There are a few things about this walk to make it notable:

1. I got up from my desk at 11:35pm and headed out for a brisk walk, mainly so that I could try to get over 6,000 steps today.
2. I measured my steps using a Fitbit, and had the specific target because it’s part of an internal fitness challenge Automattic is hosting through Keas.
3. I took the chance to compare Fitbit to RunKeeper for measuring walking (mainly looking at distance accuracy, but also at calorie burn).
4. A guy (probably high) most definitely lined me up to attempt to mug me, he even tried to walk with me/talk/engage to distract me and get me to stop, but I out-walked him and he kind of gave up.

So; fun stuff all around. Here’s the data, from RunKeeper:

and for the same time period from Fitbit:

What’s interesting here?

• FB reports that I burned 163 over RK’s 126; that’s a 23% difference.
• FB reports that I covered 1.22 miles, while RK reports only 0.76 miles. Almost 40% difference.
• Pace is barely even worth comparing when distance is so differently recorded. Time even shows as 40 seconds different, although I’ll give FB the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s rounding.
• You can actually see the part where the guy approached me, because I sped up. If you look at the map from RK, it was on Larkin St, between Broadway and Pacific. He tried to “walk with me” so that he could get me to stop, but instead I just walked faster. I topped out right there at 14.4 minutes per mile according to RK (just over 4 miles per hour).
• If I hadn’t been trying to meet a daily fitness goal, I wouldn’t have been walking around at midnight, making myself a target for getting mugged

Maybe I should run instead of walking, since high/homeless/whatever people are even less likely to give chase?

window.open('', '_self', '');
window.close();

Basically it reopens the window on itself, then immediately closes itself. Neat. Haven’t had any problems with it not working in other browsers, but I also haven’t super-widely tested it.

Quite a while ago (like, in at least 2009), I started thinking about regaining control of all the content I was producing online. I was posting photos to Flickr, saving bookmarks to Delicious. I started Tweeting. I was checking in. All fun and games, and all of those services offer great tools for interacting with them (let’s face it, tools that are much better than WordPress’, because they are focussed on one thing). So I figured, why not write importers for these services and pull my content back over to my WordPress. And keep doing it periodically, so that I could keep using those tools. I want WordPress to be my “home on the web”, my digital hub, but I want to use these neat tools with their fancy apps and what-have-you.

Very quickly, I realized that if I was going to do anything useful on most web services, I’d need to be able to authenticate with them. No biggie, right? I know my username and password… Oh. Right. OAuth. Turns out that most web services use OAuth (or something similar) to authenticate, and it turns out that that’s actually a bit of a bear to implement, when all you want to do is write a simple little Twitter importer. And then again for a Foursquare importer. And a Flickr importer.

What I needed was a shared, generic authentication framework that would do all the heavy lifting for me. I would tell it I wanted a connection to specific service, and if it didn’t have one, it’d walk the user through the process of getting one. It’d give me a standardized format of authentication credentials and abstract out all the complexity of making authenticated requests against those services. Then it would make me a coffee*. What I needed, was Keyring.

And so Keyring was born. Basically it’s a bunch of code that’ll handle external authentication with a web service so you don’t have to. It’ll store tokens/passwords/whatever, can talk to all kinds of different services, and is really, really extendable. It also has hooks. Lots of them. So if you want to do something custom, you probably can. It’s intended to be a foundation for writing other plugins, and really doesn’t do much interesting on its own.

I already have importers written for Twitter, Delicious and Foursquare which are based on Keyring and so far they’re working pretty nicely. There’s a lot of work to go on this project though. For Keyring to be a truly powerful framework, I need to:

• Drastically improve the UI, which is a hodge-podge of hideousness at the moment
• Improve a few parts of the Core UX which are pretty clunky right now
• Put in some more failsafes/helpers for making sure things are up and running before allowing plugins to use Keyring
• Improve internal security
• Tighten up Permissions/Roles restrictions all over the place
• Handle multi-user blogs (especially around token storage)
• Work on Multi-Site
• Support more services (preferences? suggestions?)
• Figure out a good way of allowing people to drop in their own Service extensions (and not overwrite them with updates)
• Improve the handling of auth flows in other plugins, and preferably move as much of that logic as possible into Keyring Core

I’m slowly working on this, but it’s all kind of a personal project at this point, so it’s just a few hours here and there. My main goal is to get it functioning so that I can get my content back. Once that’s done, then I’ll spend more time tightening it up for other/platform use. I also have a couple of other “companion plugins” that I’m working on — auto-linking text for Twitter @mentions and #hashtags, mining posts and downloading remote media (e.g. Instagram images) and some stuff around geo for mapping things like Tweets and Foursquare checkins (all the geo-data is imported in the importers I wrote).

