Doesn’t that look delicious? The challot look pretty good too.
Capitol 10,000
The Statesman Capitol 10,000 is the largest 10K in Texas and the fifth largest in the nation.
As one of my two 2013 New Year Resolutions (sadly, the other one is a carryover from 2012 and shall remain secret), I decided to run in the Capitol 10k on April 7th. For some people running ten kilometers is no big deal, but for me it is, as I’m not particularly fond of running after anything that isn’t a soccer ball or a toilet.
So now the cat is out of the bag, although technically it left the bag on February 5th. And I’m not alone in the suffering: one-time The MKX® author Shlomit is going to do it as well. Feel free to hold us both accountable.
Late night surgery
Last year I upgraded Shlomit’s MacBook Pro to an SSD. A few months ago I upgraded my MacBook Pro. The only little Mac left behind with its puny little spinning platters was my Mac mini. So I finally broke down and bought an SSD for it. This time it was a 250 GB Samsung 840.
Similar to the last times, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the contents of the original 2.5″ hard drive to the SSD. This took about three hours over USB 2. Slow but without a hitch.
But one thing would be different this time: turns out that when Apple ditched the DVD drive on the Mac mini, it left room for a second internal hard drive. So I can fit both the original drive and the SSD in the little box! Great. The problem: You need a special cable to do this. The solution: OWC ‘Data Doubler’ SSD/2.5″ Hard Drive installation Kit.
For $35 you get:
- A little ribbon cable to connect the drive
- Four cute screwdrivers: two were needed for the installation, two were not, and a third type that was needed did not come in the kit but thankfully I had it.
- Four screws.
- Four rubber bumper thingies.
- A piece of green plastic they call “pry tool” and was actually super useful.
- A U-shaped piece of bent metal, effectively used to move the computer’s motherboard out of the chassis.
A rip-off? Hardly, because they also bundled a very detailed manual with great photos and step by step instructions. Trust me, the booklet alone was worth the price. This was one tricky installation, they sure pack those little boxes tight.
I’m happy to report that although it took a long time, the operation was a success. The computer is a lot faster now. Nobody should be forced to use magnetic hard drives anymore. Now all I need to do is decide how to best distribute all my stuff across the 5 (five!) hard drives connected to this machine. I want iPhoto to be fast, but my giant library won’t fit in the SSD. Questions, questions…
Valentine’s
I thought this screen capture of my Facebook wall today was worth sharing. Identities covered by red blobs. Facebook friends, you know who you are.
Post 1: My wife is the best. I love you. Feliz Día de San Valentín.
Post 2: And then people are surprised that I dislike this day. How is it romantic to spend tons on paper and glue without writing a single word?
SXSW 2013 Band Geography
The SXSW (South by Southwest) Music Festival 2013 lineup is up! Very exciting. There are 479 bands listed from all over the world for this amazing Austin, TX event. I got curious about how they are spread out. So I broke out and charted it for your enjoyment. It’s all in Google Drive, so you can click on the charts to get more details or you can see all the data here.
US vs Rest Of The World
As expected, almost two thirds of the bands are from the home country. I don’t know how this compares historically, but I would guess that the US share has been slowly declining as the event grows in size and notoriety.
Click for interactive control
US bands by state
This one you definitely want to click on so you can see in more detail. To my surprise, there are nearly as many Californian acts as there are Texan!
Click for interactive control
International
As expected, US-speaking Canada, UK, and Australia are the most represented. Southern neighbor Mexico is next. The biggest surprise in my opinion is that tiny Israel is next, with 10 bands! Good, since I like Israeli music. Saddest surprise: nothing from Colombia. Colombian bands are always a big draw. As circumstantial evidence, an old SXSW photo I posted with Bomba Estereo’s Colombian hottie lead singer Li Saumet is one of the top traffic referrers to The MKX®. Go ahead, look it up on Google Image.
