Is the cognitive surplus real? I re-read some of Clay Shirky’s writing about the idea of cognitive surplus recently. While the ideas are powerful and well researched, I still have some misgivings about the value of the supposed cognitive surplus that was soaked up by television over the years and is increasingly channeled now online. While television is widely derided…

Recording webcam videos with VLC Media Player I have been recording short videos using the webcam on my laptop using a trial version of some video software that I found on the net. I had also been using the free Yawcam to snap stills, but I didn’t figure out how to get it to record video. It apparently can periodically…

Cycle time of an online community I have taken part in many online communities over the years and I have noticed that no matter what, there are certain cycles that tend to happen. There have been articles written about how sites such as Reddit or Digg change longitudinally over time, but one thing that I’m most interested in is the…

Zero an old hard disk using dd Any time I get rid of a hard disk, I always overwrite the whole drive with zeroes. I know that this is not a secure practice if you are going to be selling the drive, but since the drive is going to the computer recycling center and the data isn’t a matter of…

DIY wins the day In the mid-90s, I was a college student, newly relegated to a dormitory room after having had ample room for my music endeavors at my parents’ home several hours across the state of Pennsylvania. What I lacked in space, I made up for in newly-acquired access to the wonderful World Wide Web of information. You see,…

Do experts teach best? I’ve taken the title of this post from one of the sub-topics in this article about learning to learn. The article makes several good points and is certainly worth a read, but I want to focus on one question that was brought up near the end of the article: who should teach? The article’s argument pointed…

Running a Linux GUI app on a headless machine We all know that several remote desktop solutions exist for Linux, the most popular being VNC . Sometimes I don’t want a full desktop login though – I just want to run a single application. Linux is able to do this by design, but we do have to install a piece…

Lazy css gradient hack I was creating a new site template for a website that I’m working on and I found myself in need of some gradient images for the header bar at the top of the page. I fired up Gimp and whipped up a png file to use for the top bar. As I progressed through the site…

Personal note taking and information management I have been meaning to write a series of posts related to how we use personal information and notes in our daily lives. I have been living and breathing this topic over the last few years, culminating in the development of Ubernote . I don’t even know where to begin with this expansive topic,…

Permission to not have the answers As I wind down the hours of 2009, I’m reflecting back on some of the themes that have popped up for me over the year. One theme that has been at the front of my mind is that of giving yourself permission. I haven’t really started writing about this, but I’ve been gestating the…