As more and more sites are accepting bitcoin payments I’m struck by the fact that they don’t list BTC prices, but list USD prices and allow you to resolve your USD denominated transaction with the bitcoin payment system. This makes bitcoin as much of a “currency” as MasterCard, PayPal or a personal check.
Author Archives: Ian McKellar
Waffles
I made one blog post in 2013. I’m going to do better this year. I miss writing on the internet. In the past year I’ve found myself drifting away from consuming short-form writing on Twitter and Facebook to return to enjoying longer form posts on blogs and to a lesser extent on Google+, Tumblr and …
Horse Meat
I like horse meat. It’s delicious and healthy. And not so different from beef. I’m really enjoying watching the unfolding European horse meat scandal. Even countries like France where horse is regularly eaten are outraged that they’ve been lied to. The scandal has exposed the complicated supply chain in the European cheap meat trade. It’s …
2012, The Year of the Linux Personal Computer
2012 Q3 PC sales: 87.5M 2012 Q3 Android sales: 122.5M For sure, many would-be PC buyers were waiting for Windows 8 and refreshed models that were waiting for Windows 8 to be released, but that still means that last quarter 1.4 times as many Linux computers were sold than Windows computers. You might try to …
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Creepy Flashing Heads
Sharon picked up some cheap styrofoam heads from a store that had previously used them to display wigs for use in a decoration project of hers for this Halloween. I got her to pick up a couple more for me to use. After some discussion and ideas Aaron and I decided that it would be creepy …
Turkish Bread (Pide)
One of the foods I miss most from Australia is Turkish bread or pide. In Australia it’s common to have as a sandwich bread or for dips, in Berlin it holds the amazing doner kebabs. In the US, or at least in the Bay Area it’s completely unknown and sadly unavailable. When I visited Australia …
Cloudy with a chance of downtime
AWS went down again last Friday. I wouldn’t normally care, I only run non-critical toy projects out of their infrastructure, but I know that it disrupted a friend’s wedding and that’s just not cool. Amazon’s public statement about the event is fairly detailed and fairly believable. In one of their northern Virginia datacenters “each generator …
Seven Inches
This year at Google I/O I got a Nexus 7, the new tablet from Google and Asus. First of all Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is great – it has a ton of incremental improvements over the already excellent ICS, plus Google Now, which promises to be a really useful daily tool. Last year I got …
Simply logging JavaScript calls.
When debugging complicated JavaScript one thing I find myself constantly doing is using console.log() to print out what functions are being called in what order. JavaScript is single-threaded and event driven so it’s often not entirely clear what functions will be called in what order. Traditionally I’ve done something like this: function foo(bar) { console.log(‘foo(‘+bar+’)’); …
LXC on Ubuntu 11.04 Server
For a while I’ve been interested in Linux Containers (LXC), new way of providing Linux virtual machines on Linux hosts. Unlike machine virtualization systems like Xen, VMWare, KVM and VirtualBox, LXC is an OS-level virtualization system. Instead of booting a complete disk image Linux Containers share the same kernel as the host and typically use …