Chrome Tab Suspension
For those of you who are like me, and typically have 30-50+ tabs open in Chrome at a time, The Great Suspender might be a very useful extension for you. It allows you to suspend tabs to be reloaded when you actually visit them again.
I get into a lot of situations where I’ll have a browser window dedicated to researching a specific topic, or poking around the docs of a project, or whatever. When I switch tasks to do other things, I like to keep those sessions around, but don’t necessarily want them in memory. This helps with that, to drastically reduce the amount of RAM that Chrome needs to run. I went from being nearly pegged at 14-15GB down to 10GB just by suspending a couple windows’ worth of tabs.
I also use TabCloud for saving off windows of tabs when I think that I’m pretty much done with something, but may want to come back later.
There was an announcement last week that Chrome may be getting this functionality built-in. I’m certainly looking forward to a release of Chrome that won’t require an extension to get this feature! Until then, The Great Suspender works reasonably well.
The Year of Hoverboards
The past year seems to be the year of hoverboards. Last Spring, we had Tony Hawk, and Doc Brown screaming about HUVr, a real hoverboard that was even better than the one shown in Back to the Future.
I was skeptical, the video looked fake, and I sort of figured that a real live hoverboard, at least the first generation, would not be so amazingly mind-blowing as the one in the video. I was, of course, right. It was a CGI stunt made by some Hollywood people. Doc Brown lied to us.
In December of 2014, there was this video of someone who built a hoverboard out of four leaf-blowers, and called it a Mr Hoverboard.
The Mr Hoverboard is unique in that it can actually work on cement, as opposed to metal, as the others I will discuss below.
In October of last year that Hendo Hoverboards launched their KickStarter, for a real hoverboard. People were more incredulous this time around, but Hendo’s product looked more realistic to me. I decided to back their campaign for a sticker and a refrigerator magnet. One of the things that sold me on it being real was that there was a pretty major compromise that they had to make, which was that the surface that they were riding on needed to be metal. This made sense.
Tony Hawk even comes back to do the real thing.
Well, with Hendo, I got my sticker, and I just read that they appear to be making good progress towards shipping the beta boards. They’ve got an office in Sunnyvale or Mountain View, but even though I’m a backer, I’m not sure that would be enough to be able to drop in and try it out. (Since that was its own reward level.)
Then, this summer, Lexus has been teasing us with their own hoverboard announcement. Here’s the teaser:
Today, they released this video of someone actually riding it around a skate park.
What they don’t say in the video is that there’s metal under everything that they are taking this board over. It looks like a normal concrete skate park, but it’s not. I appreciate Hendo’s being up front with this detail, because this detail is one of those things that would indicate a leap forward in physics in one case, and in the other, it’s a new application of an existing technology. Again, it’s the latter. With that said, Hendo appears to have some new technology in there as well, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details.
They did make a little documentary that explains some of this.
There appears to be a major difference in the mechanisms that the two boards use to achieve their magnetic effect. The Lexus uses a supercooled superconductor, which requires liquid nitrogen to cool. The Hendo board uses what the manufacturer calls “hover engines”. They discuss the hover engine in this Engadget article.
In the video, I don’t see any steam coming off of the Hendo boards as I do the Lexus. The Lexus hoverboard is going to require recharging the liquid nitrogen, which probably won’t be terribly cheap or easy. If the Hendo board can recharge itself on electricity alone, that would be a big win. I haven’t seen either one state how long they can stay afloat before needing some sort of intervention.
One other note is the design factor. I think that the Lexus hoverboard wins here, but all we’ve seen of Hendo boards so far have been prototypes. That said, the Lexus board seems to take into account things that skaters will care about, which are surfaces for grinding. I’m not sure that the Hendo board will be so sturdy.
Either way, one cool thing is that we may see metal hoverboard parks in the near future where people with different kinds of hoverboards can all come and enjoy. And, given that they will all likely be rediculously expensive, hopefully we’ll be able to rent them as well.
GitHub associates commits with email
Linus did not commit that.
In the above, a vulnerability in GitHub is demonstrated where a user is able to steal another user’s identity by setting some local environment variables on their box.
Hopefully, GitHub will update with a fix soon.
Introducing My New Blog
Hello to whomever is reading this, you’ve landed on my new blog. This will be my primary collection of junk on the web. I’ve never been super happy with having my content live outside of my control, and this effort intends to fix that issue. That basically means that I will be posting here a lot, and share this content out with to other outlets.
