mpapi's comments

They're not exactly common in the Boston area, but they're here, and new ones are getting added (mainly in Cambridge, as far as I can tell). At least one even has separate traffic lights that turn green for bikes a few seconds early.

FWIW I tend to stick to the roads anyway, though, because the segregated bike lanes often have pedestrians and runners in them regardless, and the paths often get cracked from tree roots and whatnot. Most drivers don't seem to care if I'm not on the dedicated path, so long as I'm hauling and not riding crazy.

It's primarily a stove, and does a relatively good job at boiling water or cooking food. As a nice bonus for us, we used it to shave some crank time off a hand-crank/USB-chargeable lantern, deep enough in the woods that a solar panel probably wouldn't have done a whole lot.

(FWIW, I generally agree that it's probably not great for serious backpacking, but I had a lot of fun using while camping.)

You can do:

    Host hosta hostb hostc
    HostName %h.mycompany.com
    User usera

I believe this isn't a super-new feature -- every ssh version I've run into client-side in the last couple years has supported it.

If you're driving your car on the road, I think you need to follow the rules of the road. Otherwise, get off the road.

I've seen way too many cases where drivers make the roads more dangerous for everyone.

I found references to it going back to 2008, and the git repo that has my dotfiles says I've been using it (in Linux) for 3 or so years. Maybe it depends on the OS/distro.

The patterns are similar to shell globs: * matches zero or more characters, ? matches exactly one.

A favorite .ssh/config feature of mine is pattern matching on hostnames with "?" and "*". So you can say something like:

    Host bos-??
    HostName %h.mydomain.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-boston-key

    Host nyc-??
    HostName %h.mydomain2.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-nyc-key

and log in with e.g. "ssh bos-14".

They kept the Cambridge ones open this year, though, and it seemed like they were still regularly used.

If you're used to riding in traffic, it's not really any riskier than other seasons -- they salt the roads heavily and tend to have the main ones pretty clear the day after a storm.

Probably the riskiest part (as a commuter) was that with shorter days, I was often riding home well after sunset.

Yeah, I won't argue that it's heavy.

I haven't done any backpacking with it yet -- though if I did, I probably wouldn't be taking anything I could charge via USB anyway. (The aforementioned USB lantern isn't exactly light either.)

I brought a BioLite stove with me on a recent camping trip and loved it. That had other advantages: easy to get a fire going during a very rainy week, no fuel to carry (in the White Mountain National Forest, anyway) and it was pretty easy to cook with.

USB charging didn't seem all that useful at first, but with a USB-rechargeable LED lantern it ended up being great. If that's all you really needed, you could get it from the FlameStower without the battery + fan machinery of the BioLite, I guess.

Battlecode (RoboCraft!) taught me a whole lot about the sorts of tradeoffs you have to make as an engineer in the real world in a way that nothing else at MIT really did. It definitely put freshman-year me in my place, too. Pretty sure it was my first MIT all-nighter.

It's an awesome experience for the directors as well, as the competition itself is basically a small startup. 3 or 5 students responsible for coming up with an idea (for that year's game objective), pitching to investors (sponsor companies), shipping a product (game engine + docs + online scrimmages), supporting several hundred users (contestants), keeping servers up, orchestrating a live tournament, placing an order for $2500 worth of pizza, getting up and speaking in front of a thousand contestants/spectators/sponsors, fixing bugs in the tournament bracket viewer in the middle of the tournament... Not something that every undergrad gets to do, that's for sure.

Glad to see other people experimenting with this kind of setup. I've known a few people to use one of these [1] for Emacs (for Ctrl & Meta), and I finally picked one up a while back.

My setup has one pedal bound to Escape for Vim, and the other two switchable using F keys and some xbindkeys magic. By default, they're "switch WM workspace" (sort of like Alt-Tab) and "switch window focus within a workspace" in Awesome WM, but I can change them to e.g. j and k for reading my email, or have them run various scripts, or whatever.

It's a lot of fun to use, but I haven't been on it much lately having switched to a standing desk and I haven't yet figured out a way to make the two play together nicely. And, as always, I've been meaning to throw the scripts & dotfiles on GitHub, but I'm a slacker.

[1] http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/fs-savant-elite.htm

I started heading in this direction a few years ago, and now I'm running dwm (http://dwm.suckless.org), no menu bar, with a couple of scripts that I have to manually run to see things like the time or my unread email count. It did take some getting used to, but I'm definitely more productive this way.

Nearly the same thing happened to me back in May (hit by an oncoming left turn, ambulance ride, broken bone, etc., and just a few miles away from the OA's accident) and my phone got the whole thing.

The recording is an interesting souvenir. I was in a strange mood for the first few days (suddenly confined to my apartment with very limited mobility) and got a kick out of showing the recorded track to anyone that came to visit, watching their horrified reactions to "Here's where I got hit, and over there is where I landed..." Thanks to a little Python script I'd written a while back, I had the track colored according to speed, and that made it even more "fun" to look at.

It's weird to think that stuff like that -- and with that level of detail -- will be around for future generations to look at.

I do the same thing, but in GNU/Linux, using pwsafe for passwords and dm-crypt for disk encryption. IMO the one downside is that I have to remember to put stuff in the right place, e.g. moving dotfiles with sensitive data into the encrypted directory and creating a symlink back to ~.