BecauseRobots

The New Keyboard Layout is in Progress

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:33:00 -0500

I’d say, all things considered, I’m probably two or three days away from ordering my custom keycaps. Almost all the buttons are there and I’m really just culling the worst of them and trying to come up with even better ones. My second Leopold did arrive, so I have that now. I also let @bratling (who I work with) try the keyboard out, and he’s thinking about ordering one in the next month or so, though perhaps with browns.

I did hear back from WASD Keyboards that I could get a full set of custom keys easily enough, so everything seems in order. I am not sure if I will order both sets of keys immediately or not; I’ll have to wait and see what happens. After reviewing a number of fonts, I think I’m going to use Terminal Dosis for the lettering since its one of the best free fonts I could find that really had the right kind of retro feel to it.

Custom Keyboard Keycaps

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:24:25 -0500

Just bought myself a second Leopold keyboard to match the one I have at work (tenkeyless, Cherry MX Black keyswitches.) I thought very heavily about getting a WASD keyboard instead, but decided that I’d rather have two matching keyboards instead.

After seeing on WASD’s blog what they can do with custom keycaps, I sent off an email to see if I can’t work something out to get a set or two for my Leopolds. Hopefully…

More tweaks and a long weekend

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:10:21 -0500

I’ve gone back through and retagged most posts for consistency, as well as made some more minor changes to the look. I got highlight.js working once again, which was one of the biggest reasons I ditched Posterous. I even went through and hacked together a custom theme for highlight.js based upon my ambient color scheme for vim. It might not be perfect, but its certainly better than nothing.

I also spent some time this weekend working with Vundle, which is a bundle/addon/script manager for vim that has a few features that pathogen doesn’t; most importantly, a way to search for them, install them, and keep them up to date. I’ll probably right up my thoughts on that in a separate article though.

Other minor things: switched to Ubuntu’s font instead of using Roboto, as I found it looks better and has more the style I wanted to go with. Also, discovered that upgrading VirtualBox can be dangerous if you have any virtual machines in a saved state; it completely corrupted mine and I had to make a new one.

It's a new look

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:50:27 -0500

So, I’d say the new look for BecauseRobots is probably about… 80% complete now. This is probably the third major revision of the new look, which is inspired by Android’s style guide and Holo Dark. While a lot of Android’s style guide is clearly oriented for touch devices, I wanted to steal some of the look and feel. They are no where near as detailed or thorough as Apple’s (PDF), but I’m glad to at least see Android taking steps to unify the platform’s appearance and make the experience more cohesive overall.

After going through this process a number of times, I did end up starting with typographical styles and building “mobile first” styles and then worried about any tweaks I needed to make to the layout to look better on desktops. Part of the last 20% that I haven’t done is probably switching the font sizes based upon my guesses at pixel density. I did some of the work for this for the PetWatch app, but there I had the added benefit of exclusively targeting the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPhone 5. In he wild, I’ll have to guess screen sizes, whereas I could treat all platform screens as having the same physical size.

I think the real solution will be a way to actually specify layout/sizes in better units than pixels. Android calls them density-independent pixels (dp) and scale-independent pixels (sp), which are terrible names.

In spirit, a dp is a ‘replacement’ for pixels, and what Apple (and others) secretly pretend pixels are based upon meta tags. a 1dp thick line is meant to be a (more or less) the thinnest line that can be displayed on the screen, even if that means being 2 physical pixels thick. This probably what should be used for defining borders and other UI elements.

In contrast, a sp is another ‘replacement’ for pixels, identical to dp except that sp scale with the user’s zoom preference. So, I’d expect that images and other content should probably use sp’s for dimensions.

Anyway, this version of the site doesn’t use that (at least not yet.) Maybe I’ll sweep through and change over.

Energy Drinks Ordered by Taste

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:32:00 -0500

A week or so ago, we bought a number of energy drinks for the office to see which ones we liked. Here’s the order from best to worst taste. For reference, I think most soda would fall around a 2 or 2.5 on this scale for me.

Energy Drinks by Taste

Rockstar Black (Double Strength) - tasty, good kick. I know that I also like the white (sugar free) ones as well, but we didn’t get those for the office yet.
Red Bull - tastes like Spree candy in a good way.
Monster - not bad a little more bite than most like.
Moxie - tastes like lemon juice and bug juice like you’d get at camp.
Full Throttle - like if you melted down skittles and mixed them with sprite.

Not bad for an OK Go video

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:50:05 -0500

Katy Perry was in t.A.T.u.?

