Today’s xkcd called Extended Mind has a interesting tooltip:
Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link
in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat,
you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".
Too cool. Let’s try this:
Potato
Starch (starchy)
Carbohydrate
Organic compound
Gas (gaseous)
State of matter (The three classical states)
Phase (matter)
Outline of physical science (physical science)
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
All right!
Now, YMMV: There seems to be a movement of people of sorts editing Wikipedia, trying to break the loop to Philosophy (source: Hacker News).
I’ve been working at my new job for over a year and what’s really different from all my previous jobs is the close relation that I have now with hardware. Of course, programmers use computers, which is primarily “hardware” but most of the hardware I use now is built on the spot. And meeting all the tech guys that actually handle the hardware (both on the building and programming sides) is really interesting: I can peek into one’s microscope to see the boards up close, ask them questions about things that I never learned in programming classes, about compilers, peripherals and all sorts of hacks … This got me a little more interested in building my own small electonic projects but I didn’t know where to start.
So one of my colleagues directed me to a fine website called Hack a Day, which, according to him, is a good start for an amateur like me. They have all sorts of posts for beginners to look into, especially a great article on various development boards to choose from. I heard a lot about the Arduino board, which claims to be “open-source”. I got curious and read a little about it. The site also featured this wonderful documentary on the Arduino: Yes! Open-source hardware exists and it’s something that falls right into the kind of things I’m interested in. This documentary didn’t just give me some bits of information, it explained to me a philosophy; something, I believe, should always be a part of the art of programming.
Now I haven’t really used one yet, mind you. But this got me really interested on getting one very soon.
You can check out the documentary below (and use full screen) or check out http://arduinothedocumentary.org for other viewing / downloading options.
Recently, my Japanese teacher has been sending me audio dictations in mp4 formats. It’s not a problem in itself since MPlayer or any other Linux player can read it. But nothing beats Audacity for listening and re-listening the hard parts (and change the tempo when things get really hard) but it doesn’t support MPA’s (or rather, it simply and unequivocally crashes). For the last 3 or 4 lessons, I still haven’t mastered this single line of Kung Fu to convert it with MPlayer:
mplayer -ao pcm:file=<out file>.wav <in file>.mpa
Notice how the pcm:file replaces the old syntax. MPlayer (on Ubuntu at least) will warn you about this.
Hopefully I’ll stop scouring the ‘Net and go straight to this page if my memory fails. And I hope you do too
.