Next on the list is abstracting and then releasing the importers that I have. That will give people something more tangible to use as an example. After that I’ll be working on a Flickr importer, but that’s a pretty big project in and of itself.

So, what do you think? Useful? Waste of time? Massive, gaping, horrendous holes? LMK (in the comments) and we’ll see what we can do.

And you know the drill — patches welcome

* Sadly, Keyring will not make you coffee. Yet.

I’ve had or tried a bunch of different messenger-style bags in my time, but I may have come across the Perfect Bag™. The Timbuk2 Command has all sorts of neat features and extras that make it suit me absolutely perfectly. Here are a few highlights:

• TSA-compliant: There’s a perfect sleeve in the back of the bag for sliding in a laptop. It also has a separate, well-padded and super-soft sleeve for dropping an iPad in there (yeah that’s right, specific sleeves for your laptop AND iPad. Welcome to San Francisco). The best part about these sleeves is that they’re on the back-side of the bag, which zips to fold out flat. Butterfly this baby open, drop the bag in the x-ray machine and don’t even fret about that “enhanced pat-down”.
• Luggage pass-through: Ever tried juggling multiple bags in an airport? It’s a nightmare. Between work and pleasure I travel quite a bit, so knowing that I can slide my bag over the handle of my rolling carry-on is a nice touch. When I’m not using it for that, the bottom velcros shut for an extra, over-sized sleeve to drop things in for quick access.
• Quick-adjust shoulder strap: I always wear my messenger bags on my right shoulder (so the bag is on my left hip), so the quick-adjust buckle is in the middle of my chest. This puts it in the perfect position to quickly adjust where the bag hangs, and doubles as a super-handy place to temporarily hang my sunglasses from.
• Super-slick buckles: while they’re a little tricky to get into position right now (it’s brand new, so the straps are still very flat), I love these buckles, and think they’re way more stylish than the previous clip-buckle style on most bags.
• Space: I got the small version of this bag, and it’s (relatively speaking) HUGE. OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s perfect for what I need, and fits way more than I was expecting. I can easily (and comfortably) carry a 13″ MacBook Air, power adaptor, towel, book, water bottle (tall Kleen Kanteen style) and a bunch of small things (keys etc). That reminds me…
• Dedicated power brick pocket: There’s a neat, almost hidden pocket below the main compartment where you can store your power brick so that it’s easy to get to without taking out everything else in your bag.
• Napoleon Pocket: This is the one thing that is a bit of a bummer for me. There’s a cool side-accessible pocket into the main accessory panel, but it’s only accessible if you wear your bag over the left shoulder. It would have been nice if they had the zipper on both ends of this pocket (which doesn’t seem like it’d be a problem), and then it would be completely ambidextrous.

Between the travel-friendly features, the double-gadget sleeves and the overall space available, this is probably my perfect bag. If only the Napoleon pocket was double-ended, I would have literally nothing to even kind of complain about. Well played Timbuk2, well played indeed.

• A WordPress installation, with a group of people who all have accounts
• A small Mac/Windows app that lived on your desktop/menu-bar/somewhere easy to get at. Let’s call it… Guppy.
• All users download a copy of Guppy and configure it to point to the same WordPress install.
• Guppy now sits on their computer, waiting for them to interact with it.
• When they drop files on this copy of Guppy, it does some magic
  • Images will be uploaded and inserted into a Post, or set as a gallery (if there’s more than one),
  • Text files will be uploaded and rendered as pre-formatted text,
  • Other will be uploaded and attached to a Post,
• Double-clicking/clicking Guppy would open a small window where they could type in some text (and perhaps also drop files into that window and have them appear as “objects” within their text)
• Right-clicking Guppy would allow you to change options, jump to the configured website (like you didn’t already have it open in a browser tab!), create a new instance of Guppy, maybe some other stuff.
• All of this content is published as Posts on the connected WordPress install, and is automatically formatted beautifully (perhaps via an optional theme that’s geared heavily towards collaboration?). Comments are enabled, so you can discuss things on that site, right there while you’re looking at it.

