When I first moved to China, I decided that I still wanted to stay connected to the US. Part of that is keeping a US phone number that can both send and receive calls and text messages. Luckily, thanks to products like Google Voice and Skype, doing so is now cheap and easy.
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Archive for the 'tech' Category
Staying Connected Overseas with Google Voice and Skype
March 11, 2010Root access on Ubuntu server?
November 1, 2009I’m in the process of setting up my very first production server using Ubuntu, and I’ve ended up spending a lot of time reading about security online. Since I’ve always let the ops team worry about setting up environments, etc., I’ve now learned that there are a lot of different concerns to think about.
One decision in particular is bugging me right now – how to secure the root account on my new machine? Read the rest of this entry »
iPhone Reference Errors
February 28, 2009I’ve decided to give iPhone development a try. I have a few ideas for cool mobile apps that I’d love to implement so that I can learn a new platform, a new language, and maybe make some money on the side… However, I’ve remembered what I dislike most about programming – configuration.
Free Speeches Online
February 24, 2008I just learned about this cool website: www.ted.com. TED is an organization that asks famous/interesting people to give 20-minute speeches and records them. Now, on their website, you can watch speeches that they’ve collected over the last 24 years. A lot of this content is probably available on YouTube, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher on TED because of the limited format and the high barrier to entry.
This morning, I watched a talk by J.J. Abrams, and yesterday I watched a theramin concert and a speech on aging by Aubrey de Grey (whom I’ve read about, but had never seen before). If you have twenty minutes to spare, you should check it out.
Dancing for Engineers
January 6, 2008Now here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. I started going to salsa dancing lessons fairly regularly this fall, but am having a hard time remembering the long sequences of complex moves that I learn in the MIT lessons (which are great, by the way). Even when I can remember them, it’s hard to do them on the dance floor with a girl who doesn’t also know what is coming, while staying on the beat, etc. etc. So, at some point this fall, I thought to myself that there must be a better way to learn enough sequences of moves not to bore a good follower to tears. Read the rest of this entry »
The Results Are In – makeyourownjeans.com
August 23, 2007
A while ago, I wrote about makeyourownjeans.com, a website that sells custom-made clothing, that I thought might be the answer to the tall (or short) person’s dilemma. It’s been a long time, but on August 6, I finally went ahead and placed an order with them for two items – a pair of jeans, and a formal shirt.
A Post Free-Web-Hosting World
May 30, 2007I’ve been trying to decide what to do with my online presence after graduation for a while now. I had a few choices about what I could do once my MIT hosting disappeared:
- I could give it up and suddenly not be online.
- I could use generic services like GMail and Blogger to maintain a basic web profile.
- I could host my own server either with a dynamic DNS entry or with a static IP address and dedicated hostname.
New Theme
May 28, 2007As some of your may have noticed, I have a new theme for my blog. This one is basically Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner. Thankfully for me, he released the theme for free for people to use. All I had to do was make new versions of the header graphics and slightly modify the sidebar (I didn’t like how the links displayed), and I was off.
Unfortunately, soon after changing the theme, I noticed a sharp drop in visitors on my Google Analytics reports. Since my readership is so low anyway, I first attributed this just to people being busy and/or not noticing anything. However, after three days of zero visitors showing up (even when I tried to make visitors show up by visiting myself), i realized something was wrong. Turns out, I forgot that the display of WordPress blogs is entirely decided by the theme, and the way I had gotten Analytics working before was to put the javascript code into the theme footer. So, when I changed the theme, I also eliminated all the tracking code from my website. It’s back in there again (you can check), so everything should be back to normal.
So, in conclusion, let me know if you like the new theme. I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to keep it over the summer when I will probably host my blog on wordpress.com for free, but I guess I’ll figure that out when it’s absolutely necessary.
Useful Guitar Hero
May 21, 2007
When I bought my MIDI cable a while ago, I had assumed that mostly I’d be recording myself play piano, and I have done that a bit. However, it turns out that there is more to having a MIDI keyboard than recording. You can also play games with it.
One of my favorites is Synthesia – a Guitar Hero clone, but for piano. I love the concept of this; Guitar Hero is such a fun and addictive game that some people will play for long hours to become good at it. Why not use the same format to teach people a useful skill?
Apartments and KML
May 19, 2007I’ve been looking for apartments lately, so I’m constantly looking at Craigslist postings, finding the addresses, putting them in Google Maps, and trying to estimate how far they are from the T-Stop, whether it’s a good location or not, etc.. However, this morning I realized that Google Earth is a great tool for this. You can add more than one address, check distances, etc.
So, I decided to play around with KML a little bit and make a map of where I want my apartment to be. Now, I can just put the address in Google Earth and see if it makes it into my desired area quickly. Check it out:
