Disk Inventory X

I’ve found a great to to help you find what’s eating up your hard drive is a free tool called Disk Inventory (Mac) or WinDirStat (Windows).  These tools, based on the same underlying software, scans your hard drive and gives you a colorful visual representation of the filetypes that are occupying your drive.  That’s it.  There’s no cleaning or deleting that happens from here, but it serves as a visual guide for finding those pesky files taking up so much space.

Only cursorily like watching a child grow, watching these plants start from seed or seedling and slowly grow to be mature has been a joy.  Checking on the well being of the plants constantly in their early days, and giving them physical support as needed.  Soon, the tomatoes will turn red, the eggplant blossoms will bear fruit, and the beans will dangle from the vines.  I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like having a garden, and finds the growing process at least slightly addictive.  I think I have caught the bug, especially since the plants aren’t dying on me.

Maybe it’s the economy, or an unconscious trend, but I’ve been hearing about more people and groups that are using a bit of land to grow their own food.  Michelle Obama is only part of that trend, not the instigator.  So maybe it’s a subtle backlash to all the newspaper articles asking kids where the Thanksgiving turkey comes from (answer: the store/freezer).  Knowing where your food physically came from, not just the brand name, has a certain appeal.  You are what you eat, even if that is dirt you used to play kickball on.  And I take heart from knowing that some of who I am, literally comes from my own back yard.

It is the script, text on a printed page, that drives the actors on screen.  The newscaster or politician reading off the teleprompter.  It is now making a high-profile splash through the use of  short text messages and Twitter posts using pocket devices.

And though the home set of encyclopedias has all but vanished, and general book sales have been waning for years, one of the most popular forms of personal expression is writing.  Topical books on politics and personal celebrity biographies are all the rage.  Not to mention how much popularity there still is about everything James Patterson or J.K. Rowling publish.  And though there are new alternative outlets for their written work, like the Kindle digital book, or even audiobooks (to which the reader adds an extra level of artistic performance) the written word is still king.

The law, though it may be supported by photos or graphics, will for the foreseeable future be the basis of our societies.  And it is the written word that will be preserved, to be a guide for those generations that will come after us.

As we transform and convert all that we create to digital formats, for the purposes of copying, distributing, and preserving, we must remember that even the images of our lives, as put on our computers, are based and suspended in written computer code.  A written language foreign to most, drives much of our modern world, and is behind every computer.

But the computers of the world function as abstractions, or tools that abstract us from reality.  I click the mouse on my screen, which is an abstraction of a selection, of a command, of code, of a binary number sequence which is the reality of that mouse click.  But it is the computer that uses and understands the binary code, an extrapolation of billions of logical yes/no’s per second.  And in the computer age, “1″ is king and “0″ is queen, while everything else is just subjects in the binary monarchy.

I don’t live in that kingdom.  I know of it, and can dip my toes in it when needed, but until the machines rise up against us, I will stay in my world.  Where the word is still king.  Where I will struggle to place the characters together in a pattern that will communicate meaning.

Hero 1 Robot

To me, Heathkit is the Kleenex of home electronics kits, and though Heathkit Educational Services is still in the business of electronics education, it is no longer geared towards the individual home consumer. I remember when I was a kid that my dad had a Heathkit Freezer Alarm (GD-1183) (for if you leave the door ajar) and my older brother got a Photoelectric Switch (GD-600) (don’t break the beam of light). These electronics interested me the most, and I think it was because they were put together by members of my family, even if the reality was one of simple assembly. The act of putting the puzzle pieces together, and that the results didn’t look like perfection, was perfect. I was hooked. And though I haven’t been a kit builder per se, I’ve embodied the spirit of the tinkerer.

Of course at the time, the holy grail of the home electronic kit was the Hero Robot series, and saw mainstream advertising. But the DIY electronics has caught on only slightly better than the Sears DIY mail order houses.

But in the modern computer world, fueled less by social networking and more by viral videos, there has been a resurgence of hacking – the art of modifying things in a roughshod way to fit our needs. Popular sites like Slashdot and Digg often feature simple hacks for others to try (generally illegal hacks are not shared so publicly). Great sites to check out include Hack a Day, The Daily Hack, Make, Lifehacker, and Instructables.

NerdKit project

For another way of getting started with your own programmable electronics, you can look to NerdKits or SparkFun Electronics for kits and eduction resources. From these kits, you can move beyond basic electronics with software coding, memory, and processors that let you quickly develop more complex projects.

When in doubt, there are plenty of broken or discarded electronics all over the place that you can carefully take apart and see what you can see. Be careful, and have fun.

Highlights of the program include a 3-year plan to double alternative energy production, three thousand miles of new power lines (I suspect many of those will be from the new distributed power sources), energy efficiencies for federal buildings and weatherizing 2.5 million homes.  There is a 5-year plan to computerize medial records, and a stopgap measure for healthcare coverage of the newly unemployed.

Everything is available from The White House website.  Remember: if it’s created by the US government, it’s either classified or it’s public domain.

Al Roker and Barak Obama wave

Al Roker jazzed about Obama

The torching of major environmental and medical protections are just a part of the ongoing “gutting of America”.  Read the original for all the details.

My next challenge, though I doubt I’ll solve it soon, it to keep the banner ads at the top of the page from duplicating every time the dynamic page I’m working on auto-saves.  It pushes the page down another 1.5″ and really starts to suck.  It’s even worse when entering tags (happens every word).  Grrr.