Cavalcade of Mammals

The Conservative Mind
The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism
Stepper driver circuit using an Allegro driver
Scam School web TV show
Open States, tracks political info at the state level
Some of the history of US assassination policy

Squish is a game where tiles are moved on a game board. The starting board has the tiles out of place. The player needs to move the tiles to match the goal arrangement.

Tiles travel in a circuit when a move is made. The player click on a tile to squish it out of place. The tile displaces an adjacent tile, and this follows along a loop until a tile moves to take the place of the original tile. If many circuits are possible starting from an original tile, the choices are displayed and the player picks the move.

To complicate the game, there is a hierarchy of tiles. Darker tiles can displace lighter ones, but lighter tiles can not move darker tiles. This limits the possible moves.

I run Ubuntu on my main home machine, but the latest 12.04 LTS release has a terrible, barley useable window manager.

I’ve switched to Cinnamon, following the instructions here. Now it all works like it is supposed to.

Added Google Analytics to my first app!

Needed V2, PhoneGap code athttps://github.com/DoersGuild/Cordova-Android-Analytics.

Idea 1:

Laser level. Ther are apps that use the orientation sensor in the phone to turn it into a level. Take it a step further. Combine hte orientation sensor and the phone to show a live camera view but draw a level line on it.

This can be taken further (if the phone is accurate enough), to draw a ‘same’ height line on the camera view, useful for hanging pictures and checking the level of things.

Idea 2:

Novelty ‘which protein is your name in’. Check human proteome first for good matches, then orangatang, pig, rat, bacteria. Show the protein sequence with the name highlighted, and a picture of the organism.

Allow the user to send this in an email or post on FB.

The 21st century is a teenager now!

App development stories
Google App Analytics
Google App Analytics with PhoneGap
Sysadmin horror story featuring Sendmail
CTCA: Profiting from Offering Ineffective Therapies to Cancer Patients
Wild Sex
Transparent magnets (aerogel with tiny magnet particles
Crazy unstable compounds: Azidoazide Azides
Dr. Oz, health care fraud tout
Total assessed property value in the US is roughly $30 trillion.
Chicago teacher’s strike 1 2
Romney’s 47%
HTML5 Canvas
The Republican war on democracy in the US
Voting ID laws
Nate Silver strays out of his niche, messes everything up
Scenes from the class war, part I
Funny sex comic part 2
Did they really think only old white men would hear the dogwhistles?
Pibgorn Comic
The best of the internet: John Holbo on the strange world of the conservative mind
The SABRE, an air-breathing rocket engine
Men are too emotional to have a rational argument
The GAGE assessment of short read sequence assemblers
Review of SASHA AND EMMA, The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
David Brin: Science Fiction for Young Adults: A Recommended List
Diagrams on Conservatism, The Four Types of Conservatives
Totalitarianism in the US: An Accident Waiting to Happen
HMC5883L Digital Compass Module: $10.90 bare HMC5883L, $6.95
Three Axis Magnetic Field / Electronic Compass Sensor Module: $9.90
Fran Blanche, electronics projects / small business
the Makey Makey w/ capacitive sensing
7 steps to turn a photo into a cartoon using Gimp
Andrew Sullivan, destructive hack
Women Don’t Like Libertarianism Because They Don’t Like Libertarianism
Timothy Geithner: Modern Day Metternich
Phage / antibiotic combination treatment
Arrogant Worms “Wouldn’t it be Great if Everybody had a Gun”
C. elegans modeling group OpenWorm
Muckraker Tarbell writes on Standard Oil in 1901