Thomas Linzey, Envision Spokane on Democracy Now

A neighborhood coalition in Spokane is gathering signatures to place a new community bill of rights on the November ballot. Recently, an Envision Spokane representative, Thomas Linzey, appeared on Democracy Now to talk about the effort. Read more about it and watch the video.

My Amazon Kindle 2 Software Update Wish List

Earlier, I wrote about reading The New York Times on my Kindle 2. Eventually, Amazon accepted my scratched Kindle on return and I ordered a replacement.

Since then, I've been using it to read The Times, mostly on weekends. Here is my updated wish list for software updates:

1. Fix the news navigation keys to make reading news publications easier on the Kindle. See my blog post above for more details.
2. Publish my Kindle 2 clippings to an RSS feed on the Web 
3. Support encoding to Kindle of text inside emails. Sometimes I get a long email, I just want to read it on my Kindle rather than my laptop. Kindle currently encodes only attachments. 
4. Allow my screensaver to rotate through a folder of my personal photos rather than Amazon's pre-loaded literary images. 
5. Email me when my battery drops below 10%. Sometimes I leave my Kindle for days and forget to charge it; finding out too late - when I'm already on the road with it. 
6. Improve processing of email attachments via the free email address. Sometimes this can take 30 minutes or more - makes the free download option prohibitive. 

  

UW Students Launch In:Site, Arts & Culture Mag Powered by NewsCloud

Congrats to the University of Washington's Supraprint journalism class who launched In:Site, a Facebook magazine covering Arts & Culture in Seattle - powered by NewsCloud. I've had the pleasure of going back to school the past few weeks to help the these emerging journalists launch their publication with the Facebook tools our team built for the Knight Foundation grant I received in December 2008.

Please check out In:Site. Invite your friends.

Read the news release. 

MySQL Tips: Intra-column String Replace Queries

If you want to change text inside a series of columns via MySQL, the REPLACE command can be handy:

 

UPDATE YourTable SET columnName=( REPLACE (columnName,'needle','haystack'));

via MySQL doc comments

Call Comcast: Cut your bill by 43%

This seems like an example of a company providing a utility just crying out for oversight and regulation by the city of Seattle.

My regular Comcast bill - $109 per mo. for Internet and Cable. So, every six months, I have to call them and threaten to switch to Qwest and DirecTV which keep sending me low priced offers.

I schedule a cancellation with Comcast, then they drop my rate to a market price again. The new monthly bill through the end of the year $63 per mo.

Seriously, in addition to not letting me buy cable channels a la carte, the company continues to be able to charge an above market rate ... it's getting kind of silly to have to regularly call them to adjust my rates. 

The Seattle City Council might want to address this issue and force them to consistently offer a market rate and a la carte subscription options.

Debian tips: Running commands as a user

> sudo su username
enter your password
ctrl-d will exit

Debian Tips: How busy or loaded is my server

Try uptime

 13:01:04 up 88 days, 22:48,  7 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00

 or top

top - 13:01:17 up 88 days, 22:48,  7 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00

Tasks:  89 total,   1 running,  88 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu(s):  0.2%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.5%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Mem:   1003336k total,   978236k used,    25100k free,   152196k buffers

Swap:  2650684k total,       36k used,  2650648k free,   669384k cached

Rev=canonical URL shortening

I like Kellan's new URL shortening engine. It must be hard for perfectionists like him living in the mortal world ;)

Huh?

RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative.

Why?

URL shorteners are as problematic as they are useful. They create SPOFs, that over any meaningful timeframe are guaranteed to create data loss, eroding the historical record. And then there are the privacy concerns. And the usability ones. See also on url shorteners and Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem.

Learn more

CSS is Awesome! Mug

Russell sent me this awesome CSS mug!

Little "bug" with the Dymo LabelWriter postage stamp printer

First, let me say, I am extremely impressed at the Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbo. It has saved us tons of time and money in shipping t-shirts and license plate frames to Hot Dish Action Team contest winners. But, it seems to be saving us a bit more money than it's supposed to...

In the middle of printing 50x $1.51 stamps last week, I got a paper jam around #42. Using the Mac OS X print queue, I was able to place the job on hold for a week while I waited for more stamp labels to arrive. 

When I resumed the job tonight, it printed 50x $1.51 stamps (not 8x). That's a $63.42 bonus - but an improper debit to the U.S. Postal Service. I'm not really sure it's supposed to work this way.