This is a work-in-progress. I’ve already imported three separate blog’s worth of content here, and I’m continuing to add the things that I’d like to keep. So, if you find things broken, or a bit off, hopefully I’ll get to fixing it.
On a technical note, I’ve been wanting to try out a static site generator for a while, and landed on Hugo. It’s written in GoLang, and was the only tool I tried that worked as advertised out of the box. It also happens to be quite speedy.
That’s all for now!
Google+ is Dead
On the “Google+ is Dead” Meme
There seems to be renewed interest in the “Google+ is dead” meme from both media outlets and users. I’m not sure, but I would say that from my perspective, it doesn’t look great. At best, it seems like we’re going to find out if the core offering of Google+ is going to succeed or fail on its own, without the support of all the other Google services propping up its numbers.
I’d like to state at the start, that I do hope that it succeeds, because this is the social network that I spend the most time on. It’s the one that I like the best, for a number of reasons. I really don’t want to need to actually learn how to effectively use Twitter, or clog up Facebook with interest-based stuff. Google+ is the ideal social network for me for following my interests and interacting with people who have similar interests.
It seems already that Google is deprioritizing Plus. There was a pretty bad outage the other day, where the service was unavailable for about an hour for myself and a lot of others. I was more than a little surprised when it happened. Now, I understand that mistakes happen, and people screw up, in fact, I’ve caused a service-wide outage for millions of people before when I was doing a live database update (whoops).
However, I do expect that at a company with lots of resources, touching an important product, maybe they have their shit figured out before messing with production?
As far as the product, they’ve been removing more features than they’ve been adding recently. Photos, and the forced integration with the rest of Google. Posting photos to G+ is now a considerably worse experience, since depending on how, exactly, I share something, I may or may not be able to re-order photos, or force an album cover. The split from the other Google products is also not great. OAuth log-in was one feature that’s going to be more strange without a G+ login button, not sure what they’ll do with that. Removing YouTube from the G+ feed makes a lot of sense, that was its own, separate community, that was very different from the G+ community.
That said, I wonder what percentage of Google+’s active user numbers were coming through for one of these ancillary services? I remembered seeing a few infographs that pegged Google+’s usage as similar to Twitter and Instagram’s (i.e. in the ballpark of social platforms that are not Facebook). However, with Photos and all other Google services separated out from G+, what will the usage look like? If it dips too far, then the platform will look less compelling to a lot of people. Will it become the de facto Google message board, where people basically just come to talk about Googley stuff?
Again, I like the service, and will continue to use it until Google pulls the plug, or until the interesting people like yourselves migrate away. I’m not saying they will, but it seems like a possibility. Another possibility is that they do another serious iteration on G+ to focus on its core strengths. Collections and Communities seem like pretty core experience pieces for G+.
I like the Communities here more than Facebook Groups, because the communities here aren’t as full of junk and spam. They are much more focused and on-topic. That’s awesome, and exactly what I want out of an interest-based community.
Collections are another great feature. I really enjoy being able to post things with added context, that allows people to follow only certain things that I post, because it’s interesting to them. For example, someone might really love coffee, but have little interest in tech. They can follow my Coffee collection, and ignore the rest of the stuff that I post. Great! I’ve recently started cooking with an immersion cooker, and am posting to a collection on Sous Vide cooking, which is something that I probably wouldn’t have done before, but makes sense to me to do within the context of a collection.
All that said, Google+ is my favorite social network. I hope it stays alive, and grows into a strong product in its own right, such that it makes sense for Google to continue investing in it.
Is Trump trolling the GOP?
I’ve definitely thought that Trump was trolling the GOP for a while, but haven’t been able to come up with a coherent story on why. This is one possibility, but I’m not sure that I buy it completely. I really don’t think that Trump is a dumb guy, and I don’t think that he would be saying this type of stuff if he were sincerely after the presidency. But, as I said, I haven’t been able to figure out what he might want to get out of such a massive trolling effort (not that I really understand trolls to begin with).
Doing dumb things
I went out on my new Freebord today for the first time. A Freebord is not a skatboard. The idea is that it’s like a snowboard for the streets, I can’t attest to that quite yet, as I haven’t ever gotten good enough with it to compare the two. If you take a look at the photo, you’ll notice that it’s got six wheels, the center two are on casters, that rotate 360º, which enables you to slide on pavement and make similar maneuvers to that of a snowboard. It also has bindings on the top of the board that your shoes hook into (they’re very easy to pop out of).
