/home/shank/random.sh

Google+ Auto Awesomed part of Upright.

I'm making a definitive break here. My lengthy blog posts will happen on http://shanked.me/ for the future. Reblogs and other things will be here.

Suppose you develop a simple game where the main character has to kill enemies as he travels around the world. You release your game, and people download and buy it. Now you want to see how long people have played your game. How many monsters they've killed. You've botched the entire thing from the start by not collecting that data on release. You can consul yourself in thinking that you're only tacking stats from point X, but you secretly will wonder what happened before you started. Don't screw it up. Log everything from the start, and later use that data if you want it. Don't even make it visible to the user, just silently collect it for the useful or clever ideas down the line.

You might not have known his name before today, but you're on a more open planet because of him. Aaron was the co-founder of [Demand Progress](http://demandprogress.org) and one of the most outspoken activists against SOPA, COICA, and ProtectIP. Aaron's legacy lives on in the hearts of activists everywhere, and physically inn the form of the Creative Commons, PACER, and many other projects he worked on. "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you." - [Lessig](http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully)

 I’ve had a whiteboard for a couple months, and while it’s proved useful in the odd case that I need to prototype something, often it goes unused. Same with a pile of sticky notes I’ve got laying around. Instead of waste either, I’m combining the two into an organizational board. Moving across from left to right is time, which rapidly scales up. This means I can easily prioritize things for today & tomorrow, while I can also add arbitrary projects for the future to the back burner. The other element I can track is progress through a project, which, again, uses a sliding scale that allows for rapidly approximating progress. Projects are rarely left unattended midway through, so it’s easier to tune the first 10%, while the last 50-99% block is closer to the bottom. A project at the bottom is finalized, but waiting on outside approval or publishing for completion. Once a task is completed, it’s removed from the board. In addition to this basic scale, a very simple section on the right is divided off for a generic tracker of everything else. It can house anything from a task to a note for future reference, without being scheduled. My only issue with this organization scheme is that it wastes sticky notes. I’d use something like [Trello](http://trello.com/), but part of the reasoning behind this is its physical presence. It’s satisfying to move something across a board for progress, not so much so to drag a tile on Trello. Trello also doesn’t convey the vertical axis switch as much, which kinda breaks the flow too.

The Aurora Public School system introduced a district wide installation of [Moodle](moodle.org), the open source alternative to [Blackboard](http://www.blackboard.com/), an online course management system. The APS installation is open to all teachers in the district, and enables teachers to allow assignments to be turned on digitally, at any given set due date. Speaking qualitatively, the results initially were far from enthusiastic for many students and teachers, though early adopters always exist in the education sector. Fast forward a couple years, and suddenly the benefits of Moodle are becoming more and more clear to both sides. Teachers are using it for grading and assignments alike - as it tends to be more convenient than paper, while students are seeing it as a way to extend deadlines as far as possible (most teachers set midnight as the turn in date, rather than an in class time). Entirely paperless classrooms at a high school level might not be fully realized in the short term, but the gap is closing quickly on that. As teachers and students become more familiar with it, and as internet connections and devices become more prevalent, the likelihood of this increases dramatically. If anything, it might help drop the [price of printer ink](http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/printers/ink_vs_printer.jpg).

Apparently regardless of the world's state of not-ending, most of my technology has been in protest for the last week. The LCD panel that powered my desktop finally gave out, after several years of heavy use. This is almost 8 months after a similar panel died, thus rendering my desktop effectively dead. My laptop is dead in the water for anything heavy in performance, so I needed a solution that still allowed usage of my desktop without a monitor. I'm using Windows 8 Professional on all machines, so my temporary fix is already built into Windows. I enabled [Remote Desktop Connection](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/remote-desktop-connection) on my desktop PC while connected to a TV as a temporary output device. Once setup, it's trivial to remote desktop in from a low-power single-core laptop and let it serve as a dumb slave while the RDP session takes full priority. Over LAN, the performance is actually quite stunning. Both the laptop and the desktop are connected via 802.11n, and as a result there are only minor issues in running through RDP. Remote audio streaming works for Windows sounds, but anything more complicated (e.g. an actual mp3) causes stuttering issues, as to be expected from networking the entire stream. Video playback is obviously dead in the water, but at that point it's just easier to disconnect from RDP and use Samba to stream back data from the desktop, akin to how a NAS operates.

