Henry Sztul, Ph.D.

#want

lolgoats:

No words.

Gold. “Will Ferrell in Davenport - Old Milwaukee Commercial #1” on http://shel.tv/wnqC2p via @laughingsquid

:)

HT Lauren

We are going to protest! #stopSOPA

Watch this all the way through… wait for it… wait…

This is one of the reasons why we at Shelby.tv have blacked out our site today to protest SOPA / PIPA and why I am attending my first ever public protest.

I am going my part. For the kittens, cats, koalas and GOATS!

Save the Internet!

laughingsquid:

The Oatmeal blacked out in protest of SOPA / PIPA

I have had the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon for several months and one feature that I have used only once on the device is the video recorder.  The reason: it SUCKS!  The video quality was (just) ok, it was was audio that was the worst, most garbled, audio I have ever heard on a video recording device!  No exaggeration, no joke.  Hands down the worst!

A month or so ago I installed the CyanogenMod ROM (7.1.1) and the video recording was no better, so I was sure it was the fact that there is only one mic on the device (or something like that) and wrote it off as a hardware thing.

Weeeeelllll, for some reason this weekend I decided to go with an unofficial MIUI port.  For starters MIUI is a totally different Android experience that lies somewhere closer to iOS.

Here’s the thing though: THEY FIXED THE AUDIO IN THE VIDEO RECORDING APP!

YAY! Go MIUI.  I cant wait till ICS comes out for the thunderbolt, but until then… here’s to MIUI!

shelbytv:

Tumblr fans, rejoice! Tumblr integration is back and better than ever!

After logging in, click the Tumblr icon to connect your account, and Shelby will start pulling all those amazing videos from your dashboard. 

Huzzahs all around!

The video I get in Shelby from tumblr is constantly awesome!

I think this is a great Interview from last night with Andrew Napolitano on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Among other topics, Ron Paul comes up, and Mr. Napolitano makes the distinction that there is really just ONE political party in this country, with just different visions of what BIG government should be, that is, the GOP ‘aint what it used to be! He got me thinking that Ron Paul might be the only candidate in the Republican field that I would vote for over Obama. I guess I am not alone seeing that something like 47% of adults < 25 voted for him in NH. Time to wake up GOP!

http://shel.tv/zhHtFD

nbd.

shelbytv:

btw.

This is exactly how I first got interested in code (and science and engineering I think too)… in fact it came up over lunch yesterday.

I hope kids today have a “Logo” of their time… maybe the “Logo” of their time is Logo?

garychou:

When I was a kid, this was how I first learned to write code. I’m excited that in 2012 there are now things like Code Year.

I agree @neiltyson totally! Teaching Science literacy is more important that just being able to reciting facts.
Scientific literacy is a part of understanding how to approach problems, deal with conflict, and hey, while I’m at it… approach life!

“Neil Degrasse Tyson: “If you’re scientifically literate the world looks very different to you”” on http://shel.tv/zzPim0 via @neiltyson

shelbytv:

Next week, team Shelby is headed to CES. I know what you’re thinking, why would a tiny startup head to one of the biggest consumer electronics shows in the world, especially when Apple has already won CES?

It all started when we won a booth at CES this past summer as part of a competition…

cool

“aaaaaaayyyyyyyyy.”

(via Bluth Family Reunion)

I really love Instapaper.  The whole product through and through.

Marco Arment has done a great job with this product all the way from top to bottom. The bookmarklet experience is great, it’s fast, convienient, clear as to what is happening, the web experience is straight forward and designed well, and the iOS app is the first App that I knew EXACTLY what I was getting when I paid for it, and was 100% satisfied with the $4.99 price tag.

In 2011, from what I can gather I saved over 1100 articles to read later on my iPad (I don’t have an iPhone). Almost every morning either over coffee or my morning subway ride, I would catch up on my reading. It was really a great system.

Unfortunately, with the start of 2012, I am no longer going to be using Instapaper.

