kencasting.com

Posted via web from Move along, there’s nothing to see here

Posted via web from Move along, there’s nothing to see here

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Move along, there’s nothing to see here

via geekologie.com

The bacon cheese roll. This bacon thing might be getting out of hand.

Posted via web from Move along, there’s nothing to see here

This last weekend, we had a group of people at our house in Mendocino. Altogether, there were 8 guests, we had a lot of fun, cooked and ate amazing food, enjoyed good wine, great conversation. A pretty typical party. The difference was, we’d only met 3 of these people in person before. Of the other 5, one came from Ohio, one New York, two from Maryland one from Texas They were all friends of my wife and/or I on twitter.

Friends we knew, @Ann_Steckel @CreativeSage and @MarantzGuy we’d met a while ago, and all of them had been over to the house before on several occasion. They were close to the area, and so were friends we knew we got along well with. Of the "new friends", one of the guests @PreppyDude, was the reason for the far-and-wide turnout. He’s wanted to visit California, and especially Mendocino county, for a long time, and he finally had the opportunity to come. We scheduled it to coincide with @geosteph and @fireton’s visit to California for the NASA 40th anniversary festivities surrounding the moon landing. @ChazFrench was about to start culinary school, and was able to arrange to come out and surprise folks at the last minute, in particular @PreppyDude, and @AnnOhio who popped up to complete the roster.

I’ve been to plenty of gatherings at neutral public locations, but having people to your home is a bit different. Being a bit paranoid, we’d gone to some measure to invite folks, but only send out directions to people who someone we trusted in the group knew. That worked out well, we were comfortable that we weren’t inviting anyone we’d rather not have know where we live!

We had @ChazFrench come into town on Wednesday, had a great time with him, while keeping is arrival a secret. Picked up @PreppyDude on Thursday, and headed up to Mendo. @geosteph and @fireton stopped by Thursday with super tasty Racer 5 beer, and we had a great Salmon dinner. Then @Ann_Steckel stopped by Friday bearing wine and snacks galore. We had a dinner on Friday night at one of our favorite local restaurants (the Albion River Inn) with the whole gang. People got to meet each other, and have a great local meal, and those interested got to do vertical scotch tasting’s as well!

It had been foggy Thursday and Friday, weather is very unpredictable on the coast, and it’s often foggy in the summer (as it gets hot inland, fog forms on the coast creating natural air conditioning. Tourists who go to the coast are often surprised by this). We hoped for, and got sun all day Saturday. The fog would start to come in, burn off, and it stayed lovely all day, so we were able to hang out on the deck together and enjoy the day.

People began arriving in the early afternoon, and the appetizers started flowing. Spiced snack mix, baked brie in puff pastry, pesto and tomato on pastry, cheese-stuffed roasted jalapenos,  goat cheese and raspberry on toast, spicy chicken wings, Caribbean marinated chicken with mango chutney, light cake with fruit. We only took pictures of some of it, since we were having such a good time eating it all!

Had a great time meeting everyone, and a fun time hosting them as well. Thanks everyone for such a nice weekend!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Move along, there’s nothing to see here

In March, I did a month long road trip (see the Road Trip category for a play-by-play), and I wanted to blog as I went, incorporating pictures and sharing photos on Flickr. My iPhone is a wonderful Internet device, but it doesn’t do everything.

I could bring my 15" MacBook Pro, but it’s large, heavy, and most of all, expensive. A wonderful machine, great keyboard, big bright screen, I’m using it to write this entry because it’s such a nice computer. But, being on a road trip means leaving your car a lot of places while you explore, you either want to take your most valuable possessions with you, or not worry much about them. Few small-town inexpensive hotels have safes, so you’ll leave gear in your room.

But, I’m also working on some self-employed freelance projects, playing with iPhone app writing, some server-side cloud computing ideas, and building kinetic wind-art, while taking a break from my traditional engineering management work, I don’t want to spend much money since I’m living off some savings for a while. What to do?

Netbooks seem to be all the buzz with the cool kids. They’re small, cheap, have good battery life. They also have crappy keyboards, slow processors, and limited space for memory and storage.

I really want a 12" Macbook replacement, having given mine to my wife as her primary computer, but Apple doesn’t have one of those right now. I end up finding a solution for that, but it’s the focus of part two of this blog entry.

