Myles Braithwaite

The Problem with Patents (Infographic)

2012-01-05T09:34:00-05:00

Jason from Frugal Dad made this interesting infographic about the United States of America’s patent system.

U.S. Highways as a Subway Map

2011-12-20T13:44:00-05:00

Cameron Booth made this really cool map of the United States highway system in the style of a traditional subway map.

This, Jen, is the Internet

2011-12-19T16:35:00-05:00

Top 40 Songs of 2011

2011-12-19T15:24:00-05:00

You can purchase this playlist on iTunes or stream it on Rdio.

The Answer Was You / Sloan
Welcome / Hey Rosetta!
Shoot Out Sparks / The Swallows
It / Rich Aucoin
Heaven’s Just for Moviemakers / Graham Wright
Colours / Grouplove
Blue Eyes / Destroyer
To Carry Many Small Things / Mina Tindle
Let’s Win! / Alexander
The Stand / Mother Mother
Soviet Race / Graham Wright
If Raymond Carver Were Born In the ’90s / Library Voices
Jimmie’s Still Jimmie / Joel Plaskett
Reaction / Acres Of Lions
Your Daddy Will Do / Sloan
Rolling In the Deep / Adele
Video Games / Lana Del Rey
Mission Bells / Armistice
The Golden Age / The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
Nostalgia / The Burning Hell
Chapel Song / We Are Augustines
Adieu / Cœur de pirate
The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball / The Killers
Green Thumb / Sunparlour Players
Bad Ritual / Timber Timbre
What a Little Moonlight Can Do / Boy and Bean
Comeback Kid (That’s My Dog) / Brett Dennen
The Prime Minister’s Daughter / Library Voices
Post-War Blues / Dan Mangan
Cruel Thing to Do / Peter Elkas
Pop Goes the World (Men Without Hats) / The Burning Hell
Owen Sound / Elliott BROOD
She’s Thunderstorms / Arctic Monkeys
Book Club / Arkells
Paradise / Coldplay
Queen of Hearts / Fucked Up
Who Are You? / Kathryn Calder
Healthy Hands (Will Mourn You) / Tasseomancy
One for You, One for Me / Bright Eyes
Oh Fortune / Dan Mangan

Ringtones make up 1/3 of the Online Music Industry

2011-12-16T13:59:00-05:00

Mashable has an interesting info-graphic about ringtones. This little tidbit surprised me:

And over there there’s broken bones
There’s only music, so that there’s new ring tones
And it don’t take no Sherlock Holmes
To see it’s a little different around here

~ Arctic Monkeys / A Certain Romance

Swapping a MacBook for an iPad+VPS

2011-11-03T10:00:00-04:00

Mark O’Connor switched his MacBook for an iPad and Linode.

Apple's Hidden Dropbox Competitor

2011-11-03T09:35:00-04:00

It looks like Apple hide a Dropbox-like folder in iCloud:

If you want to try out the trick yourself, make sure “Documents And Data” is turned on within iCloud settings, then navigate to Library inside your Home folder, and then find Mobile Documents.

Then, throw some files into the folder. These files should sync to any Macs where you’re signed in using the same iCloud credentials.

Right click to create an “alias” of the Mobile Documents folder on your desktop, and you’re good to go.

(via Clayton Morris)

Get an OPML File of All Your Public Twitter Lists

2011-06-28T12:31:00-04:00

I made this simple python script today to get an OPML file (to be imported into Google Reader) of all my Twitter lists.

#!/usr/bin/env python

__version__ = '0.1'
__project_name__ = 'TwitterListOPML'
__project_link__ = 'https://gist.github.com/1051517'

TWITTER_LISTS_URL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/%(username)s/lists.json"
TWITTER_LIST_FEED_URL = "http://api.twitter.com/1/%(username)s/lists/%(list)s/statuses.atom"
TWITTER_LIST_HTML_URL = "http://twitter.com/%(username)s/%(list)s"

OPML_START = """<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- OPML generated by TwitterListOPML -->
<opml version="1.1">
	<head>
		<title>Twitter Lists</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<outline text="Twitter Lists" title="Twitter Lists">"""
OPML_END = """		</outline>
	</body>
</opml>"""

OPML_OUTLINE_FEED = '<outline text="%(title)s" title="%(title)s" type="rss" version="RSS" htmlUrl="%(html_url)s" xmlUrl="%(xml_url)s" />'

import sys
import urllib2

try:
	import json
except ImportError:
	import simplejson as json

def get_lists(url):
	request = urllib2.Request(url)
	request.add_header('User-Agent', '%s/%s +%s' % (
		__project_name__, __version__, __project_link__
	))
	opener = urllib2.build_opener()
	data = opener.open(request).read()
	return json.loads(data)

def main(username):
	t_lists = get_lists(TWITTER_LISTS_URL % {'username': username})
	
	print OPML_START
	
	for t_list in t_lists['lists']:
		list_title = t_list['name']
		list_html_url = TWITTER_LIST_HTML_URL % {'username': username, 'list': t_list['slug']}
		list_xml_url = TWITTER_LIST_FEED_URL % {'username': username, 'list': t_list['slug']}
		print OPML_OUTLINE_FEED % {'title': list_title, 'html_url': list_html_url, 'xml_url': list_xml_url}
	
	print OPML_END

if __name__ == "__main__":
	username = sys.argv[-1]
	main(username)

Download: twitter_list_to_opml.py.gz

F.B.I Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Instapaper and Pinboard Offline

2011-06-22T13:48:00-04:00

The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites.

