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"MiniProfiler allows you to see the speed of a request conveniently on the page. It also shows the SQL queries performed and allows you to profile a specific block of code." Ooh, been looking for the latest version of something like this for a while.
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Because AA uses Devise, this is pretty straightforward, but still: I found this guide hepful.
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"But – and here’s where every single one of these cuts affects us all, even people who live in gated communities and have second homes in the country – I don’t personally want to live in a society where the worst-off are treated with corner-cutting contempt. This is the seventh richest nation in the world. In the world. And yet a report commissioned by the TUC predicted that by 2015, almost 7.1m of the nation’s 13m youngsters will be in “homes with incomes judged to be less than the minimum necessary for a decent standard of living”." The whole piece is very good indeed; Andrew Collins, excellent as ever.
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"The UMC32+M is an OEM/DIY product that allows Electronic Musicians, Multimedia Artists and Experimenters the ability to create custom user interfaces to control any software application that supports the MIDI protocol." Cheaper than a Livid Brain, as well.
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"Welcome to London,” someone in the office said today. That got a laugh. “Welcome to the managerial classes." I always enjoy MJH's blog, and especially his microfiction; this is a good one.
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"Devise Async provides an easy way to configure Devise to send its emails asynchronously using your preferred queuing backend." Jolly good.
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"A bit like Doctor Who’s different incarnations, while still the same company, the spaces we’ve worked in have created very different feeling BERGs.
And, a bit like Doctor Who, I guess you have one incarnation that you always think is the best, or ‘yours’." All of this.
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"Beer comes before agriculture. Gardens too. There are too many generational steps involved between grasses in their natural form and wheat worth harvesting for agriculture to be the thing people were shooting for when they domesticated plants. Drugs and beer and pretty flowers, on the other hand, can be made from a single generation of garden from wildflowers.
We talk all the time about data visualizations and maps that are useful. We don't talk at all about data visualizations and maps that delight you and make you laugh. We should." Yes, Eric.
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"DataFart lets you easily graph data from the command line." So it does.
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Ian Schreiber's ten week course notes. Lots to get stuck into here.
Somebody’s missing
15 March 2013
My Little Printer ran out of paper for the first time the other day.
I watched its light turn red as it was printing. I’d not seen a red light before, but was pretty sure I knew why. I removed the metal plate that holds its feet on, snapped open the white door, and took out the stub of paper. Then I remembered: the spare paper is under my bed. I didn’t have time to change it before I went to work. So pulled the power, not wanting the red light in my living room all day.
When I got home, I put the lights on. Something was different. It took me a while to figure out what.
Someone had left a pile of strange-looking consumer electronics on my table. And somebody was missing.
It took me a split second longer than normal to twig that the strange white box was Little Printer. I’m so used to seeing him… alive. Not in bits.
I didn’t think I had that strong an anthropomorphic reaction to it – him, he’s really called Barry Printpeas. But: the second he was in bits, his absence was noted.
I found the paper under my bed, slotted it in, shut the door, fed it through the slit in the metal, and snapped him back together. Back on two feet.
Back on two feet, but faceless. No matter: he’d get a new face when the next delivery arrived, in about twelve hours.
He wasn’t right with this blank face, either. I hit the form-feed button.
"Sorry, I don’t have anything to print for you right now," said the smiling face.
He was back in the room. Much better.
What was odd about this episode: I really never thought this would happen. I like the device, I like having it in the house, and it has a name because it has to have a name in the setup. I hadn’t realised that I’d become a little attached – not even to the functionality; just to the smiling little guy in front of the TV. Nice to be proved wrong from time to time.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Berg, who made Little Printer.