A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system

I can’t even begin to grasp how big things in space are, but this does a pretty good job explaining.

You can download the theme here

Colors were taken from the Base16 TextMate theme, and the font is Source Code Pro

These sites describe how to get your Terminal to start showing colors.

I recently received a review unit of the Chargekey.

It’s essentially a key-sized USB to Lightning cable that you will can have available on your keychain (They also make a Micro-USB version to fit your Android phone). I don’t do too much wandering around during the day, but I hadn’t bought a second cable for charging my phone while at work so I was more than happy to start making daily use of this.

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By artist Yukino Ohmura.

A simple rake task to dump the contents of a MySQL database and save it to an Amazon S3 bucket. Use together with whenever to automate it.

namespace :backup do

  task :nightly do
    timestamp = Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")
    backup_file = "tmp/backups/#{timestamp}_dump.sql.gz"
    `mkdir -p tmp/backups`
    `mysqldump -u root {DATABASE_NAME} | gzip -c > #{backup_file}`

    send_to_s3 backup_file
  end

  def send_to_s3(file_path)
    bucket = "{BUCKET_NAME}"
    file_name = File.basename(file_path)
    AWS::S3::DEFAULT_HOST.replace "s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com"

    AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(
      :access_key_id => '{KEY}',
      :secret_access_key => '{SECRET}')

    AWS::S3::S3Object.store(
      "backups/#{file_name}",
      File.open("#{file_path}"),
      bucket)
  end

end

Zach Sobiech was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 14. He used the small amount of time he had left to produce music, which has reached and touched millions.

“My Last Days” on YouTube

I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting and didn’t really lose.

Zach passed away on May 20, 2013. Buying his album on iTunes will support a cancer research fund set up on his behalf, or you can donate directly.

I’ve been getting a few questions about the script used to generate the Pokemon Fusion sprites, so I thought I would write a quick blog post to describe the process.

The inspiration of the website was the idea that it should be possible to automate the process of combining pokemon sprites, and each image is automatically generated by a computer script. Some of the results are less impressive than others, but I think that it adds to the fun and makes it that much more satisfying when you come across ones that work really well.

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See a Google Street View at a random point in the world, guess where it is on a map.

Here’s a quick Mac OSX service that will allow you to save any link to Pocket by right-clicking it. It will work from within basically any app that lets you right-click text. Prerequisite is that you have the Pocket OSX app installed.

Download the script here

After downloading, unzip and place the file in ~/Library/Services (or create the folder first if it doesn’t exist already)

After doing so, you should be able to simply highlight a link and right-click it to see the “Save to Pocket” option. (You might find it under a “Services” category)

I absolutely love the energy