[Writeapp](http://writeapp.me) re-launched today, with an emphasis on being a platform for easily taking down thoughts where ever you are, with the intent on expanding on thought at a PC later (see [Bill's Introduction to Writeapp](https://writeapp.me/writeapp/notebooks/how-to-guides)). This argument relies on a smartphone being always present, while a notebook wouldn't be so. The problem lies in with speed, however. The human mind can create a thought at an instant, and lose it in an equally fast amount of time. Opening an app requires a high amount of friction just to take note of a quick idea. If your phone has a lock code, you'll need to enter it. Find the app you're using for notes (call it Write App even), then wait for it to start up. Assuming you're already logged in, find the "new" button, and title your thought. Then, record that particular thought and save it. If you have a notebook on you, this is a relatively simpler process. You just open to a blank page, scribble down your thought, and leave it at that. I'm not saying that digital notes won't eventually become the standard - I hope they will. It just isn't practical right now. There's a reason why [a site focused on technology][1] [has writers who carry Moleskines][2]. > That's right, it's another literary romantic with a Moleskine. I use it for note taking whenever I can't be bothered to produce electronic scrawl. -Thomas Ricker > I end every day by making a written list of the next days to dos, and I also take written notes throughout the day. I enjoy crossing items off lists, and I feel like I have more control if I've written something down in ink. -Nina Sokoler [1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/28/3406344/whats-in-your-bag-thomas-ricker [2]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/24/3239305/whats-in-your-bag-nina-sokoler

Something I've noticed over this Thanksgiving holiday has been how subconsciously addicted to news I've become. Chrome's "Most Visited" tab has Hacker News at the #1 spot, followed by Android Police, The Verge, Android Central, and lastly Android and Me. If I open a new tab, the first thing I type is "n" followed by return, because of how frequently I've loaded Hacker News. It's becoming stale. Hacker News is a source of community voted news that ["anything that good hackers would find interesting"](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and as such it should in theory be a great place to find new, interesting articles at all times of the day. With how frequently I visit Hacker News, I no longer see a varied homepage each time, but the same content in a day with a varied amount of new articles added every hour or so. Suddenly Hacker News becomes a lot less interesting when the front page doesn't change every refresh. The BBC's [Rory Jones left the Internet](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20322747) for 24 hours, and deemed disconnection too much to handle in a great amount of time. The answer isn't to completely disconnect - but rather to stay connected in moderation. At least a good break interval will make sure Hacker News always has a fresh smattering of articles to see.

Strong characters aren't those who rely upon their physical traits to get by. Strong characters don't fall victim to tricks in others' thinking, but rather react accordingly with doubt. Strong characters don't rely on artificial influence to make them appear 'good.' Strong characters are human, rational, and make mistakes. At the same time, however, strong characters carry morals that extend well beyond the work they're created in. Strong characters aren't written as an afterthought, but are developed as an integral heart of something to teach a lesson or tell a story. A character is only strong once their influence extends outside and long past their creation. Strong characters resonate with audience members, and as such, their influence carries long past the lifetime of their original story.

Apparently someone decided that 2012 would be year of the renaissance for social networks. In July, [Dalton Caldwell](http://daltoncaldwell.com) started a crowd funding operation for [App.net](http://alpha.app.net/). With 10,000 users and $500,000, App.net was [funded](http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it) with little more than a day to spare. Today, though I'm talking about [Tent](http://tent.io/). Tent is two parts, the first an open protocol. In brief, Tent is similar to email. Anyone can host a server, and as long as you're aware of which server your friend are using (ala @gmail.com), you can send them status updates and similar data. Obviously, this is an entirely automated process, but the neat part is just how open the protocol is. Anyone can fire up a server and connect to Tent - and anyone can move about from server to server. Nobody is restricting the apps, the API, or any other arbitrary limitation that might come back to bite in the future. It's entirely decentralized. ### Tent.is On [September 25th](https://tent.is/blog/introducing-tent-is), [Tent.is](http://tent.is/) was created as the first publicly hosted Tent server. It's free, and anyone can sign up. Tent.is marks the start of what could turn out to be a burgeoning new social network. At the [rate it's progressing](https://tent.tent.is/), I wouldn't be surprised if it passed App.net in users alone in the next week (at this time of writing, App.net has an estimated 12k and Tent 6.7k). It's definitely early, but if you're wanting to reserve your username, you can do so now. You can also [follow me](http://shank.tent.is/) on Tent.

Fortunately, a fabulous tool called [TouchFreeze](http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/) automatically disables the "tap to click" functionality of Windows whenever you're typing. It works great. Go try it if you hate accidentally clicking like I do.