I got a Nest thermostat and have been very happy with it. They emailed me recently to take a customer survey so I’m sharing my comments here, too.

I was stumped trying to set the Away state from my iPhone app to the point where I just adjusted the temperature down to my default away temperature. I overlooked the toggle marked ‘Home’ perhaps because I didn’t immediately associate the opposite of ‘Home’ with ‘Away’. I figured it out a few days later, and I won’t likely forget now, but I really felt dumb at the time. Maybe tapping on the little house icon itself would be a more intuitive switch for the home/away setting.

We keep our house pretty cool, so every temperature setting shows the leaf symbol, making it superfluous.

I’d love to see my energy usage stats displayed on the web admin in a more graphical manner. Having only the last week’s info accessible only on the nest thermostat is frustrating. My wife and I are brand new homeowners of a 100-year-old uninsulated house and we’d love to be able to compare the next few year’s worth of heating data side by side to track our house’s overall efficiency as we insulate and seal up the structure.

Installing:

Drag the plugin folder to wp-content/plugins NOT wp-content/[activeTheme]/plugins. Whew. I actually had to read the readme.txt for that one. From your plugins admin page, activate the Custom Sidebars widget.

Configuring:

Once Installed, you should see a Custom sidebars item under your Appearance menu in the admin area.

First step is to select which existing sidebars you want to be able to override. I have 26 on my site, but there are only 3 main ones that I’m working with, so I select those three and click the ‘Save Changes’ button just below. I know that single posts on my site use the Home sidebar by default so I make sure that’s one of the ones I select here.

Next, I create a New Sidebar in the area named just that. Clicking the ‘Create Sidebar’ button below will make it appear on the ‘All the Custom Sidebars’ list just below that. This will create a new sidebar that will show up on the right side of the Apprearance > Widgets admin page.

To configure the new custom sidebar, go to Apprearance > Widgets or click on the ‘Configure Widgets’ link towards the right of the ‘All the Custom Sidebars’ list.

On the Widgets page, click the expanding button on the right of your new sidebar area to expand. Your new custom sidebar should appear at the bottom of available sidebars. Drag and drop one of the available widgets over to the sidebar and it should pop open to allow you to enter values for its custom parameters. I’ve dragged a simple image widget for this example, but you can drag as many different widgets as you need to the sidebar.

Now you’re ready to create a filter. Go back to the Custom Sidebars admin page under the Appearance menu item. Once you’re there, click on the Default Sidebars tab. I know that single posts normally use the ‘home-right’ sidebar. So, under the ‘Mountain Festival’ category, using the ‘home-right’ dropdown, I select ‘Mountain Festival Promo’.

This effectively overrides the Home sidebar for every post categorized as ‘Mountain Festival’ and replaces it with the ‘Mountain Festival Promo’ one. Click ‘Save Changes’ at the botttom left and you’re finished. Browse to a post in that category and you should see the new custom sidebar in place. Awesome!

Huge thanks to marquex who wrote this plugin.

Feel free to post any questions or corrections in the comments section.

fixrbconfig error

On page 24 of ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’ they give you a tip to ‘fix’ the Apple default configuration of Ruby which produced the following error:

sudo gem install fixrbconfig
sudo fixrbconfig
====================
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0/ruby.h does not exist. This probably means you haven't yet installed Xcode from the Tiger DVD. You won't be able to compile Ruby extensions without it. Please install it then rerun this program.

I had just previously installed Xcode, so I knew that wasn’t it. I decided to run a search for the ‘ruby.h’ file in case it really was there, just in a different place, and it turned out it was:

cd /
find . -name "ruby.h" -print

./usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin8.0/ruby.h

This searched through my entire hard drive, so it took a little while returning the odd ‘Permission denied’ error along the way, but eventually it did turn up, so I copied it to where fixrbconfig was expecting it to be, reran fixrbconfig and it all seemed to work out fine.

sudo cp /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin8.0/ruby.h /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0/ruby.h
sudo fixrbconfig

• sign that my boss is flirting with me
• journal on shopping bags attributes
• darned socks
• freelance profile pop designer pepsi
• styrofoam letters
• sealcoating school
• punk rock desktops
• blender.gif
• muhammad ali stencils
• raising maggot
• fantasy babes
• what is the size of guam
• burritoville burritos calories
• dough stretcher
• big nose day disses
• how do i make myself puke?
• burnt with her cigarette
• metallic smell in bedroom
• buy scarred but smarter
• caught up in the rapture midi

Critics complain about the inconsistencies in recording techniques on this album, but what never falters is the intimacy and patience with which the songs are wrought. I was amazed to find out that as many as six songs on the disc are covers, they are so well chosen and executed. Calmly and courageously inspired, this the rarest kind of listening experience.

Apple O’ - Deerhoof

Deerhoof are so relentlessly creative they remind me of a puppy running around a farmyard. All of their albums are so packed and varied it’s hard to single one out but this one has the greatest range in mood and feel and provides the biggest payoff for your attention. I think driving fast to music is pretty foolhardy, but once I caught myself doing close to 95 m.p.h. on I-90 once just because L’amour Stories came on the car stereo; that song is pure exhiliration.

