I’m a bit fuzzy on the dates, but it was during a Summer School enrichment program, prior to high school, that I encountered the Internet. Before then, the closest thing to owning a computer was my Super Nintendo. I have memories of using Yahoo! to search for everything Final Fantasy, and used up all the … Continue reading
Category Archives: Tech Tools
Ok, Regex, You Win!
Regular Expression or Regex is used in programming to indicate patterns in strings (of characters). My most frequent encounters with Regex are when I’m parsing a string in Java and I call the split() function. When Regex has been useful: Let’s say I wanted to count how many times all the words in the Bible occur. … Continue reading
The First 10 Android Apps I Download
I recently reformatted my Google phone, but before clearing the data, I made sure to make note of the top 10 apps that I must remember to install. Media Audible – I’d accrued many credits before canceling my subscription. Not only was the $15/mo a bit much, but they only rolled over 6 credits at any … Continue reading
A Short Game Lineage: From Threes to 2048
A friend downloads this game called Threes a couple weeks ago. It’s currently $2 on iPhone and Android. My friend called it the Tetris of our day, and, I have to admit, it is easy to understand, challenging, and fun. Before getting the chance to write about it, an interesting lineage of clones appeared. Cloned. The … Continue reading
GitHub: Social Networking for Hackers
If you’ve always wanted to feel connected to computer programmers (of all levels), you should join github. My only caution is that it’s confusing as hell. Most accessibly, it’s a Facebook for hackers. It’s a collaborative space that does “version control” on software. Version control (or revision control or source control) is important, because it … Continue reading
Costs of Websites: Do I Really Need 22 Domain Names?
I really like my domain name registration service. They charge $10.99 per year, per dotcom. I’ve accumulated 22 names, and lost some over the years (delawarereclaim.com, clubvirture.org, reclaimtalks.com– do I still own that one?). How I do websites. If I have a good name for it, I’ll buy the dotcom. Then I’ll either host the … Continue reading
3 Things I Want to Make
When I was in college, my Computer Engineering partner, Mike, had built his own arcade unit. I thought the idea was so cool; I’ve always wanted to build my own. Since that microprocessors class we had, I haven’t done much with hardware; well, if you don’t count some projects with Lego Mindstorms. In the midst … Continue reading
Fitness Apps: We’ve Become Our Own Giga Pet
I’ve downloaded many health apps, and the two that work best are MyFitnessPal and RunKeeper. MyFitnessPal allows me to keep track of what I’m eating (with a barcode scanner for those preprocessed foods), and I can’t seem to get enough of all the numbers and graphs that it makes for me. I mean, I’d never … Continue reading
I Had a Feeling that Posterous was Pulling the Plug
Yesterday at 6:30 pm, I messaged my band, “I’m migrating our site from posterous to wordpress… b/c wordpress pwns.” As I was updating information on our latest gig, I had an eery feeling that something about how the Posterous site was running seemed off– mostly in the features and odd formatting. I took a couple hours yesterday … Continue reading
Quick, Someone call the Presence Police!
You remember the old saying, “dress to impress?” What you look like influences people’s first impression and how much favor you’re likely to have. Even if we’re told not to judge a book by its cover we still have what is known as “cognitive bias.” With that said, someone needs to call the web presence … Continue reading