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:51:00 -0500

Just realized that Katy Perry’s E.T sounds like like t.A.T.u.’s All The Things She Said. Don’t believe me?

Vintage Mode in Sublime Text

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:10:00 -0500

Will is one of my colleague at iMarc, and an avid Sublime Text 2 user. He’s written a number of plugins for it now, and every once in a while vintage mode comes up.

Vintage mode is an ‘official’ plugin that’s bundled with ST2 itself which tries to add many vi behaviors to ST2. The first couple times I tried it, I found short comings within 2-3 minutes and this time it took 5, so it’s slowly getting better. Anyone who had used vi or vim (or gvim/macvim) for a while will probably notice these.

These are all command mode or visual mode commands, as that’s all Vintage mode claims to affect. There’s certainly a number of ex and insert commands which I would sorely miss as well.

The lists below are by no means exhaustive, just commands that I use fairly often and recalled from memory.

Vim Left-Right Motions

h, l (left and right) - already found differences. h and l don’t ‘wrap’ around the beginning and the end of the line in vim, and in Sublime, they do. If you think this is an irrelevant difference, think of using multi-selections to edit a bunch of lines at once. vim is very mindful of what commands will cause line changes and which ones won’t, and I think this ties into making sure that macros are more robust or degrade more smoothly.
0, ^, $ (first character, first non-blank character, last character) - these all seem to be consistent.
g^, g$ (first character of the visual line, last character of the visual line) - these don’t seem to exist. It’s interesting that Sublime implemented the ‘true’ line operations here and didn’t implement the visual line operations, whereas in other places, Jon did the opposite.
f{char}, F{char}, t{char}, T{char} (go to the next/previous character, go up to the next/previous character) - these all seem to be working correctly.
; and , (repeat last f, F, t, or T command) - all seem to work.
{column}| (goes to column {column} in the current line) - not implemented.

Line Motions

j, k (up and down) - in vim, j and k do their best to move to the same column in the previous line. In Sublime, j and k move to the same visual column and may only change visual lines. The ‘visual line down’ and ‘visual line up’ commands do exist in vim too, they’re just gj and gk respectively.
gg, G (first line and last line) - seem to work.
+, - (goes to first character of next/previous line) - don’t exist.

Word Motions

w, W, b, B - these all seem consistent. For those that don’t know, w moves your caret to the next first character of a word (like ctrl-right/cmd-right.) Similarly, b moves your caret to the previous first character of a word. W/B are nearly the same, but they work on WORDs instead of words, where a WORD in vim is a string of any non-whitespace characters.
e, E, ge, gE - these are very similar to w/W/b/B, but instead of going to the first character, they go to the last character of a word or WORD. e/E seem to work fine, but it looks like Sublime is lacking ge or gE entirely.
cw/cW - this is an inconsistency in vim (maybe even a bug originally), where cw should have included the space(s) after the current word, but instead, cw and cW were changed to behave identically to ce and cE. All things considered, its extremely rare that anyone would have actually wanted the correct behavior, but it is still a little strange, as similar commands like dw and vw do not behave the same as de and vw. Still, Sublime decided to implement this to be consistent with vim, so all is well.

Text Selection

viw,vaw,vaW,viW (select word/WORD without or with whitespace) - these seem to work.
vit, vat (select inside tag, inside tag and tag) - these don’t seem to be implemented.
vi’, va’, vi”, va” (select inside single/double quotes without or wite whitespace) - these seem to work.

I didn’t test clipboard/registers very much, but I did want to note that while it appears that dd (delete line) works fine, pasting the line back doesn’t correctly preserve newlines. ddp should just swap two lines, whereas in sublime I have to ddpi. Another nicety would be for Vintage mode to change some global keybings, like to redo.

Bring skates.

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:14:00 -0500

Bring skates.

It's in Progress

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:12:00 -0500

Just wanted to let everyone know that my tumblr theme redesign is in progress, so the site probably looks messy at best. I’m trying out some fun things, like jQuery Masonry, to try to get a unique style that isn’t too terrible.

Also, I’m trying to make sure all my fonts are bigger so the site is easier to read, and trying to update the font. Right now I’m playing around with Segoe UI and Segoe UI Light, but I may also try something more interesting.

Anyway, thanks for the patience.

'Disabling' the F-Lock key on Logitech SetPoint Keyboards

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:55:00 -0500

It took way too much Googling to find this obvious, simple solution, so I figured I’d post it to BR where it’ll hopefully be easier to find.

