A Pictoral Guide to the US Women's Gymnastics Victory →

Even knowing the results of the Olympic Women's Gymnastics team finals, I was still spellbound by the athleticism and ridiculous poise under pressure.

The Atlantic Wire captured it all in an awesome pictoral display, showing how the US won, Russia folded, and letting you relive pretty much all the greatness of Tuesday night. And they partially explain how the hell gymnastics scoring works.

To keep it simple, if you want to win, you need a score above 15 on beam and floor. You want at least a mid-15 on bars. And you want as close to 16 as possible on vault.

The greatest part of the article is the images. You need to check it out. So. Much. Greatness.

Image from The Atlantic Wire

Nearly 10 Things About Mountain Lion … roarrr

Lame title aside, I've not had much time to write in the past few weeks. So, while I've got a few minutes of downtime, I figured I'd brain dump a few of the things I've learned about Mountain Lion, as I've been using it since it came out last week.

1. I regained about 15GB of disk space after installing Mountain Lion. I'm not sure this will happen to everyone, but I'm guessing between clearing out old caches, probably clearing out some of the 32 bit components (since it's a full 64 bit os), and just going through a full reboot, I got back a whole boat load of disk space.
2. Notification Center is cool, but reasonably useless. Until more apps support it (which means updating and releasing in the Mac App Store, it tends to be a no man's land for me. I use Growl a ton, and in a few weeks (hopefully), Growl 2.0 will be out, which will pipe all of those fun Growl notifications right into the Notification Center. That will be nifty.
3. Brett Terpstra hooked up a nice script that lets you pipe stuff into the Notification Center. If you do anything in the Terminal, or script anything at all, it's pretty awesome.
4. iTunes continues its slide towards suckitude. For whatever reason, iTunes performance seems to be worse. The podcast interface, intermittently, throws crazy beachballs when just clicking on a podcast. Could just be me, but I'm guessing it's something in the newest build.
5. Safari is good again. Safari gets really good for a build, then falls behind Chrome for a while, then gets really good again. iCloud tabs are great, the speed is great, as is finally merging the search and URL bar. A few months from now, I'm guessing it'll have drifted behind Chrome again.
6. iCloud is getting better. Slowly but surely, iCloud is getting really useful. The aforementioned iCloud tabs are great, and for some apps, iCloud for documents is really good. There are a few things missing (can't share docs between apps; not enough apps using iCloud), some bugs (Contacts still seems to flake out sometimes), and some performance issues. But by and large, iCloud is useful. It's just not as useful as Dropbox, yet (for files).
7. Twitter integration is sort of cool. It's nice to be able to quickly tweet from Notification Center, or to sync up a contact's Twitter user with their address book entry.
8. AirPlay Mirroring is badass. Too bad it only works with newer Macs. I'm sure someone will hack it to work with others.
9. It's $20 bucks. Just buy it.

I haven't really played with dictation, but I'm guessing that'll turn out to be pretty cool. For instance, I just dictated this line right here. Works well enough, though the lack of response while you're speaking is disconcerting (because it is sending everything out to Apple's servers, rather than doing it locally. so it can't keep up with your speaking).

Anyway, seriously, it's $20. Go buy it.

And yeah, I probably should have just come up with a tenth fact.

Yahoo Making Lemonade Out of Sewage →

I'll keep this short, since my punditry is not strong.

Jesus. Yahoo! just made lemonade out of a massive pile of horseshit.

— Ryan Toohil (@ryant) July 16, 2012

Yahoo hiring Marissa Mayer as CEO was probably one of the only moves Yahoo could make to keep the company relevant in the short term. This is a major shot in the arm for Yahoo, putting a real technology person in the head spot, someone who (at least from the east coast) has some major star power and real dork creds.

She's smart, she lead Google Search during its heyday, and she's a pick that makes perfect sense. Which makes the fact that the pick is shocking enough to keep Yahoo in the news for a few more days (and enough to make everyone wonder why she wasn't on the shortlist of speculated options all along).

But, more than that, Mayer should at least keep some smart people from abandoning the Yahoo ship, giving her time to plot a new course. It'll be interesting to see where Yahoo goes, as the places they are really strong (Sports/Fantasy Sports, News/Finance, arguably Flickr, I suppose Yahoo Mail is still big) are places that are strong, but not really growing. Do they double-down and try to take ownership of those areas? Or do they carve a new path?

Two days ago, Yahoo had a short list of uninspiring candidates, with all of the interesting ones saying publically they had no desire to lead Yahoo.