RIM, You're Done Here

2011-06-22T13:40:00-04:00

Research In Motion is done. They’ll be bought in the next year or so, their products will roll into whoever buys them – Microsoft, most probably – and they’ll go the way of Nokia, Danger, and countless other mobile platforms. They’ll exist independently for a while and then be subsumed. It’s over.

So, That's the End of Bitcoin Then

2011-06-20T13:38:00-04:00

No, the doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the Bitcoin experiment, but it’s a pretty good indication of it. For there are certain things that we want from a currency. A medium of exchange, a store of value, we’d also like to it be liquid and security is important as well. No currency can have all of these features (and humans have used some pretty odd things as currency over the centuries, from copper sheets to cowrie shells via butter, salt, gold, silver and even pieces of paper with Dead Presidents on them, surely the final lunacy?) to perfection but a currency which doesn’t have any of them in appreciable quantities isn’t going to last very long.

As I said this morning on Twitter:

Don't worry Bitcoin will bounce back. It's based on the drug trade now. So as long as there is a "war on drugs" it will be successful.less than a minute ago via Twitterrific for Mac Favorite Retweet ReplyMyles Braithwaite
mylesb

29 Ways to Stay Creative

2011-06-20T10:27:00-04:00

Bitcoin Prices Plummet on Hacked Exchange

2011-06-20T09:29:00-04:00

A Cross-Site Request Forgery was found in Mt.Gox, (as of Sunday) the most popular Bitcoin exchange, which caused the current trading of Bitcoin from a $17USD high down to just pennies.

The extent of the compromise became clear when a copy of Mt.Gox’s user database began circulating online. The file included username, email addres, and hashed password for thousands of Mt.Gox users. Karpeles’s statement was updated to acknowledge the breach. He warned users who have re-used the Mt.Gox passwords on other sites to change them.

25,000 BTC Stolen in the First Major Bitcoin Theft

2011-06-15T11:38:00-04:00

In the first Bitcoin theft of its size, a user has lost ฿25,000 — or nearly $487,749 USD at today’s market rates — to an unknown thief.

The Effects of the Colour Red My Lie Deep in our Evolution

2011-06-13T12:05:00-04:00

The study involved male rhesus macaques—a species of Old World monkeys that is sensitive to red, green, and blue—ranging freely in Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico. Two human experimenters, one male and one female, entered the monkeys’ colony and found isolated males to test. Both people knelt down, placed a Styrofoam tray in front of them, drew an apple slice from their backpacks, held the slice at chest level for the monkey to see, then placed the apple on the trays. Both stood up simultaneously and took two steps back.

The monkey typically went directly to the slice he wanted, ran off, and ate it.

The humans wore T-shirts and caps, whose colors—red, green, and blue—were changed in each of four conditions: red on female, green on male; then vice-versa; red versus blue; blue versus green.

The results were striking. The monkeys paid no mind to the sex of the experimenter. Green or blue made little difference to them either. But in the significant majority of cases, they steered clear of the red-clad humans and stole the food from the other tray.

iCloud Will Make Native Applications Better

2011-06-13T11:24:00-04:00

Apple’s vision of the cloud makes native apps better. Others see the cloud as a substitute for native apps.

I keep thinking of the ways the iCloud file storage API will help with native applications on iOS and OS X. Seeing what having a Dropbox can do for mobile development something full interagted with the OS is pretty cool.

(via Daring Fireball)

Update

Just so you know Apple didn’t copy Dropbox for this feature, they copied Ubuntu One and CouchDB.

Hate Java? You're fighting the wrong battle.

2011-06-13T10:59:00-04:00

Tell me, what do the following have in common?

Paying with a credit card.

Going to the emergency room

Adjusting your 401k.

Using your insurance card at the dentist.

Shopping around for the best car insurance.

A BNSF train pulling a Union Pacific coal car.

Transferring money between banks.

Filling a prescription.

All the above industries are billion dollar players in our economy. All of the above industries write new COBOL and mainframe assembler programs.

Sympatico Legacy SMTP Server

2011-06-10T13:38:00-04:00

One of the large issues when trying to configure people’s email usually comes to sending messages. If you/they are using Bell Internet (previously Sympatico) you can use a legacy SMTP server at smtp1.sympatico.ca. It will only work on Bell’s ISP (not include your local Starbucks), so it would not be a good idea to configure it on a laptop. If they are working on a laptop the best idea is to see if their email provider provides an iterative SMTP port. Port numbers 587 and 2525 have become a somewhat standard alternative for email providers. If that doesn’t work, another option would be to use the SSL server which is usually on port 465.

xkcd - Permanence

2011-06-10T10:32:00-04:00

I think anyone that uses Linux has the same conundrum when setting up a new server. Unless you one of those people who uses web1, db1, app1…

Sarah Palin Emails

2011-06-10T10:09:00-04:00

The voluminous nature of the release, the isolation of Juneau and the limited bandwidth in the city of 30,000 people has forced media outlets to come up with creative ways to transmit the information. The Washington Post is looking for “100 organized and diligent readers” to work with reporters to “analyze, contextualize, and research the e-mails.” The New York Times is employing a similar system.

The Internet has become such a part of our lives it’s strange to see people not being able to use it because of a lack of bandwidth.