In SetPoint, under My Keboard, Keyboard F Key Settings (the F in a box on the left) you can select what all the F keys do when F-Lock is on. Just go through and change each to Keystroke Assignment and assign them to their respective function key. While this doesn’t disable F-Lock at all, it merely makes the function keys behave the same regardless of whether F-Lock is on. This works perfectly with my old diNovo Media Desktop keyboard that I use for gaming.

nslookup cobblestone

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:27:00 -0500

I am overtired and going to sleep now and wanted to share how I figured this out.

While playing Minecraft, my mind started to dream anyway, and I dreamt that there was some kind of DNS issue into of Minecraft, and I was confused because I wasn’t sure how I figured out there was a DNS issue as I didn’t see any trace routes or text on the screen. It was very confusing; I

Good night.

PHP: Joining arrays into subsets

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:21:00 -0500

The following snippet joins the elements of an array into of subgroups of 3 (and one for the remainder.) I used this for grouping list items into columns for formatting, if it helps, enjoy.

$x = array('one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six', 'seven', 'eight');
for ($i=0; $i


Creates
array(3) {
  [0]=>
  string(11) "onetwothree"
  [1]=>
  string(11) "fourfivesix"
  [2]=>
  string(10) "seveneight"
}
By the way, apologies for the crappy formatting for code snippets; I’m working on a new style for BecauseRobots which should also address that.



Vim Script Snippet to Detect SVN/Mercurial
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:15:00 -0500
While this might not be as elegant as it could be (as I’m only just starting to embark on learning the intricacies of vim script) this gets the job done. I’m using this to prevent running commands/plugins that don’t make any sense to run (for me) outside of a working copy.

For example, the below snippet, instead of just binding  directly to FufCoverageFile (FuzzyFinder), it will check to see if I’m in a SVN or HG working copy/repository first. This was mainly to prevent me from running FufCoverageFile in / or /home/kevin or some equally terrible directory that has way too many files to index. At worst, I can still run :FufCoverageFile to get around this check.
function! s:IsInSvn(dir, vcdir)
	let l:dir = simplify(a:dir . '/' . a:vcdir)
	if isdirectory(l:dir)
		return 1
	else
		if simplify(a:dir) == '/'
			return -1
		else
			return s:IsInSvn(a:dir . '/..', a:vcdir)
		endif
	endif
endfunction

function! g:SafeFufCoverageFile()
	if s:IsInSvn(getcwd(), '.svn') == 1 || s:IsInSvn(getcwd(), '.hg') == 1
		FufCoverageFile
	endif
endfunction
nmap  :call g:SafeFufCoverageFile()



Good Music is Always Good Music
Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:26:00 -0500
I’m a fan of chip or 8-bit style music. While for some people it may conjure memories of Nokia ringtones, for me, I feel like it’s time for a boss fight. Sometimes I’m asked why it doesn’t sound bad too me, and I usually fail to explain why.
Danny Baranowsky composes chip music, although much of his stuff goes well beyond true chip stuff. Most of his stuff is soundtracks for iPhone games these days. One of his most recent albums was the soundtrack for Super Meat Boy, which I’m particularly fond of (If you do decide to listen to this, make sure to go beyond the first track, as the first track is a much different style than all the rest.)
A little over a week ago, Brent Kennedy released piano covers of ten of the songs from this soundtrack. I think its interesting to check out and listen to this instrumental, piano covers as I feel like they do a better job than I could of explaining what kind of feeling or depth I feel the original soundtrack has by putting them in a medium more people are used to.
And no, I don’t think that the piano covers sound better than the originals; I just think they may be more accessible. Anyway, enjoy.


Epsilon XFWM theme
Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:32:00 -0500
I just posted one of my custom XFWM themes that I use pretty heavily, as I figured I’ve been using it enough that there’s a chance someone else would want to use it too.

I’ve used Epsilon with a number of GTK themes, and it works pretty well with the (relatively new) Die Hard 4 theme which I’m using now. See it on XFCE-Look.org for more screenshots.


