Blog

My friend and partner in crime (rather InVisible) Keith Bingman is leaving Europe tomorrow morning. I met Keith at Reboot 7 (or 8) in Copenhagen. We met again a year later and talked about working for me. Soon after, he started to work for my then company InVisible, and became a major asset due to this many skills. He turned into a CSS and JavaScript wizard very fast, and helped develop a number of great web projects. ...

I have been aware of BitCoin for over 2 years (at a time, when mining with a 8 core CPU still yielded a nice number of coins). I have seen the rise, fall and rise again of the exchange rate between USD/EUR and BTC and I have been able to buy a couple of “real” things with my Bitcoins (no, not on Silkroad. I have bought a projector, Art and mining hardware) ...

My friend and colleague Alvaro (who is responsible for the wonderful Mobino iOS and Android apps) has been working on an application of his own. Talking Stick launched today. It is a really simple app - that simulates a talking stick - the token that gives one power to speak. The app allows you to select number of participants, a mode for a discussion (several talk modes available) and then tracks the speaking time of everybody (and it also records what was said) ...

I finished week 3 of the Coursera songwriting course. This weeks assignment was to write a verse and chorus that confirms to certain specifications (stable verse, unstable chorus). The effect has to be achieved by using certain rhyme schemes or rhymes. For non-native english speakers like myself this was really difficult - as I have learnt last week, english is actually a rhyme poor language. There are very few “perfect” rhymes (love / above). Much rhyming is thus done with “family rhymes” (where similar sounds t/d, p/b, k/g, m/n/ng are rhymed like cut / mud) or even worse additive / subtractive rhymes ( cry / ride), assonance rhymes ( fool / rude ) and consonance rhymes (friend / wind). ...

Feed reading on my tiny tiny RSS instance is quite nice. I had to change a few CSS properties (make the font bigger for my old eyes) and I installed another (more Google Reader like CSS). I have started to look at the options, learnt how to enable the digest plugin (edit config.php to enable it) and actually read through the descriptions of the different features on the TT-RSS home page. Today I also got a mail from TheOldReader that my feeds had been imported - just around a week after I uploaded the OPML file to them. I think I’ll pass :) ...

In my quest to “own my own data” I spent the last few days to get an alternative to Google Reader going. I decided on trying Tiny Tiny RSS instead of Fever mainly because TT-RSS is supported and in active development, while Fever (while looking more interesting) has been on hold for a few years and Shaun Inman basically hinted that he will not update or support it in the near future at least. Also, Ràmon has endorsed it… ...