I used to have a Freebord Alpha 112, which was one of their first models, when I was in either middle school or high school. I never really got good at it, because it’s meant for going downhill, which is pretty scary on a board. The thing is, I never really learned what I was doing on it, and didn’t stick with it long enough to even get comfortable on the thing.
So, I decided to pick up a new one, with the 15 years’ worth of improvements that they’ve made since my last one. It slides a bit easier than I remember, and is much, much smoother. One issue that I had was that I would frequently catch an edge, just like on a snowboard and eat it. Didn’t happen at all today. I even had my brother towing me on his bike, and while I didn’t get going too fast, I was starting to get a feel for it. I’m hoping that when I get back home, I’ll be able to work up to trying out some of the hills in Belmont and San Carlos. Either that, or I’ll either scare or injure myself and will sell this thing within a few months. We’ll see.
Oh, and this is totally going to be me:
U.S. Decides to Retaliate Against China’s Hacking
There’s a really interesting discussion in here of what types of attacks might constitute different types of responses. The biggest take away is that the government doesn’t know how it should respond to this most recent attack, because it’s never happened before.
Nitro Cold Brew Coffee
There is a coffee shop in San Jose, B2 Coffee, that does nitro cold brew. I always grab a cup when I’m in the area. When I was in Canada the other weekend, I was looking around for coffee shops and saw one close by that had posted on their site that they were getting a nitro system in for their cold brew. I went there and was disappointed to learn that it wouldn’t be installed for another week, long after I was gone. I’m currently in an area where there isn’t even a grocery store closer than 15 miles. Needless to say, there’s not much in the way of coffee either.
That got me thinking about what it would take to do this at home. The first thing that I found was a full-blown system, shown below.
Add this to the list of things that I want to do when I have the requisite time/money. Realistically though, it’d be much better at the office. You’re really only supposed to keep cold brew for a week, and I don’t drink nearly enough to justify a whole keg.
You can get a mini-keg that’s basically just a stainless steel growler, and a tap for it, add a nitrogen tank, and maybe a mini-fridge, and you’re good to go:
Even a mini-keg would be a bit over-the-top for home usage for me. This lead me to Google around a little more. Apparently there’s an even cheaper and easier way to do Nitro Cold Brew coffee. Just use a whipped cream dispenser, they have little nitrogen canisters that attach, and it looks like it works pretty well.
I’m not sure if they’re using nitros or nitrogen cartridges in the video. Typically, with whipped cream, you’d use nitros. However, I found that you can get pure nitrogen cartridges, for not too much money. From my research, I found people doing both, for both beer and coffee, so I figure that I’ll probably experiment with both when I get around to this project. Either way, if it works, it’ll be a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a keg and a nitrogen tank.
Carbonara with Poached Egg
Tonight was a carbonara with a sous vide poached egg on top, and some parsley for garnish. It was amazing. Holy cow, the egg came out perfectly, exactly as I wanted it. It all came together very well, with some minor issues.
I had to make a couple of substitutions, typically carbonara has pancetta for meat, and pecorino for cheese. The grocery stores in the middle of nowhere don’t carry such fancy items, so I had to make due with bacon and romano cheese. The bacon was a little overcooked, which was the only real issue that I had with this dish.
I used the egg calculator to choose my ideal egg texture and consistency: http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/the-egg-calculator . It gave me 69 °C for 20 minutes. Again, this came out perfectly.
Carbonara is a very quick and simple pasta dish. Typically, ingredients include the following:
- wide noodles (linguine, fehttuchini)
- pancetta
- garlic
- pecorino cheese
- parsley
- olive oil
- raw egg
You cook the noodles until they are done, as normal. Cook the garlic and pancetta together until they’re done. Remove everything from heat. Drain the noodles, combine with the garlic and pancetta, add the olive oil, and optionally some pasta water. Then combine with half of the shredded pecorino and half of the chopped parsley. Crack a raw egg or two, and mix that in. Serve with the remaining cheese and parsley on top.
For mine, I chose to leave out the egg, and serve with that on top. It made for a nice presentation, and something quite different than we’re used to. I’m going to be doing this one again.