Vegan eateries by location and budgets

     

The end of the year is one of my favorite times of year. It’s when I see how I did with the goals I set for the current year and start to plan out my next adventures for the new year. I also like to either delete old ideas, or finish up random, playing-around code I have sitting in the old Projects folder.

This year I made a conscious effort to refrain from putting out bits of code, but there are two proof of concept apps that I found useful and kind of fun. Instead of sending them to the trash, I thought I’d put them up. The hopes are that the examples may help someone just starting with a few of these technologies, but keep in mind these were just things I made to learn a particular technology. I wouldn’t call them finished products.

One-time pad in Javascript

     

Recently, I was doing some research on encryption for a project. I’ve used encryption libraries in past projects, but I’ve never written any actual encryption algorithms myself. And as the Internet does from time to time, I got sucked into looking around at the various algorithms. I came across an interesting encryption algorithm that I had never heard of. Apparently, it can not be cracked: the one-time pad.

This is the one that most movies reference when you see the spy guy with his little flip book of paper. He’d write down some random numbers he heard off the radio, or what have you, then burn up the page. It’s an incredibly simple algorithm, and that makes it very useful because you don’t even need a computer to do the encryption / decryption.

Watching YouTube videos without Flash

     

I’ve been trying to eliminate flash from my system, and one pain point I’ve run into is watching YouTube videos on the YouTube website. The videos play fine on an iPad or iPhone, but for some reason when I browse them on my desktop, YouTube really wants me to use the Flash player.

There used to be an HTML5 video option (set for the whole account), but I can’t seem to find it anymore. However, it seems that when you embed videos from YouTube into another site, the video can play just fine on an iPad.

Ordering iPhoto in Reverse Chronological Order

     

This is a very small thing that has been bothering me lately, and a benevolent voice from the void showed me how to resolve most of my woes.

I’ve noticed that everywhere photos are displayed on all my devices, the order is oldest to newest. It’s a very small thing, but I have photos from around the year 2000, and scrolling through 13 years of photos to get to a recent one started to bother me a bit.

Living Below the Line - Day 5

     

This year, I decided to take part in the Living Below the Line fundraising campaign. Living Below the Line aims to raise awareness about poverty by challenging people to live off of $1.50(USD) a day (the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line). If you’d like, you can donate to my campaign or donate to the cause in general.

As you might have read in Day 1, Day 2, or Day 3 my strategy is to live exclusively off beans and rice for the next 5 days as that was all my $7.50 could afford.

Living Below the Line - Day 3

     

This year, I decided to take part in the Living Below the Line fundraising campaign. Living Below the Line aims to raise awareness about poverty by challenging people to live off of $1.50(USD) a day (the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line). If you’d like, you can donate to my campaign or donate to the cause in general.

As you might have read in Day 1 or Day 2, my strategy is to live exclusively off beans and rice for the next 5 days as that was all my $7.50 could afford.

Living Below the Line - Day 2

     

This year, I decided to take part in the Living Below the Line fundraising campaign. Living Below the Line aims to raise awareness about poverty by challenging people to live off of $1.50(USD) a day (the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line). If you’d like, you can donate to my campaign or donate to the cause in general.

As you might have read in Day 1, my strategy is to live exclusively off beans and rice for the next 5 days as that was all my $7.50 could afford.

Living Below the Line - Day 1

     

This year, I decided to take part in the Living Below the Line fundraising campaign. Living Below the Line aims to raise awareness about poverty by challenging people to live off of $1.50(USD) a day (the U.S. equivalent of the extreme poverty line.)

In the start-up world, making do with far too little is a way of life, and that particular challenge is something I enjoy. This seemed to be an interesting way to test my frugal / inventive skills while trying in some way to help a good cause. If you’d like, you can donate to my campaign or donate to the cause in general.

How to eat like a Vegan (Plant Based Eating)

     

The first thing I should say before any of this is: consult your doctor before you make any kind of health changes. However, keep in mind, most doctors are not trained in nutrition (and some nutritionist are just plain misinformed as well). Nevertheless, doctors can draw labs and tell you if you’re going to do something that would hurt yourself which, I am sure you would agree, is nice to know.

Are tween girls the profitable music demographic?

     

I am by no means a music industry veteran, but I’ve worked at a few music tech startups, and there is often this underlying theme from music industry insiders that tween girls are the target market. I’ve often asked why that is, or if there is any proof, and I am often met with a “well that’s just common sense” kind of answer.

It has never made logical sense to me, and all of my life experiences point in a different direction, but being a noob in the industry I just assumed I was old, and it was true.