This saturday I went segway rallying with mike, I had a great time, although I did sprain my arm in a pretty big crash, see the video below.
I took my new flip ultra video camera (a bargain at £45 from ebay) and duck taped it to the handlebars of the segway.
I wasn’t really expecting much from it, but it out did itself, the simplicity of the interface makes it easy to pickup and shoot, then easily import it into iMovie, plus at such a low price I’m not to worry about destroying it so I can get some great footage that most people wouldn’t usually risk.
If you’ve not rode a segway before, I highly recommend it. It’s like nothing else and so easy to get the hang of, you’ll be flying around like a pro after 5 minutes. The rally was provided by Seghire, it’s £69 for two and last about 2 hours, with everything you need included.
Also, on the time trial lap we each did at the end I was the quickest (47s), including being a whole second faster than the instructor!
@codefor is a tiny twitter bot (40 lines of ruby) that when sent a domain, will reply to you with a voucher code for that domain (if it can find one) from http://retailmenot.com, give it a try:
Just send a reply to @codefor with a domain name that you want a voucher code for and it will scurry off to look for one, and reply to you within 5 minutes or so.
The code I’ve written is pretty modular too, I’m also thinking of making an “I’m feeling lucky” twitter bot that returns the first url for a google search of the text in the reply to the bot, if it takes off.
Please spread the word, retweet it on twitter and tell all your friends.
If you let users choose a colour for a background in your web apps, you may end up with unreadable text due to a lack of contrast, this little ruby method takes a hex value (like a css colour) in the form of 0x###### where the #’s are the hex colours letters or numbers, and works out if the text colour would look better in black or white.
Downgrade your version of ruby to 1.8.6 (not suggested)
or place the following code in config/initializers/enurmerable_fix.rb unless '1.9'.respond_to?(:force_encoding)
String.class_eval do
begin
remove_method :chars
rescue NameError
# OK
end
end
end
I had some weird behaviour with textmate today, random files and folders were not showing up in projects, after a little investigation I discovered that some tweaks I made to textmate’s regex patterns for what files to include on a different mac had been synced over mobileme.
I went in search of the defaults that come with a fresh copy of textmate but couldn’t find them, thankfully @ioptics hadn’t messed with his settings and sent me a copy:
