High Caliber Guns http://highcaliberguns.com Most recent posts at High Caliber Guns posterous.com Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:13:28 -0700 Found my two year old daughter watching The Three Stooges all by herself. I'm so proud! #fb http://highcaliberguns.com/found-my-two-year-old-daughter-watching-the-t http://highcaliberguns.com/found-my-two-year-old-daughter-watching-the-t

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:06:18 -0700 Sign Up For Dropbox... http://highcaliberguns.com/sign-up-for-dropbox http://highcaliberguns.com/sign-up-for-dropbox This post is nothing more than a shameless attempt to get more storage for my Dropbox. The fact of the matter is that mine is running out of space quickly. If you don't use Dropbox and want to give it a try (it's free), please use the link below. This will automatically give both of us 250mb of extra storage space!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:28:40 -0700 Simple Desktops #1... http://highcaliberguns.com/simple-desktops-1 http://highcaliberguns.com/simple-desktops-1 One of my favorite places to find desktop wallpaper is Simple Desktops. As a matter of fact, almost all of the wallpapers that are currently rotating on my Mac are from Simple Desktops. They are just that good. I've submitted a few, but they have never made the cut...until today. You might notice that I gave this post a number. I'm trying to be optimistic! This is my submission. See it on Simple Desktops and download the he-rez version.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:03:32 -0700 Logos 4 Mac Shipping Soon... http://highcaliberguns.com/logos-4-mac-shipping-soon http://highcaliberguns.com/logos-4-mac-shipping-soon

We have been waiting a long time (and through a bunch of alpha and beta releases), but it looks like Logos 4 Mac will be shipping very soon! There will be discounts, giveaways, and lots of Logos love. You can buy today and download a pre-release version. The final version will be available October 1st. Check It Out!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:08:55 -0700 Firefox Moves To The Back Seat... http://highcaliberguns.com/firefox-moves-to-the-back-seat http://highcaliberguns.com/firefox-moves-to-the-back-seat
I have been using a Mac for almost two years now, but it was not until today that Safari become my primary browser. There are plenty of reasons to use Firefox. It has been my browser of choice for as long as I can remember and I will still use it for certain things, but there are three reasons I want to replace it with Safari. First, it seems a little more nimble than Firefox these days. Second, WebKit is just cool. The Firefox team says they will not touch it, and I am afraid that might be a mistake. Finally, Safari is a Mac product and that means something to people who know what that means...if you know what I mean!

So why am I finally switching to Safari? It is simple enough--there are finally enough extensions available for Safari to provide most of the behavior I use on a daily basis in Firefox. Obviously 1Password and Xmarks have worked with Safari for some time, but there are a few other things I need if I am going to use a browser every day. For instance, I also need RSS to play well with Google Reader. I can make that happen now by using Google Reader Tools by Andy Allcorn. In addition I need session management. This is provided (and very nicely) by Sessions written by David Yoo. I also added a reload button using an app of the same name by John Siracusa, and a duplicate tab button in the same manner written by Thiemo Gamma.

These might seem like small things, but keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list. However, it is a good start and enough to make it time to switch. Of course now that Apple's extension page is active new extensions are being added regularly and I am confident it will not be long before I a reach browsing utopia. Now will someone please write an extension for tab management!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:29:10 -0700 Happy Nothing... http://highcaliberguns.com/happy-nothing http://highcaliberguns.com/happy-nothing Not counting my wife, who is my best friend, I have two really close friends. One is a woman I went to grade school and high school with, and the other is my friend and venture partner. To make matters more simplified when birthdays come around both of them were born on the same day which happens to coincide with the day my parents were married. Not only that, but I was actually with my parents today which happens very seldom as they live three hours away!

