Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

House of Cards

House of Cards is a British television series available on Netflix.ca. It is like an evil version of Yes, Minister – documenting the functioning of British politics, but with a much darker and more brutal tone. For example, the Prime Minister uses the SAS to carry out assassinations which are blamed on the IRA; security personnel murder unarmed civilians with impunity; and extensive cover-ups are successfully undertaken.

It’s the sort of show political junkies might appreciate, though I think it is probably less true to life overall than its more light-hearted equivalent.

Mythbusters and animal products

I enjoy the show Mythbusters quite a bit. I like the contrasting personalities of the hosts, and I like the way they stress how the ultimate test of any theory is experiment. The constraints of a television show can somewhat restrain them, when it comes to being rigorous and showing their work, but it is obvious that there is more thinking (and math) that goes on in the background.

One aspect of the show I don’t fully approve of is their frequent use of animal products. They often use dead pigs as stand-ins for human beings, usually when testing myths about whether something would be deadly or not. They also use lard as a lubricant, and other animal products.

I don’t think it is always wrong for human beings to kill animals for their own purposes, but I do think there are many reasons to oppose factory farming and many reasons to use non-animal alternatives when possible. In that spirit, it seems to me that the Mythbusters could find analogues for human beings that didn’t have to be raised in the kind of conditions these pigs probably were. Also, it seems plausible that testing urban legends isn’t a sufficiently important purpose to justify the use of animal products, when there are reasonable alternatives available.

In the grand scheme of things, Mythbusters is a minute consumer of animal products. Fantastically larger quantities get consumed by human beings and other animals every day. That being said, the Mythbusters are role models within a certain community, and it might have a positive effect if they established a policy on the use of animal products that takes into account some of the ethical considerations involved.

The Thesis theme for WordPress

My primary focus in blogging is definitely not the coding side of things. I see myself more as a creator of content than as a technology guy. I don’t even know enough CSS to format things the way I want them. As a result, I am grateful that the Thesis theme makes it easy to have a decent looking site that is friendly to search engines.

Avoid messing around with code

With the Thesis theme, you can easily reconfigure things without ever having to dig into CSS or PHP. You can set up sites with different numbers of columns in different arrangements. There is a multimedia box that can be used in creative ways. Thesis also lets you tinker with things like fonts and colours without having to edit any code.

Also, if you want to set up customizations beyond what can be done with Thesis’ various menus, Thesis lets you make all of them in just two files, greatly simplifying the process of upgrading WordPress and Thesis itself. You have a ‘custom’ directory that contains all your special tweaks, and you replace everything else when you upgrade the theme.

Thesis isn’t cheap. It costs US$87 for a personal license (good for one site) or US$164 for a developer’s license (unlimited use). At the same time, that price seems well justified for anyone who is putting a lot of effort into their site and isn’t a web design guru. You want people to take you seriously, and having a decent-looking theme is a big part of that. It would easily take tens of hours to make a site that looks anywhere near as good as Thesis does, and it would be much harder to upgrade your custom setup every time there is a new version of WordPress released (and we all need to keep up with new versions, if only to get security holes patched).

Superior support

Thesis also distinguishes itself in terms of its support community. The theme is updated regularly, maintaining compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. Rather than having to puzzle over which bits of your site get broken or weirdly modified by the latest WordPress changes, you can just download the updated version of the theme.

Buying it also grants access to support forums, which are extremely useful for both troubleshooting problems and learning how to set up particular customizations. The forums are very useful for helping you set up custom features particular to what you are trying to do with your site, including finding ways to earn a bit of money from ads.

If you are a serious blogger who is still relying on a free WordPress theme, I would recommend thinking seriously about upgrading to Thesis. You will save time that you would have spent agonizing over code; you will present a more appealing look to your readers; and you will improve how your site looks to Google and other search engines, which is critical for building traffic.

Keynote and Pages

Tempted by the reduced prices on Apple’s new App Store, I picked up Pages and Keynote, Apple’s answers to Microsoft Word and Powerpoint.

While it is annoying to have to learn the ins and outs of new software, it cannot be denied that Apple’s offerings produce beautiful output rather easily. In particular, the software comes with templates and typefaces that make it simple to produce documents and presentations that look rather hip and professional.

I have already produced a fellowship application and a job application using Pages (and the attractive Didot serif font). I am also in the process of producing a guest lecture using Keynote and am quite happy with the visual results I am getting.

Geothermal heating and fuel price risk

The building I recently moved into is distinguished by the technology which it uses for heating and cooling. Rather than use electricity or fossil fuels to generate heat directly, it takes advantage of the way in which the ground maintains a fairly constant temperature all year round, if you dig down deep enough.

One big advantage of this approach – when it comes to the residents of the building – is that it takes away the risk associated with volatile fossil fuel prices, and reduces the amount of electricity required. People living in such a building have a better guarantee that they will be able to heat their homes than people living in conventional structures will. This could be especially important if fossil fuel prices spike in the future, or even if they just progress relentlessly upward.

It can be challenging to identify situations in which the economic self-interest of individuals aligns closely with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas pollution. Geothermal heating and cooling seems to be one of the places where those interests align.

