anoved

I'm in no position to dispute the author's technical competency, but on the basis of a series of haranguing messages I received from him after making a small space-related thingy (http://wheresthatsat.com), I believe he does regard US-based space activities (including everything from NASA to commercial enterprise to hobbyists like me) with blanket disdain. That's consistent, for better or worse, with the conspiratorial tone you note.

An exception exists for TLEs redistributed by CelesTrak.com. Sources: http://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/notice.asp#Update16 and personal correspondence with the operator.

(Note also that the Space Track terms do not prohibit individuals from requesting accounts for personal use.)

I don't know of a paper, but on the Tcl wiki there is some discussion of the "non-recursive evaluation" (NRE) engine that enables these features [1]. More formal descriptions of the new coroutine [2] and tailcall [3] commands are listed, among others, here [4].

1. http://wiki.tcl.tk/37253#pagetocbefb5a57

2. http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/328

3. http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/327

4. http://wiki.tcl.tk/21276

Update: more details on the NRE implementation are available here [5] at the contributing author's site; anonymous login required.

5. http://msofer.com:8080/wiki?name=NRE

Jonathan's Space Report (http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html) is an exhaustive accounting of human activity in space (manned or unmanned), with a focus on recent launches. Released every few weeks. Back issues run to 1989 and continue to the present day.

Emily Lakdawalla writes some very good explanations of space science for the Planetary Society - very accessible, but with more detail and intelligence (IMHO) than you get from other media outlets. http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/

Emily Lakdawalla has posted a good explanatory write-up, with more details on the methodology and background on the research, at the Planetary Society blog: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/1129120...

I don't deny that cracked screens appear to a problem, but surely you agree that going through 15 iPhones makes your case a bit of an outlier?

I hope you find it useful! Note the interface is just an AppleScript wrapper around some Python code that could be used in other ways.

Nobody's useless. It's easy to get wrapped up in the impression that we are defined by our jobs (especially around this site), but we aren't. I have had some unrewarding jobs myself, with little big-picture purpose and no easy way out, but the solution is to find (and make) value in other activities. Cultivate a hobby or an art or a programming side project that is important to you. Even the small "feel good" activities you mention are not insignificant if they impact someone else - and if you choose activities that are more interesting to you I suspect you will find them to be more satisfying.

If you're working with real-world objects, one approach is to place the object of interest on a turntable, allowing you to capture multiple perspectives with a single camera/sensor. Philo Hurbain has made some delightfully clever LEGO NXT 3D scanners this way (delightful especially because they're used, in turn, to digitize the shape of complex LEGO parts) - one using a needle probe, and another using a laser.

http://philohome.com/scan3d/scan3d.htm http://philohome.com/scan3dlaser/scan3dlaser.htm

You might also be interested in the Makerbot folks' structured light 3d scanner kit: http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/09/14/new-makerbot-3d-scanner-...

Or what about using built-in motion sensors to record the relative camera location and orientation of a series of frames captured with an e.g. iPhone camera? I don't know exactly how the accelerometers and gyros work, or what sort of data they provide (linear distance vs just orientation changes?), but imagine holding down a "scan" button as you simply swing the phone around a subject to capture a series of images. I would think it would be possible to reconstruct 3d surfaces (at least under suitable illumination conditions, I guess) given known camera location/orientation for each frame. Pushbroom stereo, in remote sensing parlance...

Actually, it briefly displays a sequence of four illumination conditions - a white semicircle at the top, right, bottom, and left edges of the screen.

Well, the original still works pretty well. ;-) I just used MacPaint to paint this portrait of MacPaint programmer Bill Atkinson:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anoved/4813947112/

Well, in reality, I would use it to buy food. Money is tight.

If we're talking some sort of online-only credit, I'd actually like to donate more to a number of podcasts I enjoy (escapeartists.net, drabblecast.org, starshipsofa.com). They work on a lot of productions that enrich the life of my mind.

Courtroom artists serve exactly that function - to sketch the scene in courtrooms where cameras are not allowed, for distribution through the news media. I'm not sure what the trend is but I wouldn't be surprised if it is a waning profession, given increasing number of courts that allow photography/video.

It may not be exactly what you desire, but Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) presents a series of mathematical problems of variable difficulty. Working out solutions in code is a great problem-solving exercise, in my opinion.

I'll let others address your actual question of increasing speed, but I'd just like to make the [perhaps obvious] point that speed isn't everything. I'd argue that comprehension and composition (diction, logical structure, etc.) are more important than unqualified speed.

Divvy seems like a neat utility, too, at least for my taste in window management tools. I've been using Cinch (drag windows to top or sides of screen to cinch to full or half screen size - http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/), but I think I'll give Divvy a try.

Shopify + Fetch (http://fetchapp.com/) seems like a decent combination for selling digital goods. Fetch provides file hosting and download services and integrates with Shopify as well as other services. I believe it helps manage updates to your files too, eg. with an option to send out re-download notices to existing customers when you update a file.

FYI, minor change to the stylesheet (pre {overflow:auto;}) to improve readability of preformatted text: http://anoved.net/2010/06/mcreadability-and-preformatted-tex...

Together with part 1 (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typ...), quite an informative summary of different writing systems. I find different scripts fascinating, and know little about most, so this is a nice entry point to learn more.

I'd like to learn more about Safari Reader, too - especially the paginated-article collation feature, which is a real advantage over Readability.

Anyway, as for tweaking the stylesheets - here are some links to compare.

Here is the original Readability stylesheet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability...

And here is my version (featuring an inexpert mix of px, em, and % units that surely could be improved): http://anoved.net/css/mcreadability.css

To try your own modifications, edit a Readability bookmarklet and set _readability_css.href to the URL for your stylesheet.

Thanks! When I first set out to make it, I thought JavaScript would be involved - but turns out a new stylesheet was sufficient. There's JS on the page to replicate the bookmarklet maker, of course, but swapping the stylesheet URL in an existing Readability bookmarklet amounts to the same thing.

It is interesting to see the initial reaction (aversion) here and elsewhere to horizontal scrolling. I guess I concur that it is annoying in most contexts, but hadn't noticed it here. Maybe it's a difference between browsing/skimming behavior and prolonged reading?

In my experience, having used this for a few weeks now, not much scrolling is involved. That's part of the point - more of the text is visible at once, without too many distractions, be they visual or interactive.

Scrolling is a matter of tapping the right arrow key once or twice when you get to the end of a column or the page. Plus, with today's laptop trackpads, scrolling sideways is just as easy scrolling vertically - but, true, it's not conventional.

I feel like quoting "Green Eggs and Ham" - try it, and you'll see! Or not. It's certainly not intended for "typical web content" of videos and bite-size blog posts (and neither is normal Readability). I use it for longer articles and short fiction.

That said, I certainly accept the feedback that many people seem put off by the horizontal scrolling concept. Just thought I'd share!

Speaking of Readability, and with apologies for the off-topic self-promotion, I made a multi-column stylesheet which some may find appealing: http://anoved.net/tag/readability/

I use the Caps Lock key as a Control key, and indeed I type Ctrl-X with my left pinky and middle finger. (I realize that I touch-type "X" with my middle finger anyway. Is this unusual?)

Hard Knocks.

I went to a public school in NY. We had a weekly touch typing class in 5th grade (during the mid nineties). It wasn't rigorous enough to make great typists out of us, but it provided a decent foundation for keyboarding electives in middle school and high school.