 a few years ago.

But simply widening the old design wasn’t really an option, since it all hung off a photographic banner image that came with a WordPress theme, and so couldn’t be altered. Decided to chuck it all and start from scratch. Chose the Titan theme as a starting point and went from there. Dug up shots of old radio dials from Google Images and pulled a new banner together, keeping only the broadcast tower from the original design.

Was able to run a series of search/replace operations in the database to increase the size of all the embedded videos already on the site. Interesting to see how many different aspect ratios we had accrued without even trying. Also interesting to see how many of the videos had been “Removed due to violation of terms of service.” Seems like the big publishers have been digging deep in YouTube’s bowels to find and skewer copyright violations, even if they do provide free publicity.

Added a bunch of new features while I was working:

Pretty happy with the results, though the banner still feels a bit crude to me. We’re no Flavorwire, but without a few dozen more unpaid writers and some Sand Hill investment, this is about as good as it gets for a while. Would love a plug if you’ve got one to give!


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John Stewart Skewers Glenn Beck

… by acting like him for the first 15 minutes of recent show. This kind of brilliance knows no bounds… and it’s also the best possible way to make a point that so desperately needs making. Go full-screen on this one, you won’t regret it.

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Spectacles

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote or offer advice about my first pair of glasses. To be honest, the process was a bit of a rush job, because I wanted to have them in time for SXSW. Not that I like to rush decisions like this, but my distance vision was blurring out fast, and I knew I’d be spending a lot of time in big halls looking at far-away projection screens. In the end, I’m glad I did. I had no idea just how blurry my vision had gotten until I was able to A/B them in a real-world setting. I think I honestly thought that projection screens were inherently blurry – classic “boiling frog” situation.

As for the for the frame choice, it was tough – it really was. There were a lot of options I would have been happy with. But in the end, I defer most aesthetic decisions regarding my person to my wife, who knows these things. Her choice matched the choice of an artist friend of hers whose taste I also trust, and to be honest,  this was the one pair that just felt right from the first moment I put them on.

It’s not all peaches and cream though – it’s been a mixed experience. Distance is fantastic. But these are bifocals, and that part isn’t cutting it. The close-range reading thing doesn’t focus until the very, very bottom of the lens, and then I have to tip my head way back to make it work. I’d rather just hold the page farther away than deal with that. And at the computer, where I spend most of my working hours, things are in way better focus with them off than on. So I’ll have to make a return visit to see about working stuff out.

I have a new-found respect and sympathy to everyone who’s dealt with glasses all their lives. I never really stopped to think what a pain in the neck this whole glasses thing is, or just how lucky I was. Ah well, I’m here now. Age stinks.

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Pencil Art

… but not like you’d expect.

Jennifer Maestre creates incredible sculptures out of pencils and nails, inspired by the form and function of the sea urchin. Not quite like anything you’ve ever seen. I love the idea of taking things that are inherently linear and creating something so distinctly non-linear. Gorgeous.