Related: Heat pumps

Technology for content creators

As a technology geek, I can see the appeal of devices like the Kindle and the iPad, especially as far as portability goes. It would be great to have a device small and light enough to carry around all the time, yet less annoying to use than a smartphone.

That being said, the iPad in particular seems to have major disadvantages as a content-creation machine. The web browser has trouble with some parts of the back end of WordPress (creating posts, editing posts, dealing with media, etc). The multitasking capabilities of the device are also somewhat lacking. Rather seriously, copying and pasting on the iPad is far from easy or intuitive – a pretty critical failure for someone who needs to move text between emails, blog posts, blog comments, other webpages, etc.

To me, the MacBook Air looks like a far superior option for people actually heavily involved in the creation of content. It’s a real computer that is fully under your control (you can even install Flash!), and it has a real keyboard and real web browser. If you are doing more extended work, you can plug in a mouse. It lets you take content from a USB key, or plug in your iPod to charge. Alongside all of that, it is remarkably small and compact – especially the 11″ version. It’s not as powerful and capable as a full computer, but it is plenty capable of accessing the internet and email, which would be the critical functions for me. If I need a computer that can do some heavy lifting, I can always go home and use my Core2Duo iMac.

If I wasn’t in the process of saving up for an uncertain financial future, I would almost certainly go out any by one to replace my heavy and increasingly non-functional G4 iBook. As it stands, if I do find myself heading off to join an academic program, it is probably an investment I will make.

Core competencies

If you are primarily a content producer, running a website or a business inevitably seems to involve doing some work outside your area of core competency. You need to deal with clients, negotiate rates, file taxes, manage webservers, etc.

There is one line of thinking that says all such activities are a necessarily evil, at best, and that we should all stick to doing what we are most skilled at. The Ricardo theory of trade may be the purest expression of this idea. It says that if everybody focuses exclusively on what they are best at and sells the products of that skill to everyone else, they will be able to pay others to provide all the necessities of life.

We all do a fair bit of outsourcing. Consider the case of Thoreau, who built his own house and found some of his own food. Compared to him, we are pretty much all more specialized.

Of course, Thoreau’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of Ricardo’s. Thoreau thought that you should do for yourself even what other people could do better: haul the lumber for your shack on your own back, rather than hiring a man with a cart.

The main question here seems to be how far you should specialize. There are definitely gains to be made in specialization. As Malcolm Gladwell argues, if you spend 10,000 hours practicing the activity you do best, you might become world class at it. At the same time, specialization produces vulnerability to change. A hummingbird with a beak that has evolved to fit only into a single kind of flower is in a lot of trouble if that flower becomes rare or goes extinct. This idea is well expressed in the anime film Ghost in the Shell: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness; it’s slow death”.

Personally, I think it makes sense to cultivate at least a couple of sets of skills – something abstract and something practical, perhaps, or at least some sort of serious hobby outside of work. Also, even when something isn’t a core competency of yours, it can be worthwhile to know a bit about it. It would be useful for me to take a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), for instance. Web design certainly isn’t a major activity of mine, but it would be nice to be able to customize sites a bit without having to spend heaps of time trawling through forums and plagiarizing the code of others.

The CRTC and UBB

Regarding all the furor about usage based billing, I don’t think that basic concept is really so objectionable. Someone who uses 100 times more bandwidth than someone else should probably pay more for it.

What I object to is the rate at which the big telecommunication companies are being allowed to charge for bandwidth: $1.90 a gigabyte (GB), above a low limit. Movies, especially, are rather large. One ordinary definition movie from iTunes is about 1.5 GB – 2.0 GB. High definition movies are even more. The cost of actual providing the bandwidth is much lower, and letting the big firms charge such a high amount risks choking off promising new uses for the internet, such as increased videoconferencing. My relatively modest internet use in December (67 GB, well below my previous 200 GB cap) would have resulted in an added charge of nearly $80 to my monthly bill.

It would be fine to have an internet pricing regime that included some variability, it’s just important that it be set up in a way that allows upstart firms to challenge monopoly providers, lowering costs for consumers and improving service. Letting the big companies squeeze their competitors to death with hefty overuse fees doesn’t serve the best interests of Canadians.

[Update: 11:24pm] Michael Geist has a good piece about all of this: Fixing Canada’s Uncompetitive Internet.

Put This On

Put This On is a site worth looking at if you’re a man who buys into the whole idea of avoiding wasteful living. After all, it makes a lot more sense to spend $300 dollars on dress shoes that will last twenty years than to spend $80-100 on shoes that will fall apart in six months and look bad in the interim.

Just don’t get addicted to the site and buy some gargantuan wardrobe. Something you only wear once every year won’t get worn out quickly, but also probably doesn’t justify the resources that go into making it. Put This On is good about encouraging the purchase of used formal clothes, including the inexpensive and apparently superior-quality clothes available at estate sales.

They have some very professional video segments on denim, shoes, and work clothes.

In any case, the site is already very famous and most of you had probably already heard of it. For the few who hadn’t, though, it seemed worth mentioning.