The Hobo Box: Adventures in Refrigeration-Free Microwave Cooking

During the past two years, I spent a lot of time on the road and lived in many different places. I often didn’t have access to a stove, refrigerator or freezer. Not wanting to eat out all the time, I started researching food that would keep indefinitely and that could be eaten either without cooking [...]

How to sort by date with Nutch

I’ve been working with a team over the last few months to create a search engine that could sort by date for the local student newspaper. Among the open-source search engines available, Nutch seems to be the easiest to set up. However, I couldn’t find any tutorials on sorting by date so I decided to [...]

The Closed List: Getting Things Done, with boundaries

Just finished reading Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management by Mark Forster. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, so I’m a little skeptical about new time management approaches. However, this book’s ideas seem to complement the GTD system very well.
The basic idea of Do It Tomorrow is [...]

Speak and print your daily tasks and events

I keep track of my tasks using Remember The Milk and my calendar using Google Calendar. However, I don’t have a Blackberry or other phone with Internet access, so sometimes it’s nice of have a paper copy of what I have to do on a particular day.
I created a Ruby script that reads in my [...]

Full Contact Search Code — Lessons in Google Authentication

Here’s the main code file for my Full Contact Search Application:
fullcontactsearch_code
I’m releasing it under the Apache license. Some of it is originally inspired from Google tutorials anyway. The portion of the code you may find useful is the self.GetAuthentication method. Basically, what you need to be able to do to permanently authenticate a user is:

Get [...]

Drop.io - very cool file sharing

Update, January 2012: drop.io has been shut down. I recommend using ge.tt instead.
If you ever have to share files on the Internet, check out Drop.io. It’s the simplest, quickest way I’ve seen to get a file uploaded and a link sent out. And check out the Firefox extension, which allows drag-and-drop uploads from your computer. [...]

Executor: My new application launcher

I read about executor on lifehacker the other day. It’s a utility that enables you to launch programs using keyboard commands, such as “excel” for Excel. In the past, I’ve used Mike Lin’s MCL to do this. I’ve experimented with other launchers like Launchy, but I’ve found they’re too bloated and index way too many [...]

Shell commands to upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1

Just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6.1 via ssh. Went just fine (knock on wood). Here’s the commands I used, for my own reference as much as anyone else’s:

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
rm -rf wp-includes
rm -rf wp-admin
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
cp -rpf wordpress/* .
rm latest.tar.gz

Of course, you’ll want to replace “.” in the second-to-last line with the address of your [...]

Ryan Pfisters: we’re not the only ones that share a name

Check out this New York Times article on people with the same name that keep track of each other on the Internet.
Obvious quote of the day:
“Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name? Social science, it turns out, has an [...]

Guide to making a personal Web site (with a Penn State focus)

If you’re a Penn State student (or anyone else) who wants a spot on the Internet, here’s my getting starting guide based on my own experiences.
Topics covered:

Hosting your site (where to save your files)
Creating and updating files
To dot.com or not to dot.com (or .org, or .net)

Hosting your site
For people to be able to view your [...]