Justin Miller incanus

Max Battery Life Checklist

Here is a checklist to follow if you want maximum battery life -- for instance if you're about to get on a long plane flight.

Low power use checklist

With power connected:

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

Hofstadter on Lisp

In the mid-80s, while reading through my roommate's collection of Scientific American back issues, I encountered this introduction to Lisp written by Douglas Hofstadter. I found it very charming at the time, and provide it here (somewhat illegally) for the edification of a new generation of Lispers.

In a testament to the timelessness of Lisp, you can still run all the examples below in emacs if you install these aliases:

(defalias 'plus #'+)
(defalias 'quotient #'/)
(defalias 'times #'*)
(defalias 'difference #'-)

	/*
	You can use this to call deprecated methods without warnings (supporting old sdk's for example)
	or, you can use it in place of performSelector: where you need non-object params, or multiple
	params.

	ie: ...

	int result = 0;
	int index = 12;
	NSArray *array = myArray;

	justin: so static api
	yh: don't use it for this
	justin: ok
	yh: or i will body slam you next time i see you

	/*
	* Scan your official Twitter archive to get a basic count of the
	* people you've talked to and the words that you've used.
	*
	* $ node tweet-counts.js ~/path/to/tweets-archive/
	*
	*/
	var fs = require('fs');
	var base = process.argv[2].replace(/\/$/, ''); // Strip trailing slash.
	var Grailbird = { data: {} }; // The Twitter archive uses this.

	# -- coding: utf-8 --
	'''recorder.py
	Provides WAV recording functionality via two approaches:

	Blocking mode (record for a set duration):
	>>> rec = Recorder(channels=2)
	>>> with rec.open('blocking.wav', 'wb') as recfile:
	... recfile.record(duration=5.0)

	Non-blocking mode (start and stop recording):

	import pyaudio
	import wave

	FORMAT = pyaudio.paInt16
	CHANNELS = 2
	RATE = 44100
	CHUNK = 1024
	RECORD_SECONDS = 5
	WAVE_OUTPUT_FILENAME = "file.wav"

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<title>Foo</title>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0" />
	<style type='text/css'>
	body {
	font-family: 'Helvetica';
	letter-spacing:-5px;

	// Playground - noun: a place where people can play

	import Cocoa
	import QuartzCore
	import XCPlayground
	import Accelerate

	func showMessage(message : String, messageIndex: Integer) {
	let attributedString = NSAttributedString(string: message, attributes: NSDictionary(object: NSFont(name: "HelveticaNeue-Light", size: 24), forKey: NSFontAttributeName))
	XCPCaptureValue("Message \(messageIndex)", attributedString)