Category Archives: Geek

Growing cactus from seed

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saguaro cactus sprouts

On May 21 I planted a bunch of misc cactus seeds to see if I could get them to grow. So far, so good. In the picture is what they look like now. After googling I think they are mostly Saguaro cactus plants. I’m hoping some others will sprout too but if not I think I’ll buy some various types of cactus seeds. Fun, fun – these should be fun to grow at work and I’ll probably give some away too. I bougth some small containers at the Dollar Store to put them in also. Will show those off later.

UPDATE: June 7 – started growing seeds at work in a nice sunny window.

Audiobook Review – The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

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the lost gate I just finished listening to the audiobook The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card. I picked it up for free thanks to my local library and Overdrive.

The story is fantasy versus OSC’s usual sci-fi settings and is about the ancient gods like Odin, Thor, and Zeus who have been stranded on earth for centuries because their Great Gate has been taken. Danny is a young boy who has the gift of gate-magery and could recreate the Great Gate – if the Gate Thief doesn’t get to him first.

There are two parallel storylines in the story, one about Danny in present-day earth and one about Loki in a medieval land and each storyline is narrated by a different narrator – both of which are very good. I was much more interested in the story of Danny than Loki’s. Overall, the book wasn’t bad, but the fact that the Loki storyline wasn’t as interesting to me and the rather quick ending that totally led into sequels kinda turned me off. I’m not sure if I would read/listen to the next in the series, but I did finish it and it was entertaining, just not the best book I have heard.

Twitter search archiver

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With Teenormous, we started giving away free tees to people that tweet a link to us. Problem is, we couldn’t find an easy solution to archiving/looking back on tweets for the month. Twitter keeps the tweets seachable for a very short time. We found a few web apps/services that did some similar things but not exactly what we wanted. We even tried Google Reader by putting the search RSS feed into it. (That worked, but trying to scroll and count to #57 is a royal pain and that method just doesn’t scale.) So, some poking around led me to the excellent Ruby library for Twitter by John Nunemaker which uses the Twitter APIs.

It’s so easy to use it’s laughable. A few hours later and I have an app/script written that stores the results of any twitter query (like the one we care about) into a static HTML file with them in order from oldest to newest and each tweet numbered for easy random picking of winners. It also automatically creates a new file each month. I used the Twitter CSS so it looks nice and clean. Slap it in a cron job and we have auto-archiving twitter searches. Plus – it’s in HTML format in case we want to put them online for some reason.

It’s nice sometimes to do a little coding project that’s not exactly what you typically do. Oh – and Ruby rocks.

Audiobook Review – The Crown Conspiracy

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I just finished the excellent free (thanks to podiobooks.com) audiobook The Crown Conspiracy by Michael J. Sullivan today. I highly recommend it if you enjoy the medieval/fantasy genre. The story is excellent and Nathan Lowell (of the Share series) does a great job of narration. I can find no flaws in the audio, narration, or story. I can’t wait for more of the series. Check it out – you won’t be sorry.

Clear Nintendo DS Lite Case/Shell

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clear ds lite case

I bought a used white Nintendo DS Lite a while back so I could play games with my daughter. I got a really good deal on it but it was white – not the coolest looking DSL. So, I bought a clear replacement shell from DealExtreme and just installed it today. Took me about 3 hours and was a major pain in the arse (though now that I have done one, I bet I could do a second MUCH quicker and easier). The result is a really great looking DS Lite. Sweet.