All posts by Keith Garner

Comics, Entertainment, Geek

“Do you have any super powers?”

1 Comment

Via WWDN.

I’m not quite sure how I ended up as Superman, especially since I think I’m lacking in strength.  I see myself as more of the second two, especially if we’re talking Wally West as the flash.  In any case, I’m sure being Superman will please my daughter.  Dr. Doom I need to think about, I’m not sure how I feel about that.

You are Superman

Superman
75%
Spider-Man
65%
The Flash
65%
Iron Man
65%
Robin
55%
Green Lantern
55%
Catwoman
55%
Supergirl
45%
Hulk
35%
Batman
30%
Wonder Woman
25%
You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom
60%
The Joker
58%
Lex Luthor
58%
Green Goblin
57%
Riddler
48%
Mr. Freeze
43%
Poison Ivy
37%
Apocalypse
36%
Dark Phoenix
35%
Magneto
35%
Kingpin
28%
Catwoman
28%
Mystique
25%
Juggernaut
25%
Venom
22%
Two-Face
17%
Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain are you?" quiz…

Entertainment, Games

Shuffle a huge deck of cards

4 Comments

Killer Bunny CardEveryone knows how to shuffle a deck of 52 cards, its pretty easy, even for those without the highest dexterity rating. Due to my recent fascination with Killer Bunnies. I’m starting to need to know how to shuffle a larger and larger sized deck. This is clearly a problem I need to solve as when I was playing on Christmas with Sarah and Tony we pulled many Dolla and many Play Immediately cards in a row. (Just so you know what size deck of cards we’re talking about, I received three expansion packs as a gift and bought 2 more. This brings our killer bunnies set up to 500 cards.)

Doing a quick web search for “how to shuffle a large deck of cards” has gotten me off to a good start. Wikipedia has an entry on shuffling that lists various techniques. I had already thought of what is know as a Pile shuffle, and that seems to be the best bet. Cool fact of the day is that Pile shuffling is the only legal form of shuffling in bridge. However, I think with 500 cards, we’ll need to do more than 4 piles. I really can’t think of anything better, and it should got the job done. It’ll at least insure that cards that were next to each other preshuffle (from the last game) aren’t next to each other anymore. I’m open to other ideas if anyone has any.

One useless search return was how to shuffle Tarot cards that are physically large, not many in number. I guess if I was playing with HUGE CARDS, that might be useful to me. There were also many links to algorithms for shuffling cards in your programming, but that’s not exactly what I need either.

Geek, Internet

My biscuits is burning, my biscuits is burning!

Leave a comment

Today two guys from FeedBurner come to visit another team at work.  I asked if I could sit in to get some idea of what FeedBurner can do.  Right now I don’t really get any stats out of my blog that Technorati or awstats can give me, and those aren’t that useful.  It’ll be interesting to see if I get any insight on my blog this way.

The cool part is that this took almost no time to setup.  Registering at FeedBurner and pointing it towards my blog took about 2 minutes, and there is a feedburner plugin for WordPress that automatically redirects the RSS feeds (with a 307, so I can switch back at any time.)  All in all, pretty painless.

Cool

A Christmas miracle

3 Comments

christmas-lights.JPGSo, my mom pointed us at a device that you can use to help you fix burnt out Christmas light strings.  I had to post about it because I would have thought it was a totaly scam if you told me about it, but having seen it work…

Yes, lights are usually cheap enough that you can probably just buy a new set every year and not really empty out your pocketbook, but its really wasteful.  Also, for those of us with a fetish for prelit trees, its not always easy (or possible) to restring.

Anyway, its called the Light Keeper Pro.  You just plug in the affected string of lights, replace a bulb with the tool, squeeze the trigger a few times, and your light string works again.  The burnt out ones are easy to see as they aren’t lit, you replace those, and you’re golden.  Supposedly there is a demo video on their site.  Still, I don’t think I would have bought it except for watching my mom use it not 2 feet from where I was standing.

This post reads like an infomercial to me, but the tool just blows my mind.  I’ve "saved" 4 strings of lights for our main Christmas tree.  None of which worked when I pulled them out of storage and plugged them in.  I haven’t even gotten to the outside ones
yet…

[Update 12/4: I know I haven’t described this well, but the how it works section on their web site does.] 

General

Day off == New Theme

1 Comment

So, I’ve wanted to make some changes to my WordPress theme for awhile.  The biggest one was to add my del.icio.us tags to the page.  I’m not sure why I wanted to do this, but I did.  A few months ago Dave posted about his switchover to sandbox and some other tweaks he had done.  He also talked about it on irc.

I made the switch this morning.  The ability to drag and drop the sidebar widgets is a killer feature and what will keep me on sandbox for awhile.  If you’re visiting the page, you can see i still need to tweak the CSS to be less ugly.  Its not a big deal and it can certainly wait.  Tweaking CSS always causes my brain to bleed.  However, this looks straight forward.  I made the big hurdle which was switching themes.

Geek, OS X, Ruby

fortune for xscreensaver for OS X

Leave a comment

I love that jwz ported XScreenSaver to OS X at about the same time I moved to OS X for my laptop.  I got to keep all the screen savers I use and have used over the past decade or so.  Especially some of the cooler GL based ones.  (Its also nice that someone ported rss-glx as well, but that’s a different story.)  The only piece XScreenSaver is missing is the controller to randomly call only selected hacks.  Luckily, RandomExtra fills that hole.

One issue I’ve had with xscreensaver on OS X has been the difficulty/impossibility of having the text displaying hacks use fortune (or any program, for that matter) as the source of the text.  Mike mentioned this morning that all those hacks appear to be able to call out to a URL.  This morning I felt strangely motivated, so I whipped up a quick ruby script that is basically an HTTP based fortune server.  Since ruby ships with OS X, it’ll make it easier in case anyone else wants to get it running as well.  Once I got that working, the question was how to have this launch automatically on OS X so I wouldn’t have to worry about it.  I’ve played with Lingon on and off, and it seemed like the tool to help me do it.  I used Lingon to create a UserDeamon that should launch when one logs in, and should die when one logs out.  I then went through the screen savers that call out to text and pointed them at the localhost URL, and boom, I was back to fortune city.

To recreate this you’ll need this fortune_helper.rb script I whipped up, Lingon to create the launcher or this fortune.plist (put in /Library/LaunchDaemons) and fortune installed somewhere.  I installed fortune via DarwinPorts.