Today, Yahoo has a new CEO with legit technology credentials; it makes a huge leap forward by having a young, female CEO; and Yahoo now has more of the world's attention (and probably not just the tech world) than they've had since the shareholder revolt, which is not what you want attention for.

See, interesting. Really interesting. Way more interesting than if Yahoo had just hired another media person. Now I'll pay attention to Yahoo for more than checking my 15 year old email address and managing my fantasy football teams.

Nifty Dorky Stuff of the Week

A quick update this Sunday, as I've just spent an hour or so dorking around with a couple of scripts/tips/techniques that crossed my radar this week.

Archiving tweets

Dr. Drang at leancrew.com pieces together an IFTTT recipe plus some python to give you a nice archive of your Tweets. If you're a big dork, it's worth the 20 minutes to get it all pieced together, so you can have a text file with all of your tweets. If you need some help pulling an archive of your tweets, there are some nice apps / tools / scripts to help you do that (or drop me an email).

But now I've got every stupid thought I put into Twitter sitting in a text file so I can go back and relive my inanity.

Quick fuzzy string-matching for file editing

Internet-dork-hero Brett Terpstra puts together a nice little ruby script to quickly let you find and edit text files (in the editor of your choice), based on a partial file name. It'll come in handy for those folks who don't do a good job remembering either the location or the name of that script they were working on.

Now, if someone could just help me figure out a way to get Coda 2 to let me do the Quick Search on sshfs mounted volumes, I'd be a happy nerd. (I'm guessing I need to get Spotlight to index the volumes, which I haven't been able to do yet).

NFL Stands "Not For Long" (will we cut away to the 4:15 game) →

"In researching the kickoff time shift, the NFL analyzed games from the 2009-11 seasons and found that 44 games required part of the audience to be switched to a mandatory doubleheader game kickoff," a release from the league reads. "With a 4:25 p.m. ET kickoff time, that number that would have been reduced by 66 percent to only 15 games"

Butchered, awesome Jerry Glanville quote aside, the NFL is probably the most fan-friendly, forward thinking professional sports league (at least when it comes to non-concussion-related topics). Sunday Ticket, NFL RedZone, and NFL.com give you almost anything you could possibly want to see on Sunday, if you're willing to pay a bit. If you don't want to pay, you still usually get at least three games on Sunday, and now, if the early game is close, you won't get yanked away before seeing the final plays of the game.

If the NFL would follow MLB and the NBA's lead and put out an app (at say $10-20 a season) that let you listen to the radio broadcasts of any game, it would probably make a gajillion dollars.

MLB, with its At Bat app and web service, Apple TV/Xbox Live integration, and really well done MLB.com and MiLB.com sites, would be a shoo-in for fan friendly behavior, but their continue adherence to their absurd YouTube and blackout policies mean that, no matter what they do, they're always going to be second place.

(From Awful Announcing.)

I hate fantasy baseball

Caution: Falling Rocks

I've been playing around with the really nice wp-svbtle theme by gravityonmars (which is an open-sourced version of svbtle.com. I like the simplicity of the theme, though it doesn't always fit my needs perfectly.

So, occasionally, you might see things get broken as I try to figure out how to fit what I like (not having images and videos right against the border; supporting comments) into the theme. If you see something that I've broken, go ahead and shoot me an email/tweet/comment.

Anyway, navel gazing complete.

(How much do you miss the animated under construction gifs from the '90s?)

Oh Internet (or Tow Truck Recursion)

On my drive into work lately, I saw a giant tow truck towing another giant tree trimming truck, which lead to the obvious thought of "it'd be funny to see a tow truck towing a tow truck", and then to the obvious next thought of "but it'd be wayyyy funnier to see a tow truck towing a tow truck towing a tow truck."

So, of course, off to the internet I went.

Not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to ever throw that query into google:

This is picture sort of sated my need for tow truck recursion, but kind of fails because the last truck isn't a tow truck.

But, I think this is what finally ended my search for tow truck recursion and let me get on with my day:

It only could have been better if somehow the last tow truck was also towing the first tow truck. Anyway, it's Friday and it's 95 degrees out and the Heat are NBA Champs. I needed a distraction.

Thanks

If the "New Big Three" era in Boston ended last night, it was an awesome run.

• 1 World Title
• 2x Eastern Conference Champs
• 5x Atlantic Division Champs

Probably my favorite team that I've ever been able to follow.

Image "borrowed" from ESPN.com

Good Job! Good Effort!

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

← Older Newer →