The Queen Of Mean - DQE

Grace Braun’s voice scares some people which is a shame because her soul is made of white light. Perfect pitch is superfluous when caught up in the rapture of life. This album could have been written by a Shaker eldress instructed to create the perfect rockabilly album. Through toil all things are possible.

Featuring “Birds” - Quasi

Janet Weiss whales the shit out of those drums here, which is great because I’ve never been able to fully embrace the Sleater-Kinney sound. The crunchy organ on this is tight and tasty and the clean piano songs work where so many of Billy Joel’s and Ben Folds’ don’t. Even though the woeful post-ironic tone to the lyrics gets a little played out, they are creative and true, plus I am such a sucker for the boy-girl vocal harmonizing. This is melodic rock songwriting at its finest.

Continued Story / Hi, How Are You? - Daniel Johnston

These inventive songs convey hope through existential pain in a way that makes your own life seem manageable. Horrible sound quality prevails, but the genius melodies shine through. I can never get over the snippet of relationship heard on ‘Running Water Revisited’ where the tape runs through several takes of Daniel coaching a kid on ad-libbing over his guitar playing.

Ed’s Redeeming Qualities - Ed’s Redeeming Qualities

Recorded in kitchens and living rooms on a boom box, the Lo-fi-ness sounds like shit, but if you got caught up in that you would totally miss the point. This eight song homemade cassette changed my life.

One Foot In the Grave - Beck

Before the big budgets and brand name producers arrived to secure Beck’s genre-hopping sample-crazed crown, this album shows the true genius songwriter skillfully flatpicking his thrift store guitar. Stephen Malkmus also writes freeverse lyrics and they come off as snobby and affected and fail to make an emotional connection with me. Beck’s heart and vision are firmly intact here despite his brain possibly scrambled by drugs.

Voice Brother And Sister - Summer Hymns

I still am waiting for the lyrics to all sink in, but the depth of arrangements make the required repeated listentings worth it. This is the album I put on when I have the flu so bad that I can’t pick my head up off the pillow, I want to tear my eyes out and replace them with ice cubes, my hair aches and I can’t stand the world. This music is still able to get to me and take me away.

The Willis Files - Unbunny

The occaisionally goofy lyrics help diffuse the spot-on emotional musing here. You might not even notice all the churnings about sexual confusion, inadequacy and shyness if you never looked under the veneer of superheroes and freakshows. This is a great litmus test album. I’ll put this on for new acquaintances and if they can get past the “midget juggling pieces of cheese” line I know it’ll be worth the effort to get to know them better.

Maxi German Rave Blast Hits 3 - Bodenstandig 2000

Listnening to this is like arriving late to a party in your hometown that has been raging on a street you never knew existed. If you’re into German art students hacking 8-bit computing devices to sequence spastic pop songs, then this one’s for you. There’s MIDI, there’s acappella beatboxing, sound collage, sampling, it’s all good. Only a couple of songs are in English, but it doesn’t matter, fun music ist allgemeinhin. Kabelfreaks unite!

Cutting a design up into eight 2K images will help a page load faster than leaving it as one 20K image, (16K < 20K) right? Not really. Each HTTP request generates about 1K of server-client traffic overhead, so eight 2K images with HTTP headers creates about 24K of traffic, where one 20K image creates only 21K. Not the most dramatic example but some site layouts are made from 30 or more image files not counting content or advertising images, slowing down load times significantly.

Content text images

Oh sure, Verdana and Times get a little old, but the beauty of HTML is it’s searchability, search engines parse the text of a page that (hopefully) brings users. Locking column headers, quotes, image descriptions or any text in GIFs or JPEGs makes it invisible to the indexing that search engines do. Time spent designing and updating text images is time spent working against the goal of delivering web content.

Print design hierarchy

Many print design ideas fail miserably on the web, but the fundamental organizational rules still hold: the most important piece of information should have the most visual impact, the second should fall behind that and so on. Giving users too many options on every page inhibits the process of the user finding what they’re looking for.

Text link to every page of content

Create a text link to each of the pages of your blog. Google will not follow links in image maps, and will never find script-delivered content ( i.e. /myblog.cgi?day=23&month=september&year=2006) without being sent there explicitly. Maintaining a site map is a good way to accomplish this. Not moving these links every time you archive old content or re-design your site is likewise imperative to building up repeat traffic.

Visited text link colors make sense

Links turn purple when you click on them, that way you can tell where you’ve been. Spending a ton of time and effort creating a graphic navigation aid is noble, but if you’d just let your text link colors behave like the W3 intended, maybe you’d have more time for other things. Like drinking, sneezing or being patient with children, you know, the good stuff.

All style in the stylesheet

Ideally you should be able to re-design your whole site right from the CSS file and never touch one page of HTML. Sometimes it makes sense to link a secondary stylesheet for a one-off page, but an inline style declaration will never outlive the relevance of the content it’s supporting.

Use all the HTML tags before you start creating your own

Know your tags! A lot of the existing HTML tags were intended for pretty specific contexts, but all it takes is a little creativity and some CSS reformatting to get milage out of these. The <q> tag is much more compact than <span class=”inline-fancy”>.

<big> <blockquote> <code> <cite>

<del> <em> <ins> <kbd> <q> <samp>

<small> <src> <strong> <tt> <var>