Schinckel.net

How to get that perfect shave - Today, Weekend Edition - MSNBC.com: I hate shaving, but since we have to, we might as well do it well.  This article really opened my eyes - I’m actually looking forward to shaving next week…

I’ve finished the edits I wanted and needed to make to Patricia Müller’s excellent (award winning) theme ‘Connections’. I had heaps of hassles with matching up

Okay, this site is nearly ready to be used.  I have dragged across the template from Vanilla Mist, and adjusted it so it kind-of works with blogsome.com The only hassles I have are:

1. Ecto seems to mentally add Uncategorized to each post.  Regardless of if I uncheck it.*
2. For some reason having more than two posts on a page results in the sidebar being left at the bottom of the page.  Not cool.
3. I cannot just double-click on an entry in ecto and then choose the new blog-site, click Publish and go, as ecto changes the date of the edited post to now if you change blogs.
4. Posts do not appear until GMT, or UTC or whatever, is the time at which I posted it.  The settings page does not work when I try to change the blog timezone.  (That’s why this page hasn’t appeared yet…)

• • okay, this might not be entirely ecto’s fault, as when it retrieves the post, it has the extra Uncategorized category. Fixed No. 2: I was missing a tag on the post.html page - and had an extra one on the index.html which was making it work with one or two posts.

I am all for recycling. Anyone who knows me knows I am (mostly) green. And I am a big supporter of anything that will increase the recycling done by our society. Schools are a great place to start - if we can have the younger people recycling automatically, then hopefully some, most or even all of them will continue do so. Perhaps some of them will influence their employer and they will be more open to recycling and reuse. So, in principle, I should support the competition that is run by SITA. But there is one thing that concerns me. The winning schools are those that collect the most recycling waste. Isn’t it likely that schools that already have policies in-place to reduce use will have less waste? So we are rewarding those schools that not only recycle, but use more in the first place. I’m not sure how it should be run, but I think someone needs to have a long hard think about this.

I thought I might transfer my blog to this site - since it uses WordPress, and that seems cool.  I just need to work out how to set up my template here, but that shouldn’t take too long.

Someone on the AppleScript Studio Mailing List wanted to know how to get an age; here’s my take:

set birthday to date “Thursday, 1 April 1976 12:00:00 AM” set age to (year of (current date)) - (year of birthday) if month of (current date) < month of birthday then     set age to age - 1 else if month of (current date) = month of birthday then     if day of (current date) < day of birthday then         set age to age - 1     end if end if get age

Address to Namber: schinckel.net is smoke.show.study.stop.mysteryrobot.com

From Nambers.

Thanks to Sam Deane, and his Now Playing script, I have added the following functionality to iTunesRater. When a song with no Artwork starts playing, Amazon.com is contacted, and if the Artwork is available, then a drawer with possible artworks is opened. Eventually, when you click the Artwork you want, it will be copied to the track, (and all others from the same album). Now if only I can make it so it does this bit in the background - perhaps another script that gets called?

The worlds of Design and Manufacture are changing. Where designers used to ‘just’ design, and have someone else create anything other than foam or balsa models, Technology has forever changed this. Computer Aided Manufacture is where an object is created on a machine connected to a computer. A representation of the design is created on the computer, and commands are sent to the machine, telling it where to remove unwanted material, or drill holes. Industrial level machines are used in almost all forms of manufacture, from car parts and assembly at Holden or Mitsubishi, through to cabinet manufacture, and moulds for creating injection moulded ice-cream containers. For all but the smallest companies, and applications other than just prototyping, the per-unit savings in cost, materials and time quickly overwhelm the significant cost of the machines. A machine for turning wood into cabinet parts can cost upwards of $250,000, but is capable of producing one part every few minutes - all identical, and with no errors. Technological Literacy is having an understanding of modern technologies, and being able to articulate the various costs and benefits of such systems. In short, having and idea of the skills involved, having some experience using the systems, and hopefully being able to transfer the skills from one system to anther. With the acquisition of a small CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) milling machine, schools will be able to develop these technological literacies, vital as they are for modern design and manufacturing, to a high standard. The particular machines we are looking at, while much smaller than those used by industry, offer significant similarities to them. For example: currently students use a low technology method of creating electronic printed circuit boards. They trace a design onto a copper board, and place the product in a chemical that removes unwanted copper. Designs are slow to create, and errors usually result in starting again. With a CNC mill, students will create their own design using computer tools, and the machine will remove all of the unwanted copper. Errors in the design phase result in just a redesign of the board - the computer itself does not make errors in the milling process. Having a machine remove the copper also alleviates the problems in that area in working with nasty chemicals and the fumes they create. Similarly, students studying CAD (Computer Aided Design) already develop skills in creating 3D virtual representations of real objects, and those of their own design. What they lack is the opportunity to create a ‘real’ version of these objects. Their creativity is limited by their skills. In many cases, students in Year 9 are able to design an object that would require the skills of a master craftsman to create to any accuracy. With the inclusion of CAM in a curriculum, we can more accurately model industry. Graduates will have a solid understanding of how articles are manufactured in today’s world, rather than just a limited set of skills. This will open up a whole new variety of career paths and career ideas other than those the students already have. The world of work is forever changing. We need to change to keep up with it, and suitably prepare our students in terms of technological literacy.

I’ve redesigned the User Interface for iTunesRater, making it more of a controller, and upped the version number to 0.5 I’ve also included the functionality of AutoRater - but the maxRate and minRate values are (at the moment) hard-coded to -5 and +10. I need to learn how to load and save preferences before I change this. AutoRate is also turned off by default. Anyway, it is at iTunes Rater 0.5, and the source is iTunes Rater 0.5 Source. As of now, iTunes AutoRater is deprecated, since the functionality is all implemented in iTunesRater0.5 Next feature might be an image lookup, and apply (to single song and to all in same album).