Despite these fortunate circumstances I forgot all three today! Wow. You might suggest something like marking it down in my calendar...I did. Wow.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:01:35 -0700 A Temporary Loss... http://highcaliberguns.com/a-temporary-loss http://highcaliberguns.com/a-temporary-loss They buried my Grandpa today. I wish I could have been there. I wasn't really close to him after I got married and moved away, but I will miss him. I loved watching him play old gospel music on his guitar (and an occasional verse or two of Folsom Prison Blues and the like) while we (mostly my Dad) would sing along. We never seemed to get through an entire song before we thought of another one. Sometimes he would watch my brother and I on summer break while Mom and Dad were at work. I remember he once tried to teach us to whistle with a blade of grass held between our thumbs. I never could get it right...he said I was blowing out the wrong end. He loved Jesus. Maybe he can give me another lesson some day :)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:46:00 -0700 In The Beginning... http://highcaliberguns.com/in-the-beginning http://highcaliberguns.com/in-the-beginning I'm reading through Neal Stephenson's classic essay (for geeks anyway), In The Beginning Was The Command Line. It was published in 1999, and explores the survival of proprietary computer operating systems, but it is not the author's views on technology that I'm concerned with here.

In chapter seven of the essay, The Interface Culture, in preparation for making his arguments about the future of proprietary operating systems he gives a brilliant description of western culture as it relates to media. I would love to drop the entire chapter here, but I do not have permission to do so. I will therefore leave a few excerpts and a link to the full content provided by Mr. Stephenson (above). Finally, I would like to say that my conclusions in light of his observations are not the ones he voices at the end of the chapter. Frankly, I suspect they may not be his either when taken in juxtaposition with the rest of the chapter, but we will have to take his words at face value.

I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television. 
And rather than stay home and read a book, I was watching him
...
Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando’s civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
...
The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judg- ments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.
The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into every cranny of the world by television is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of great and ancient cultures like Islam and France, it seems grossly inferior, at least at first. The only good thing you can say about it is that it makes world wars and Holocausts less likely—and that is actually a pretty good thing!
The only real problem is that anyone who has no culture, other than this global monoculture, is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And—again—perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won’t nuke each other.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:05:30 -0700 Ruler Cam... http://highcaliberguns.com/ruler-cam http://highcaliberguns.com/ruler-cam So I need to do some time lapse and video work with my iphone, but I don't have the scratch for one of those really cool Gorillamobile tripods by Joby so I built my own iPhone tripod out of a wooden ruler, an broken iPhone car charger, a rubber-band, and a mini tripod I bought a couple years ago to use with my digital camera. Not quite Instructables material, but it will get the job done.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:19:26 -0700 Sarai with her "umbrella". http://highcaliberguns.com/sarai-with-her-umbrella http://highcaliberguns.com/sarai-with-her-umbrella

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:50:00 -0700 CronniX... http://highcaliberguns.com/cronnix http://highcaliberguns.com/cronnix

Let's face it. Much like Mr. Oddbody, I'm a geek -- second class. I started with crontab -e, but after fighting with vi and not understanding quite what command I needed to add in order to get my Automator created apps to run, I turned to CronniX. If you still haven't earned your pointed ears, or just want to take a shortcut and hope nobody sees, Cronnix is the tool you need to edit your cron tabs on Mac OS X!

--
The system's scheduler "cron" is a Unix program that is automatically started at system startup. Every minute, it checks so-called "crontabs" for tasks that should be executed. Every user of a system and the system itself can have one crontab. CronniX allows you to edit all of these crontabs one at a time. -- CronniX Help
--

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:17:12 -0700 I Want To Be A Wizard Some Day... http://highcaliberguns.com/i-want-to-be-a-wizard-some-day http://highcaliberguns.com/i-want-to-be-a-wizard-some-day Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.

Fortunately, learning to program is considerably less dangerous than learning sorcery, because the spirits we deal with are conveniently contained in a secure way. Real-world programming, however, requires care, expertise, and wisdom. A small bug in a computer-aided design program, for example, can lead to the catastrophic collapse of an airplane or a dam or the self-destruction of an industrial robot.

