Chaos Server

You hate war to win it; you love your enemy to destroy him - Bean (Shadows in Flight) My nerd podcast (The Incomparable)did a follow up to their video game episode with a computer game episode where they talked about the most meaningful computer games of their life. I wrote previously about my console games and a hole occurred in between the original Nintendo and the Playstation 2. That hole wasn't because I stopped playing games, it was because I played computer games. Here is a fun game to play on this one, see if you can name the game from the screen shot! My computing started with an Apple IIe. What a beautiful computer it was and what amazing things it could do. I think it came with a stock Apple game that was like Space Invaders where you used the Open Apple and Closed Apple to shoot two different guns at on coming aliens. I can't remember. The first computer game that capture my imagination was Lode Runner. You played a little man that needed to collect barrels and you...

Different headphones suit different needs. - Marco Arment I own a lot of headsets and I keep buying more. I'm not looking for optimal audio quality, I'm buying and testing them because I want to find the optimal functional feature set and there doesn't seem to be a one-size fits all headset for me. Requirements? I travel on the train and in the car and take a lot of phone calls. I want a headset for my phone that has the best noise-canceling microphone around. When I work from home I spend all day on phone/video conferences using my computer. I need a headset that works with my computer and is rock solid. I listen to Podcasts, Audiobooks, and iTunes radio while I'm out and about on the train, at the mall, etc. It's got to be low profile and stereo - when I use the earbuds that came with my iPhone, the cord gets snagged on drawer knobs, door handles, and other randomly annoying things ripping the buds out of my ears. VXi BlueParrott Xpressway II with Xtreme Noi...

The odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. - Richard Branson This kid is such a "chick magnet" (sorry, I put it in quotes to try and make it less offensive), I wish I were single! I was out at the mall with mini-Chaos pushing around the stroller when we rolled in by a store that had a bunch of balloons tied to an a-frame out front. He stopped and started reaching up towards them and coo'ing, "ooh... ooh... OOH!!!!!" My only response is to talk back, "Do you like the balloons? They float. That's pretty cool." One of the nice ladies who works at the store saw/heard the excitement and brought a balloon out for mini-Chaos. Do you know what is better than a balloon tied to an a-frame in front of store? A balloon tied to your stroller! HAPPINESS EXPLOSION. This kid could hardly contain himself and he started stomping, "ooh"ing, and general freaking out at the amazing gravity-deify...

I don't want more friends; I want deeper friendships.  - Huensao It's nice to be a regular. When you head somewhere and it's just as comforting as home--that's a great feeling. When I lived in the bay area there was a great coffee house (Zocalo in San Leandro) which was a common stomping ground and working from home, I was a regular.  Tim (the owner) was a former Apple Evangelist and all around great guy who often chatted me up.  I loved  when he would grab my iTunes library and start pumping anime music into the cafe.  Everyone there had a special treat. These days, we're making Mini-Chaos into a sushi regular downtown, because Mrs.Chaos loves the sushi!  Every week (ish) we roll in (ha!), the staff talks about how adorable he is, and he gets to eat edamame and being generally cute. I hope he is learning to enjoy it, cause this kid is going to get to eat a lot of sushi in his life.

No fate but what we make. - Sarah Connor (T2) One of the things I love about OSX is that most applications are scriptable. They expose the ability to send AppleEvents and control various features of the application. In the older days, the way a menu interacted with the app was by sending AppleEvents, so using scripting, you could do anything that the menus could do. While the architecture is a little different today, developers know they need to make their apps scriptable to be real apps. This means that I have a ton of scripts that do crazy stuff. Check Calendar to see if I'm in a meeting and then update my Adium IM status. Rip a movie from DVD, search The Movie DB, and then update the metatags. Check the temperature outside (Forecast.io) and inside (Nest) and send a notification to my phone (Growl) if my windows should be opened or closed. So slick. While I love the fact that I can script all this, it's a sad that I have to use AppleScript to do it. The AppleScript langu...

We recommend installing OS X Yosemite Beta on a secondary Mac - Yosemite Installer Upgrade Complete! Who cares about warnings? I've upgraded all of my computers to OSX Yosemite Public Beta -- including my work computer. My company's IT department gave me a dirty look when I mentioned I was a having a couple issues. It went so well I upgraded my iPad to iOS8. It went so well I upgraded my iPhone to iOS8. Good decision? Or GREAT decision? Back in the day I was always running 3-4 OS'es on my computer, beta versions of a dozen different major applications, and it was glorious. Somewhere along the line I ended up wanted stuff to just work? Maybe it was at the same time as my move to Apple, or maybe it stimulated my move to Apple. All I know is that recently I've been running Chrome Developer version and the Webkit nightlies and I figured... LET'S DO THIS! I'm not crazy - I did full backups. Realistically 90% of my job is done through cloud services and the last...

It's not arrogance if you really are better than everyone. - Jordanism #1 There is this phenomenon where a person is in the right place at the right time, gets incredibly lucky, and attributes success to their personal amazingness. The majority of business books are case studies on this: get incredibly fortunate and then attribute success to your particular way of working (getting up at 5am, GTD, etc). Being smart and a hard worker helps so that when you are in the right place at the right time you can take advantage of that opportunity, but that whole right place/time thing is really the important part. Marco Arment is one of the developer "celebrities" I listen to a lot, and I thought he fell into the bucket of being lucky and full of himself (tl;dr - he doesn't). I've heard him talk before and the impression I had gotten was of a guy who thought he was too smart for college (dropped out), managed to serendipitously get in at the ground level as Tumblr was be...