Like I said I don’t have an iPhone. I have an android device (a HTC Thunderbolt rooted with the CM7.1.1 ROM) and I am just a little tired of carrying around my iPad with me everywhere, that’s in addition to my laptop which I have in my bag more and more often now.

My Android phone is large enough and powerful enough to do everything I need to do on the go, so why carry around Y.A.D. (yet another device)??

For several reasons, Instapaper is not available on Android (a recent write up from Beta Beta beat can be found here).

Marco has stated he would split revenue 50/50 with whoever can make Instapaper for Android (that meets his strict requirements of course). That’s not good enough for me, so I am hopping over to Read it Later.  They have a bookmarklet (not as well designed), an iOS app for my iPad, and most importantly an Android app.

Read it Later, so far, is not as great as Instapaper, but c’est la vie! I am enjoying reading a whole lot more on my phone that my iPad on the Subway.

Here’s to 2012!

Today I dropped my daughter off at school for the first time in more than two weeks, great family time.

As I was walking past 6th Ave I looked south and noticed the Freedom Tower.  Wow, great progress since I last took this route way back in 2011.  In the morning light, the lights in the still exposed upper floors twinkle majestically.

Crossing the Avenue, as the tower started to disappear behind other buildings I was left to wonder, “What is there left to build?”

I was not around to see the bridges of NY be built, or the Tunnels, the Empire State building, the Interstate system, or even the Twin Towers.  These were all great feats of engineering.  And I fear that not many of their kind will be undertaken in this country in the foreseeable future.*

The engineering feats of my and future generations lie not in structural and visible feats, but more in the digital and scientific realms.

I am an engineer of the 21st Century.  Building the future of media consumption.  What it is? Totally unknown, totally up to people like us to build. Media giants have no clue what the future will hold, no idea what consumers want, no idea what the next step is. Another example of the Internet being a great equalizer. This is a huge opportunity, one that I can’t stop thinking about and look forward to waking up to every single day.

* [to argue this point you could say that we are building a tremendous new Aquaduct and Su way line under New York, which is nothing short of amazing. I’ll admit that.]

I feel like watching this vid every morning!
“VS Underdog Speech” on http://shel.tv/ycfJfJ via @VidPrep

I am a huge fan of Textmate. I use it ALL the time for Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, and of course Javascript.

Commenting in most of those languages is really easy:

Ruby: # comment here

HTML: <!— comment here —>

Javascript: // comment here

What I have really wanted for some time is a keyboard shortcut to turn a line or two of text into a multiline Javascript comment.

Here’s what I ended up doing (image below shows it all):

1) In Textmate, get yourself into the ‘Bundle Editor’

2) Create a ‘new command’ (I called mine “Multiline Comment”

3) In the ‘Commands’ text area enter: echo “/* $TM_SELECTED_TEXT */”

4) Choose ‘Selected Text’ as the ‘Input’ and ‘Replace Selected Text’ as the ‘Output’

5) Choose a keyboard shortcut for the command under ‘Activation > Key Equivalent’ (I chose <shift>+<command>+c)

Voila!  Now you can type your comment, highlight it, and hit <shift>+<command>+c to get your multi-line commented area.

My new t-shirt: Schrodinger’s equation with the solution is the shape of Schrodinger’s cat! Leila has a matching shirt… Thanks Josh (@iamthecarnivore)!

I have known about JSONP for some time now but it didn’t really “click” with me until this week for some reason. Now… I think it is awesome!

So, How to enable JSONP support in a Rails app?

In a Rails controller where you want to return JSON to a callback function specified in an AJAX request, simple add a callback key and value (via param[:callback]) to the call to render json:

render :json => your_data_hash.to_json, :callback => params[:callback]

When the JSONP AJAX request is made and a callback is specified (via  the ?callback= param OR the jsonpCallback option in jQuery’s $.ajax() function), Rails will now send back that JSON to the specified callback function in the DOM. Voila! 

While this is sorta trivial, its a nice tool to have in the bag.

I’m always learning.