Making bad passwords better
Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:46:00 -0500
There’s lots of different things people can do to improve passwords. Most people know that there are better and worse choices (‘password’), and most people know that adding in a number helps (‘password1’). And, if you turn the password into some mishmash of symbols like you wish you were a hacker back in ‘94 (‘p@$$w0rd’) it must be impossible to decrypt.
While a longer password (‘ultrasecurepassword’) is certainly more secure, for something like my own user account password that I have to type numerous times a day, having to deal with successfully typing a password that long without typos definitely gets slower and more obnoxious. On the other hand, completely random passwords (‘dJ2a#0xr’) require memorizing (or worse, a postit) and are terrible for sharing with a group of users.
Another simple way to improve a password is to use the layout of the keyboard itself. For example, instead of ‘password’, type the letter or symbol directly to the right of each letter: ‘[sddeptf’. Or, if you prefer, do above-left (‘0qww294e’) or above-right (‘-wee305r’).
Don’t think this is a magic bullet; some dictionary-based password cracking tools will try these kinds of ‘shifts’ as well to break your passwords. But, password cracking tools are even more likely to try simple letter/character substitutions, and substitutions like that still require memorization, and may need lead to postits. So, from worst to best,
password
password1
p@ssw0rd
[sddeptf
dJ2a#0xr
ultrasecurepassword



PhoneGap Plugins: Updates to SaveImage and EmailComposer
Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:33:00 -0500
I’ve forked and updated both plugin on Github. The first allows sending DataURI images as image file attachments via EmailComposer. The second is just compatibility updates to keep the plugin current and working.
https://github.com/khamer/phonegap-plugins-official/



How to Upgrade Minecraft to a Pre-Released Version (like 1.0 Release Candidate 2)
Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:51:00 -0400
First things first: download the client jar from either the original source (probably a tweet by Jeb or Notch) or find the link somewhere else reliable, like the Minecraft forum. Or, for 1.9pre4, click here. For 1.9pre5, click here. For 1.0rc2, click here.
Next, Fire up Minecraft, and go to the Texture Packs screen.

Click the button that says Open texture pack folder and you should end up with a folder open like this.

You may not even have any texture packs, but I have quite a few installed. Now, you want to up go a folder; you can do that by clicking on ‘.minecraft’.

Next, double-click on the ‘bin’ folder and open that up.

You’ll notice that in this directory, there’s a file called ‘minecraft.jar’, and you started this all off by downloading a file called minecraft.jar.
Make sure Minecraft isn’t running.
Rename (or delete) the minecraft.jar already in this directory, and put the new one in this folder. Fire up Minecraft again, and you’ll be running 1.9!

Note: there are two different jar files called minecraft.jar. One is this one that lives in the bin directory, and the other is the Java based launcher that’s cross platform. They aren’t the same.
If you want to share this via a server message or such, I recommend using this link instead: http://bit.ly/mcupgrade


Apple
Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:05:00 -0400

So, in the last hour or two I’ve spent energy praising Jobs, mentioning some of his flaws, and attacking Apple. So, This is a follow up from what I last wrote about Apple and Steve Jobs.
There is an attitude, encouraged by Apple, that Apple products are undeniably superior products to all others available because Apple made them. I’m not sure where the attitude originates, but I feel I became aware of it in popular culture in the 1990’s. The attitude goes beyond just that Apple makes better products to suggest that questioning whether Apple makes a better product is a poor choice; that Apple has done all the critical thinking and has made the best choices for you so you don’t have to make any choice besides buying Apple.

Further, Apple goes on to push that Apple products are for better people. I like this ad, from Wired magazine in 1999 (source) that associates Apple not only with brilliance but with identity.
With few exceptions (like to avoid self-contradiction), I vehemently oppose this kind of attitude. I am the best person to decide what’s best for me, even better than the late, great Steve Jobs. I take my time to make my decisions and will try most alternatives as I can. I routinely switch through the different web browsers available to see differences and try to find which one is the best for me. While I don’t expect anyone (even myself) to exert that kind of energy before every choice, I do expect to act appropriate to the amount of time they’ve invested in the matter. If someone had only ever driven one brand of car, didn’t know how cars worked, and hadn’t spent any time researching other brands of cars, if they announced that their brand was undeniably the best they’d be viewed as the unreliable source of biased data that they were.

Apple promotes this culture. Genius bars (source) and the majority of the Think Different advertising campaigns are examples of Apple glorifying its user base.
This kind of mentality reminds me of a few other groups that have had a lot of media attention lately. While I can think other examples, I’ll pick on Glenn Beck:

I don’t have strong political opinions, but I identify with the point that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were trying to promote with the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. They were trying to counter cultural extremes through comedy.
I think that Apple has created extremists and now counter-extremists. To those Apple users who are just using Apple and aren’t oozing superiority at every Android, PC, and other non-Apple customer they meet, I apologize for the gauntlets I throw. Still, Apple seems to be focused on reinforcing the extremes. I can’t help but think that this is the effect that Richard Stallman is hoping will begin to subside with Jobs passing.