[REBLOG] Interactive Project: The Hello Wall.

The content below first appeared in the Thought Box blog on January 4, 2012. It was written by Deathgleaner. Click here for original post.

This is another example of a great project that uses social networking crowd-sourcing. I re-discovered this while looking through my Twitter following list. Check it out:

The project gathers @replies and mentions from Twitter, and displays an animation on a giant screen mounted on a building based on users’ tweets. (When it first came out, it was mounted in London, but now, it’s looking for a place to stay.)
Continue reading

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Kindle Fire Somewhat Review

So, I bought myself a Kindle Fire from Amazon.

Quite simply put, I quite enjoy the tablet. It’s just the right size, and isn’t skimpy on computation power.

I haven’t done a fair comparison of having accelerated browsing on vs off however, but I did notice that it does not like CloudFlare’s IPv6, but then again, most things don’t.

In general, it is a nice tablet with good battery life.

My only complaints are that it doesn’t include all the Google stuff, and there’s no 24-hour clock option.

So while this is just a quick review, feel free to ask questions in the comments, and I will answer.

(This is so short because I did it on my Kindle Fire.)

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Happy Holidays from THEOKS!

As you might have noticed, the authors of this blog have been very busy. We haven’t posted here in three plus months, and there may have been a lot of things we missed. We apologize for that.
However, there are always a few occasions that we never miss, especially the holidays. Whether you’re Christian, Jewish, or atheist, the holidays are a time of great cheer and fun.

Thus, we wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever it is that you celebrate.

Again, happy holidays everyone!

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A Time of Rememberance

You probably already know, but as I write this, it is the day of the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the United States by terrorists. September 11th, 2001 was a day that changed all of America, for the rest of time.

What prides me about this country is that as a country, we did not strike back with the same violence that struck us. We instead did something good for the countries that were home to the terrorists. We sewed the seeds of democracy, in hopes that their lives would improve. Many people would have simply dropped bombs on the Middle East, but we took this approach of inducing peace.

This year as well, we found and killed Osama bin Landen, founder of the extremist group, Al Qaeda. While many people applauded his death, with many shouting “USA!! USA!!” in D.C. after news arrived of Osama’s death.

I’m glad I live in such a proud country, and I’d like to pay my respects to the soldiers that worked to defend our freedoms, those who just were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and killed by the plane crashes, as well as the families who lost loved ones 10 years ago.

We will never forget.

Animated flag image by 3DFlags.com

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Well Here We Are Again

Lots has happened for OKS since I last wrote. The things that have happened have been good and bad, but where we are at now is a place I am content with.

Comcast began blocking port 25 TCP, and that was very greedy of them. They want my family to, during this economic downturn, pay more for that, and that just ain’t happening.  However, those nice people at Google gave me a good deal, and now I am using Google Apps for mail at no charge. Aren’t they nice?

On brighter news, the OKS Minecraft server has become a beautiful place. It isn’t exactly stock, but people like it. The latest and coolest addition is the Dynamic Map. The Dynamic Map lets you see what is on the server right now. As the world updates, the Dynamic Map does as well. Hence the name, Dynamic. Right now, an Amazon EC2 instance is hard at work preparing a new static map render, and when it completes, the link will be shown here on this page.

UPDATE: The render that was taking place is long since done, and it is available at http://ec2.theoks.tk/mczoomable_new/.

Thanks, and have fun!

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A post? They have those on blogs?

I load the front page of my blog nearly every day. I just can’t seem to create a post that has enough value that it’s worth posting at all. However, now I will.

That aside, I have been looking at CloudFlare, and I’ve implemented it in some areas. WordPress is locked to a domain, so this blog isn’t behind CloudFlare. Most sections of theoks.net can be viewed behind CloudFlare by replacing theoks.net with theoks.tk.

What CloudFlare does for you is that it caches static resources like CSS, Javascript, and images, closer to you, resulting in faster load of images and styles. Especially on the image board, and the zoomable Minecraft map render this can be advantageous.

I have also added Google’s +1 button to post pages, as well as the home page, and moved the Tweet button with it to below the post content.

In related news I got into Google+, which is pretty exciting. You may ask me for an invite, but I cannot guarantee that you will be allowed to join.

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I’m Back from St. Louis!

Yes indeed I am back in my native land of Seattle. I’m almost to my house now.

In case you didn’t know, I went to St. Louis for the FIRST world championships. It was great. Unfortunately I left before everything finished because my flight left before everything ended.

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Blog Optimizations

So I took some time to check things up, and I looked up some stuff. I took a look at Mashable’s 11 Ways to Speed Up WordPress. I picked up W3 Total Cache and set it up. I set everything to store in memcached, and in two memcached instances, one on my server that runs my blog, and one that runs on a virtual machine on a server in my basement.

It seems to have sped some loading time up, but I don’t know. If you think it did, by all means, comment.

Thanks to those behind W3 Total Cache, and Cyrus Patten, author of the post on Mashable.

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