Click for interactive control
And only because I can and because it’s cool (Google Docs Drive FTW!), here’s a World Map showing the number of bands per country:
Click for interactive control
1Password boomarklet for iOS
I’m a huge fan of 1Password. If you aren’t using it or some other secure wallet / password manager, you should go set it up, then come back and read this.
In any case, I often find myself browsing on my iPad/iPhone and land in some website that I need to log into (my bank, Twitter, Reddit, Google, whatever). Since I use unique random un-rememberable passwords on every single website, I have to:
- Copy the URL from the Safari URL bar
- Open 1Password
- Paste it inside 1Password’s built-in browser
- Use 1Password’s auto-fill
or the reverse which is more painful:
- Open 1Password
- Find the login info I need
- Copy
- Go back to Safari
- Paste
So I wrote a small bookmarklet that will open the current Safari address in 1Password. It works with 1Password for iOS 4.1. And here it is:
In order to install it while on your Mac, just drag the “Open in 1Password” link to the Bookmarks bar. If enabled, iCloud Safari syncing will take care of making the bookmarklet show up on your iPhone/iPad.
If you want to install it directly from your iPhone / iPad, follow these instructions.
Once it’s installed, you can visit any page in Safari. Click on the bookmarklet you just created and the page should open in 1Password. I hope this saves several minutes of your life!
My other set of bookmarklets for changing font size in iOS Safari is quite handy and popular too.
Cutting the cheese
What would you do with close to 4 Kg of Dutch Gouda cheese? I need suggestions that do not involve waste.
The MKX® has moved!
Notice anything different? Look up. As in the URL bar of your browser. Yes, that’s right. After The MKX® has moved. We have dropped the .com!
Our team of economists determined that given 2 million daily page views, and the fact that typing .com takes about 0.67 seconds in average, we are saving the world economy about 372.2 hours of lost productivity every day!
Since we have way less hits, the productivity increase is not nearly as dramatic. But still, the new URL is cooler. Visit us at http://Marcos.Kirsch.mx from now on! Or just use the old address which will just transparently redirect you… but wouldn’t you want to save 0.67 seconds of your day?
Romantic Adventures in Cambodia
Well, it’s finally happened… the years I invested in courting, becoming engaged to, and most recently marrying The MKX® head honcho have finally paid off, because I’ve been given the world’s first ever guest spot! It was no easy feat, but let this be a lesson to you all – dreams really can come true, with the right combination of prayer, hard work and determination.
So what I want to share today, in what I hope is my first of many guest posts, is one of the adventures Marcos and I experienced on our recent trip to Asia. We were in Siem Reap, Cambodia on an intense, packed three-day itinerary planned by our wonderful tuk tuk driver, Barang. We had an awesome time exploring Angkor Wat and saw many incredible temples. Barang promised us a romantic, sunset boat ride to end our three-day experience, and we were looking forward to it – he had Marcos at “romantic”!
So finally, the day arrived. It was pouring rain and we had to drive through many unpaved dirt roads to get to our boat. If you’ve never ridden in a tuk tuk while it’s pouring on unpaved muddy roads… then you really should get out more often! But you should also know that it gets a bit bumpy. And by that I mean I swear I could literally feel my brain bouncing around inside of my skull the entire ride [editor’s note: too much empty space?], which isn’t as pleasant as it may sound. Upon finally arriving at our destination, bodies somehow still intact, we were told that the cost per person was $20. This may not seem like a lot by American standards, but to put it in perspective, a two-person dinner at a nice restaurant in downtown Siem Reap with milkshakes and beers, including taxes and tip, cost us $9. So we were skeptical, to put it mildly, but at that point we were already way too far into the journey to turn around (plus I couldn’t put my poor head through the drive again). We figured that for $20, we would be going on an elite cruise with dinner and drinks included, which sounded fun, so we paid and began our adventure.
Honeymoon photos
I’ve already posted a few anecdotes and photos from our honeymoon. But I just finished processing over 1000 photos and uploaded a large sample (but not nearly all) to
The MKX® Photo Central – since some of you expressed interest.