A week before the trip, I read the reviews, figure out what’s in stock given my procrastination, and end up with an ASUS EeePC 900HA  (8.9" screen), and order an 2GB memory upgrade. It quickly arrives, and I start the process of getting it set up for a trip.

I know I’ll have sporadic Internet access, so I need some apps to work disconnected, but I also want to also keep personal information in "the cloud" just in case I loose the netbook on the road, I don’t want it to be full of personal information.

I’ve used Windows on occasion in the past, I can navigate around and use it just fine, but I’m a UNIX and Mac guy, primarily. That just means I’m not instantly conversant on the new top cool Windows apps. I spend an evening hunting around for software that’ll fit the bill.

• Web Browsing: Firefox
• Email: Thunderbird
• Blogging: ScribeFire
• Microblogging: Tweetdeck
• Password management: LastPass

I grab a couple WAP scanning programs to help me find working wireless connectivity on the road, throw iTunes on it so I can play the music I loaded on the second partition, and I’m set.

They keyboard on the ASUS is pretty good. Everything where it should be, I can nearly touch type (I’m 6′4" and have hands to match), screen is mediocre, but I expected that. XP runs fine, I’m not pushing it very hard.

My summary, I’m really happy with the ASUS. I loaded Windows 7 on a second partition which makes the experience even better, it runs for 3-4 hours on the (removable) battery, and as a portable photo/blogging/browsing/twittering machine, it worked great! My only real complaint living with windows is that the required virus blockers are nearly as annoying as clearing my daily email spam. I think Windows 7 with Microsoft’s new virus blocking software makes an even better ultraportable computer. If only I could get such an affordable and portable platform with OSX running on it, I’d be ecstatic. Humm…

Posted via web from kaydub’s posterous

Geotagging photos, putting the GPS position information where the photo was taken in the EXIF metadata, has been around for years. Until recently, it was a process reserved for geeks who found some way to grab and store GPS location (a laptop hooked to a GPS or a GPS data logger), then take that information, generally run it through a software program that would match time information from the GPS and from the photo, and put the GPS info into the metadata.

Recently, some cameras have come with the ability to attach a GPS, and even have built in GPS’s, but not very many people are buying a camera just to geotag photos. However, a very large number of people are using their phone’s camera to take and share pictures now. For instance, the iPhone.

What many may not know, all iPhone photos are geotagged. You can turn that off, but it’s not something you’d do ordinarily. To turn it off, you need to go into settings, and turn off "Location Services". That’ll turn off the GPS and the mobile triangulation, but otherwise, every photo you take will have the last known GPS coordinates stamped on it.

This came to light again today when one of my favorite gadget stores, thinkgeek, posted a Top Secret photo of their new office. Just a simple interior shot. But, they posted it directly to Flickr, and it had the location right there in the photo. Oops, so much for that Top Secret new location!

Why would you care? Well, you’re taking pictures at your house, or your friends house, and posting them to Flickr. Do you really want everyone knowing where you live, or where your friends live? Within 20 feet? For some people, it’s no big deal, but for others, well, some amount of privacy is a good thing.

I’d been thinking about this for a while. I take a lot of pictures at my house, but don’t generally want people knowing where I live, you just never know who’ll use that information, or just "come visit". I try hard to remember to turn off location services before taking pictures with my phone at home, but I’m likely to slip up eventually. That’s when another service comes in handy. When posting to Flickr or other public sites, I user services like TwitPic or Posterous, (and even the cool iPhone app ShakeItPhoto) where your EXIF is stripped before posting. Some might find that annoying, but it has the side benefit of removing the photos location. It might be nice to have that as an option eventually, but right now it’s a great way to go for me. I don’t send photos directly to Flickr from my iPhone, only through one of these services. Of course, Flickr just announced a new feature to tweet about uploaded photos. That’s great, but be careful out there if you want your location information private!

Now another bit of party etiquette I’ll need to have to work on with guests, if you want to take pictures with your phone, that’s fine but please turn off location services first.

After building some prototypes, got the material sizes, some commercial bearings, and made some working versions. Have ‘em out in the field to see how they work, and how the materials hold up!