Interesting Links for 04-02-2012

• There's a "Right-wingers are less intelligent than left wingers" article in the Daily Mail. For once you _should_ read the comments!
  (tags: DailyMail politics intelligence )
• How Republican opposition derailed SOPA and Protect IP
  (tags: politics republicans copyright usa )
• An interview with Nick Clegg
  (tags: nickclegg politics uk libdem )
• Porn for Pregnant Ladies
  (tags: porn pregnancy funny )
• The first page of H.G. Wells’s version of Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds
  (tags: funny HGWells WarOfTheWorlds )
• A sudden realisation as to why the Republican party hate gay people.
  (tags: funny politics usa republicans lgbt )
• Darkness, a gorgeous, funny and thoughtful comic (done in 24 hours too!)
  (tags: storytelling darkness relationships comics )
• Less than six months until the Europe IPV4 address pool runs out
  (tags: networking ipv4 ipv6 )
• A patent attorney's guide to why Apple are in trouble in Germany
  (tags: motorola motor apple germany patents )
• Clearly we need new punctuation
  (tags: comic dinosaurs punctuation language )
• GMs dicuss what the nerdiest thing theyve ever written into a game design is.
  (tags: roleplaying geekery )
• Ducker's 7th law - ask the hardest, nerdiest question you can think of and someone will instantly answer.
  (tags: trivia geekery scifi )
• Why You Won't Quit Your Job
  I went through three different jobs where everyone complained, and eventually I left to get a better job, with people saying they'd be right behind me. A couple of years later I'd bump into someone and they were still in the job they hated, complaining all the time, and not doing anything about it.
  (tags: conditioning life work )

How I read the internet (and my link-collecting process)

I have a lot of feeds* on Google Reader. I mostly don't read them using Google Reader, because it's a website, and therefore doesn't have a UI that's as powerful as a proper application. Instead I use FeedDemon at home and GReaderPro on my phone. They both synchronise with Google Reader, which means that wherever I am I have the same list of unread articles.

If I'm at home then I browse on FeedDemon using its handy keyboard shortcuts, opening any articles that look interesting. If they look interesting/amusing enough to share then I save them into Delicious*. At work I use Google Reader directly, and if an article is not-work-safe, or too long to read over lunch/while code is compiling then I save it to Read It Later, a very handy tool that synchronises things I want to read later between my phone, and any PC I use regularly. The thing I love about it most is that on my phone it also provides a simplified text-only view which is much easier to read than 95% of websites***.

I used to save links direct from my phone to Delicious, but since that was taken over by a bunch of deluded simians their Android plugin has been abandoned, so I've switched to just saving articles to Read It Later and then sticking them on Delicious when I get to work/home.

I also get links via email (octopoid_horror sends me loads, and I get them intermittently from others as well). Some links come in via Facebook, which I read when I'm bored at a bus stop and have already read all my Google Reader entries. I used to get some via Twitter, but I've only been on there a couple of times in the last 6 months, and I really need to have a massive clear-out if I'm going to ever make it usable again.

And finally there's DW/LJ, where people have linkposts, or mention things in passing that I then reshare. You'll sometimes see a "via" in the link tags, and those are usually LJ usernames.

Every 15 minutes a job on If This Then That checks to see if there are new entries on Delicious and if so punts them over to Twitter, shortening the links with my bit.ly key so that I can see how many clicks they get. Once per day, at 11am (GMT) a job on Feed This To That takes the links from Delicious, filters them to the previous 24 hours, and posts them DW, which posts them on to LJ.

And then you get to read them. And point out the ones that are from 1997, clearly wrong, or otherwise should never have seen the light of day. Which is what makes it all worthwhile.

*A "feed" is a text-only version of a website, whereby each entry is separate from every other one. Rather than visiting a lot of websites multiple times per day to see if they've updated this is automated by a feed reader, which checks each one intermittently and displays new entries for you. And by "a lot" I mean 83. Which doesn't sound like that many, but includes things like the BBC front page, which had about 150 articles on it yesterday.
**I don't really like Delicious, but the best alternative is Pinboard.in, which doesn't use all of your tags for autocompletion of tags, and is case sensitive for tag completion too, which doesn't work well with my thousands of existing tags. They're supposed to be fixing that in the near future though, at which point I'll re-evalute.
***Similar to what Instapaper does on the iPhone.

The mini-pomodoro tidying technique

Neither Julie nor I are the tidiest people when we're stressed*. As she's doing a PhD and I'm living with a PhD student this means that the flat gets pretty much bugger all attention. When we do have some time free from stress/keeping ourselves alive the last thing we want to do is housework - we both need to do something _fun_ so that we're not just suicidally depressed. As we're both much happier when we're in tidy places the lack of a method of making our surroundings nice is a problem.

I've been meaning to try out the Pomodoro Technique for something for a while. It's very simple, and it seems like a good way to break a block on being able to start things. 25 minutes seemed a bit long for something like this though, and I figured that actually we could make massive changes in 10 minutes if we focussed - and that 10 minutes is about as long as either of us can focus on tidying up without getting distracted. We work both best with a bit of pressure - and the mixture of knowing that the boring chore will be over in ten minutes, combined with knowing that I had to get the chore done within a ten minute period seems perfect to get me moving.

So we just tried it - ten minutes in three rooms, with five minute gaps in-between. And indeed, it's amazing how much tidier a room gets in ten minutes of focussed tidying**. This is definitely something to work on turning into a habit.

*I know certain people are horselaughing right now, but seriously, last time Julie went away for four days the flat got a lot tidier, because I was suddenly left with less distractions, and seem to have developed tidier habits for no particularly good reason.
**It basically goes from "WE CANNOT LET ANYONE ELSE SEE IT LIKE THIS

Music identification is hard

Julie hummed something at me and asked me what it was called. I hummed it at a couple of music recognition sites and they failed to cope with my lack of musical talent.

Eventually I used MelodyCatcher and it told me it was the same as this midi file. Which would be more useful if that file had a meaningful name.

At which point I went on to IM and started pinging people I knew who might be able to help. Went through a John Wilson (recognised it, didn't know the name), Lizzie, Ari and Erin (couldn't quite place it) and Hannah (also didn't know) - and apparently it drove them crazy too, to the point where Ari called her brother to ask, Lizzie called her mother and sang it at her, and _she_ sang it to her sister to see if they could track it down, before resorting to SoundHound for suggestions, which came up with the correct answer as a "maybe", so they YouTubed it to see if it was right. And they would have won it too if Hannah hadn't had a brainwave (and a bit of googling) and beaten them to it by 47 seconds.

See if you know, and I'll stick the answer under a cut to make it more fun.

( Were you right? )