Lego Millennium Falcon Stop Motion Assembly ⧁

I cannot believe the amount of effort and dedication this entails.

Why DRM Doesn't Work ⧁

(via: @meyerweb)

Sweet Sixteen

Zanshin.net was registered as my domain on February 20, 1996. My little corner of the Internet is now sixteen years old. Here are some random statistics.

• 1,940 entries
• 584,001 words
• 291 images
• 2,507 static files in the public folder of my site
• 6,358 files in my Github repository for this site
• 70,770 unique visits since December 2005
• 130,901 page views since December 2005
• 2,821 words make up my longest posting

Two Laps ⧁

This is fantastic.

When We Build ⧁

This video has been linked to from everywhere for the past month, and I only just took the time to watch it today. You should take the time to watch it too.

My Weird Elbow

In September 1990 I joined a karate dojo, and sometime in the spring or early summer of 1992 I took part in a demo for a women’s group. During the demo I was thrown and landed badly on a concrete floor. Instead of slapping the floor with my right hand, I slapped the floor with my entire forearm. My elbow was sore for several days. About a week later, as near as I remember, I had dinner with a couple I was friends with and when he shook my hand there was a popping in my elbow and a sharp burning pain.

By the next morning I was hardly able to move my arm. I didn’t have a primary care physician at the time so I took it to my chiropractor. He treated the injury like a sprain or strain and used ultrasound to help it. Later we rehabilitated it with electric stimulation. At the time we did the ultrasound he explained that if I’d broken or fractured my elbow at all we’d know immediately. Apparently fractures and ultrasound don’t get along.

The result of this series of injuries to my elbow has been two-fold. First, I can’t straighten my arm. I get about 95% of the way there and it just stops. Second, the ulnar nerve, what people call their “funny bone” is displaced from its channel. There’s a notch in the outside of the bend of your elbow where this nerve is located. On my left arm the nerve is recessed, on my right arm it is outside of the notch. It feels like a thick cord under the skin.

Other than some really impressive pops sometimes when I straighten my arm it hasn’t bothered my much in the last 20 years. I’ve grown used to it not being straight.

Just under two weeks ago, while pulling myself up from a reclined reclining chair, there was a sharp pain in my right forearm, just about an inch below the creases on the inside of my arm, dead center in the mass of tendons that start at the elbow. Within a few minutes there was a reddish bruise there and my arm was very sore. For the next couple of days I wasn’t able to straighten it at all – not even to the reduced limit I normally have – and I wasn’t able to bend it enough to touch my head.

I iced it and used Motrin and Aleve to reduce the pain and fight any swelling. Over the course of the first week it got better and the red mark disappeared. This week the improvement has stopped however. My range of motion is still reduced at both ends – not as straight as normal, and not able to fully bend it.

This afternoon I saw the doctor and she promptly took an x-ray of the joint. Within a couple minutes she came into the room, carrying the x-ray films saying, “You’ve got a weird elbow.” So weird in fact that she showed the films to her partner in the practice.

The bone in your upper arm is called the humerus and the lower end has two knobs know as epicondyles. The medial (inner) and lateral (outer). On the x-ray of my elbow there is a very clear curved line above these processes that shouldn’t be there. My doctor’s best guess is that this is a congenital feature that I’ve had my entire life. The upshot of the x-rays is that I’m going to get an appointment to see the orthopedist.

I’ve annotated the second copy of each image below to highlight the arthritis calcifications and the mystery feature.


RVM and Xcode 4.3

During the installation of Xcode 4.3 you are given the option to remove previous versions of XCode and the XCode installer. You are warned that the entire /Developer directory will be deleted. One of the hidden implications of this is the loss of various command line tools. The *gcc compiler for example.

After installing Xcode 4.3 on one of my machines I tried to install a different Ruby build using RVM. The install failed since no compiler could be found. Fortunately I had seen an article about Homebrew and the new XCode command line bundle and I rightly figured that installing those tools would allow RVM to complete the installation of new Rubies.

To add the command line tools, open XCode 4.3 (it’s now an application in your /Applications directory) and then open Preferences. Under the Download tab select Components and then click on Install for Command Line Tools.

Update: The Command Line Tools bundle may not be 100% complete. I wasn’t able to use bundler to install the default set of gems for Octopress. A google search on the error led me to the rb-fsevent issues page, where one of the comments suggested using a pre-compiled version of rb-fsevent.

I changed the line in my Gemfile to look like this:

gem 'rb-fsevent', :git => 'git://github.com/ttilley/rb-fsevent.git', :branch => 'pre-compiled-gem-one-off'

and then my bundle install command completed successfully.

Digital Signature in Mac OS X Lion

Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, adds an annotation feature to the Preview app which can be used to “digitally” sign documents. Instead of

• Downloading the form
• Printing it off
• Signing it
• Scanning it
• Emailing it

You can

• Download the form
• Annotate it with your digital signature
• Email it.

Here’s how.

##Capture your signature
Launch the Preview app, and from the Preview menu select “Preferences”. Click on “Signatures” and then “Create Signature”. Write your name on a piece of white paper and hold it up to the camera in your computer, align it on the blue line in the “Signature preview” pane, and click “Accept” to save it.

You can have multiple signatures saved, for example I have one where I’ve printed my name, and one where I’ve signed it.

##Using the signature
Open the PDF you need to sign. (Don’t forget that you can convert just about anything to a PDF using the Print dialog and “Save as PDF…”.) Click on the Annotations button (a pencil icon) and then the Signatures button (looks like a capital letter S). If you have multiple signature saved use the drop down triangle next to the Signatures button to select the one you want. Use the crosshair to draw a box where you want the signature positioned. Once the signature is where you want it, save the PDF and it’s ready to be used.

Bonsai Tree Houses ⧁

Beautifully detail miniature worlds wrapped around bonsai trees.
(vai @kurafire)

Fear Index

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I enjoy a good audio book and Fear Index was very good. It centers around autonomous machine reasoning and a hedge fund algorithm which combine to make a pretty good thriller. In many ways this story reminded me of one I read 30 years ago called The Adolescence of P1 which was about a computer AI programmed to be greedy and fearful. Both books work in part because their respective authors are smart enough to not try to explain the intricate details of how AMR or AI might work. Rather they leave that up to the reader’s imagination. I highly recommend Fear Index. And The Adolescence of P1 too, if you can find a copy.