Master software engineers have the ability to organize programs so that they can be reasonably sure that the resulting processes will perform the tasks intended. They can visualize the behavior of their systems in advance. They know how to structure programs so that unanticipated problems do not lead to catastrophic consequences, and when problems do arise, they can debug their programs. Well-designed computational systems, like well-designed automobiles or nuclear reactors, are designed in a modular manner, so that the parts can be constructed, replaced, and debugged separately. -- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:54:34 -0700 Collins America's Danglet... http://highcaliberguns.com/collins-americas-danglet http://highcaliberguns.com/collins-americas-danglet I hate putting my iPhone in my pocket so I use a lanyard made by Collins America called a Danglet. I bought mine in February and it broke in April. Naturally I wrote asking for a replacement. They agreed to send the part, and attached a document explaining proper care of the Danglet. The Danglet is designed to withstand the maximum amount of pressure possible without damaging the iPhone's connector. I knew this from the videos I had seen on their website. What I didn't realize is that it is designed to break regardless of which angle the force is applied, not just directly down as you might expect. Talk about some excellent engineering. I wrote back and told them the Danglet worked as designed and that according to the instructions I had not used the device properly. Guess what? They are going to send the replacement anyway because the first Danglets apparently didn't ship with a copy of the "care and feeding" document. It's great when you find company that aims at excellence and exceeds your expectations.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Sun, 25 Apr 2010 14:31:48 -0700 May I Have Your Money Please?... http://highcaliberguns.com/may-i-have-your-money-please http://highcaliberguns.com/may-i-have-your-money-please Am I missing something here, or is this company asking you to let them keep your money even if they don't deliver content? Afterall the price is only $2.95? I'm assuming the three bucks is credited to your Logos account.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:21:25 -0700 No Parking... http://highcaliberguns.com/no-parking-38 http://highcaliberguns.com/no-parking-38

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:52:56 -0700 1Password For Windows... http://highcaliberguns.com/1password-for-windows http://highcaliberguns.com/1password-for-windows

I keep all my passwords on my Mac and my iPhone. This way if I need to check my bank balance or login to Facebook while I'm away from the Mac I've got all my data right there. I do this using 1Password which is the best password manager available for the Mac in my opinion. Up until recently this has been a Mac only app, but it looks like the folks over at Agile Web Solutions got greedy enough to start working on a Windows version. You have to pay for the iPhone version and the desktop version seperately, and they aren't cheap, but a better solution can't be had by hook or crook. Even if you don't have an iPhone you should still consider checking it out. If you use the same password for all your online presence don't bother.Your idenity will be stolen soon anyway

.

Agile Web Solutions

1Password

1Password Windows Forum

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Sat, 17 Apr 2010 10:40:54 -0700 BBQ http://highcaliberguns.com/bbq-405 http://highcaliberguns.com/bbq-405

This season's BBQ starting with my birthday...

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:48:02 -0700 Born To Abuse Children... http://highcaliberguns.com/born-to-abuse-children http://highcaliberguns.com/born-to-abuse-children I just heard a psychologist on NPR say that treating pedophilia is like treating having blue eyes...you have to explain how painful it can be to others etc. in order to talk them out of pursuing who they really are.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:34:24 -0700 Mark The Spot... http://highcaliberguns.com/mark-the-spot http://highcaliberguns.com/mark-the-spot The weather is finally getting warmer, and this means more time outside the house on the swing with a cigar or cooking up some BBQ (with charcoal of course...I can cook with gas in the house) or working in the yard etc.

All of this also means stepping outside the range of my super fast Wi- Fi and into AT&T's useless Edge network. Sure Edge isn't as nice as a solid 3G connection, but that's not what I'm talking about. In my back yard connecting to the Edge network means dial-up speed data, or more often than not, no data at all.

Fortunately, I can use AT&T's Mark the Spot iPhone app to inform them about my problematic data connection. Of course I generally have to wait until I go back inside for the message to get sent once I'm back inside the range of my home network, and I have to report a bad connection every single day, but I'm sure AT&T will get to working on improving my Edge network as soon as they get my enough of my daily reports. Either that, or they will ignore me because I'm just one guy in a little town complaining about my terrible service. Let's face it, I'm going to be marking the spot until it's time to buy my iPhone 7G.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:31:55 -0700 Playland http://highcaliberguns.com/playland-9 http://highcaliberguns.com/playland-9

I thought our equipment was getting old until I saw the other one.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/84749/hcg_logo.png http://posterous.com/people/1gMEjHhcL3b Aaron Jackson ArrowJ Aaron Jackson