Swedegeek’s Blog

Just a little while ago, I went through approximately 100 posts from the Lifehacker.com. That may seem like a lot, and it kind of was, but I pre-lifehacked my Lifehacker reading. After much cajoling, I finally was convinced to start using Google Reader. To sum it up, it’s awesome. All my favorite sites with an RSS feed can now be read from a single source. How lifehack-ish is that?

Now that my brain is full of all sorts of neat ideas to save time, money and sanity while enjoying it all, I need to share some of these with you my loyal readers. I recommend the following for all three of you. Some of these go to other sites, but I found them first on Lifehacker. (more…)

And… If You Wanna Teach a Man to Fish, Teach Him to Fish!

It’s a month old now, but I’ve been meaning to write on this post that, from its title, claimed to be a tutorial on Unix-based command line redirection. I use *nix systems on a regular basis, and I actually got suckered into clicking to this article. It was a waste of time. And then I got even annoyed by thinking about things on a deeper level. I hate thinking. (more…)

Last night I went to 2 very different events. Right after work, the head of Google’s Ann Arbor office, Grady Burnett, gave a presentation at the Lansing Center. From there, I stopped at home to pick-up Megan, then we went to a played called “Meeting in Munich” at St. Paul Lutheran Church. (more…)

Yep, I’ve been a bit lax in posting for the past month, and I still have a couple unfinished posts I need to get back to. But, I just read a great synopsis of the find command for *nix-based systems and had to share it. For those of you working in such environments, and don’t know the power of this utility, you definitely need to check it out. I’ve used a good many of the options described in the article for my own purposes. Everything from to just a straight up ‘find this file’ to using it in a quick bash script to purge archived files older than 6 months. Combine find with the xargs command (also mentioned in the article) and you can do a sorts of cool file manipulation in a single line. Fun stuff!

So endeth the lesson.

It’s official. 2006 was the year of user-generated content. With the likes of YouTube and MySpace in the vanguard, end-users finally became what really mattered on the Internet. With those two sites alone cashing in over $2.5 billion on acquisition deals, more than a few took notice of all the content being created by countless, nameless and often unpaid Internet users. (more…)

Though it was posted over a year ago, I just read an article by Eric Kidd over at Random Hacks titled Why Ruby is an acceptable LISP. It appears to be one of several “is (not) an acceptable” entires related to Lisp on Reddit. Anyway, Eric gives a good match-up between these two languages. Lisp is the über-cool and Ruby is the über-popular. (more…)

If you didn’t guess, I’ve been doing some reading on writing lately. Lately, I’ve been trying to post a little more frequently, so I thought I should get better at the whole writing thing. Granted, I’ve come a long way since trying to pen that fantasy novel in seventh grade on a early model IBM PC (don’t ask, I’ve forgotten the entire plot… really!), but composition still doesn’t feel natural to me. There also a few writing projects that are coming my soon, so I figured I could learn a few tricks before I tackled them. (more…)