First, find images whose file size is greater than 3M:

find . -name '*jpg' -size 3M > /tmp/big-receipts.txt

Now, get the dimensions of each of those images using imagemagick’s identify command line utility. The key to using this thing efficiently is to include the “-ping” flag (believe it or not that took me quite a while to figure out):

identify -ping filename.jpg

displays this type of output:

/tmp/big.jpg JPEG 10200x13200 10200x13200+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 5.54MB 0.000u 0:00.000

Now we can put the two together:

for fname in `cat /tmp/big-receipts.txt`; do identify -ping $fname; done

I was skeptical, to say the least. I expected a sluggish, ugly interface with a dearth of applications.

What I got is quite nice. The blackberry has a very usable interface – it’s fast and responsive, and some of the gestures (eg. closing and switching apps) are the best I’ve seen on a tablet.

It comes with a nice car racing game (I surprised myself by spending a few hours playing it), and the browser is quite excellent, probably the best I’ve seen on a tablet.

The development environment is also rich: you can use HTML or flash as well as native SDKs.

It doesn’t seem to come with a built-in email app (or if it does I’ve missed it), which is very surprising given the Blackberry pedigree.

It’s also lacking apps and games – the app world feels a bit empty.

I’m surprised at how much I like the device. I just wish it had more apps.

Specifying port:

sftp  -v -oPort=6636 -o IdentityFile=keys/my-key.ssh my_username@sftp.somesite.com

I gave a guest lecture at UCSD recently espousing this viewpoint. You are cheap right now, I told them, so take advantage. If you wait 10 years to start a company you’ll have much higher earning power and much higher personal costs (spouse, mortgage, …) and therefore a much higher opportunity cost when starting a company.

What about our student loans? asked one of the students.

Good question. I don’t have a good answer.

When I went to school I was able to pay my way from the third year onward. I left school with savings instead of debt. I was able to start a company immediately.

Today students graduate with an average debt of about $27,000 dollars.

That’s just awful. That means they are bound to a job for at least the first part of their career. We’re removing the option of starting a company, of producing explosive value, of growing the economy to the benefit of the whole country, for more than 60% of our graduates.

Think of all of the companies with billions in value created by college students. Think Facebook, Dropbox. We need these. We want these created in the US.

We have to get education costs under control. We can screw the young generation over to put a few extra bucks in our pockets now, but we’ll all end up paying for it when we fall behind other countries who encourage their creative young to be entrepreneurs.

mysettings = __import__("config.mysettings", fromlist=["config"])

This is equivalent to

from config import mysetings

• Open the OS X Preview app
• Go to the File menu and select Import From Scanner
• Select your printer
• Look for the “Format” option on the right hand page and set it to PDF
• Select the “Create single document” option
• Hit the Scan button

This will produce a single PDF file with all of the pages of your document, scanned into the location of your choice.

Here’s how you see your log messages:

adb logcat | grep "TiAPI"

adb is in the tools directory of your Android sdk.

javascript:void(document.cookie=prompt(document.cookie,document.cookie));

Via stackoveflow.

You can check if a user is part of a group using this simple snippet. It will allow you to check if a user is in a group with the following template syntax:

{% if user|in_group:"Friends,Enemies" %}

This afternoon driving by the high school near my house I was amused to see uniforms everywhere – here a patch of girls all wearing the same types of shorts, with hair pulled back, there a group of emo kids all wearing shades of near identical clothes.

It’s lovely. We all need to be different in our uniform ways.