I recently purchased a Mac Mini Server, for this site to run on. It’s hosted on my home broadband connection, but it’s just really for small time side-projects like this site. Also it’s a way to play around with Docker, VirtualBox, Node.js and all those other fun technologies I don’t get time for.

I don’t really plan to post links, but maybe I’ll review things or cover things I’ve bought.

On holidays in Lithuania recently I was eating in a restaurant and noticed the music was all in English. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed a non English speaking country playing all English songs in bars, restaurants and taxis. Rather what was unusual was the very few ads and the fact it was an American station.

I’m no fan of ads, and am a huge fan of audio in general - be it spoken word or music. I’m a Spotify subscriber, but I also get bored if my own playlists fairly quickly. Spotify Radio isn’t the solution and I can’t access Pandora easily outside the US. 181 fm has a huge choice of stations (although I need a Smiths/Cure type of station) and plays few ads. It takes a little time to try out feeds they have, and some songs are on heavy rotation like regular music radio but it’s a nice service. Give it a try

I’m a big Wirecutter fan and they don’t disappoint with this travel guide.

I heard a behavioural economist on the radio this morning, he was talking about rising house prices in Dublin and the tricks the industry uses to get you to overpay. Turns out you can mitigate these tricks with a bit of knowledge, as this proves:

But now, with some simple math, you can fight back!

First, let’s see how the MTA tricks you out of your money earlier than you might want to release it to them.

Interesting study here: apparently performance of people in a company is never related to a bell curve, but is more like a ski slope. So the majority of people are carried by the few in terms of performance. What I really want to know is pay for these people like a ski slope? Cause I bet it ain’t.

Interesting announcements yesterday by Apple, finally releasing an iWatch. A lot of the talk on tech sites was reminiscent of the famous CMDR Taco (of Slashdot) line: “Less space then a nomad. Lame.”

I happened to own a Nomad shortly after that famous quote was made. So we can see, quoting Steve Jobs “[They] have no taste” is applicable to me! I just don’t get the watch yet. As a permanent contact wearer, I’m waiting for Google Glass in a contact lens! What I do predict however is: motor accidents due to Apple Watch updates and laws banning staring at the thing.

I’ve followed this tutorial personally, not using Mongo as the database at first. It’s clear and to the point and provides just what you need to know to get started. Highly recommended.

As part of my undergradute thesis, I found a template (for LyX) to ease the pain of formatting a thesis in LaTeX. Making it look just right to me was very important. If your are writing a thesis, perhaps you feel the same way? If so, read on…

While doing my first undergraduate thesis in Computer Science, I found a template used for a Computer Science thesis in NUI Maynooth (a university in Ireland). What attracted me was simple: it was battle tested and easily customisable. That was 2011 and since then I’d pretty much forgotten about it.

Worth a read for those wishing to optimise programs that process a lot of data. It proves that less really is more…

Money quote:

The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.

A great guide to get up to speed with Fish shell. What is Fish? It’s a shell written from the ground up to be more easily understandable the the traditional shells (bash, tcsh). I don’t know yet if I’ll switch (anything you can do in Fish can be made to work in Bash). It’s an interesting concept and I’ll try it for a while…