In essence this is just a streamlined, simplified, beautiful WordPress client. There is nothing stopping someone from creating this today. There you go internet, 1 more free idea.

Today I had my first check-in (from home), and it was fun. It also felt good to know that I was helping the city keep track an emergency system that might save lives at some point. I checked in via the repeater at 443.100+ tone 114.8 and had a bit of interference, but it was clear enough for the net control to hear/understand me after a clarification. ”KJ6LFV, back to net control”

Over the Thanksgiving break, some friends and I went camping over on Angel Island, in the San Francisco Bay. It’s quite a unique experience, camping in amongst so much city/so many people, yet being so isolated. We caught a ferry from SF over to Tiburon*, and then another from there to Angel Island. Once on the island we checked in with the ranger, then backpacked (via North Ridge Trail) over to our spot (campsite #3, on the East Bay side of the island).

We were greeted with a pretty amazing view out over the East Bay, which continued all night as it remained clear and cold. The lights were thoroughly impressive and provided enough light for us to night-hike up to the top of Mt. Livermore (once our eyes had adjusted). The view from there was even more impressive, providing complete 360° views of the entire bay area.

Not having a fire there was pretty rough (only charcoal fires and camp stoves are allowed, due to fire hazard), so we had to have a nip of whiskey to keep us warm instead. We also got to see a few pretty big shooting stars while we were sitting out chatting at night.

In the morning we took our time to get up, enjoy some breakfast (more Thanksgiving leftovers!) and then hiked back down to Ayala Cover, where you catch the ferry. 2 ferry rides later and we were back in the city again.

*Note: During summer it would be much easier to just catch a ferry direct to Angel Island, but because it was off-season and the day after Thanksgiving, the ferries were running on holiday schedules, so we had to do it this way.

Most of my work for Automattic is done on a remote sandbox machine, somewhere in Texas. I’ll often jump in and make smaller edits over SSH via vi, but when I’m doing something bigger I much prefer to work locally, using TextMate (I’m on a Mac, obviously). To do that, I need to be able to access files as if they were local, which means either duplicating them to my machine (lame, annoying) or mounting them directly.

I’ve been doing that via one of the following options, and I’m wondering if anyone out there has a better solution.

• Mount locally using Transmit 4, via SFTP or
• Mount locally using Macfusion (which uses MacFUSE), via SSH

I’ve tried both for a while now. They both work. Except for when they don’t. Here’s what I’d found:

• Transmit seems more responsive, when it’s working
• Macfusion often crashes Finder the first time I access a newly connected filesystem (and is then reasonably stable)
• Transmit much more randomly just stops working and gives no indication, I just can’t browse any more and have to disconnect/reconnect
• Macfusion allows you to easily customize a neat icon for each filesystem
• Transmit seems to have more aggressive caching (or a longer TTL on it) of filesystem details (part of what makes it feel more responsive)

So, have you used one of the following methods? Is there a configuration option I’m missing? How do you go about solving this problem?

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I need to be able to do this over the open internet (securely), where I’m not connected directly to the same network as the server.

If there’s one thing that travel has done for me lately, it’s made me recognize and accept how addicted and reliant I am upon my smart phone (in my case, an iPhone).

When you travel (internationally), you have to make a hard choice — do I shell out big $$$ to AT&T to get an international data plan, do I shell out even bigger $$$ to use roaming data, or do I sever the umbilical and disable roaming data. Roll the dice on being able to get wifi. Or worse yet — don’t use the internet at all. Gasp.

Traveling with others, I get this feeling that some people who don’t get an international plan are hopping from connectivity bubble to connectivity bubble, holding their breath in between and hoping they make it to the next one alive. There’s a sense of relief when they can get back online. Check Twitter. Check email. Check in. Check a map. OK, now hold your breath and hope we can find somewhere else with wifi before it’s too late!

I’ve found myself more and more often opting to not get any data access at all, and to actually relish the experience of not having connectivity for the most part. When I was in Chile, it was rough at first, not having access to maps, Google, etc. But I got used to it. It was like taking a step back in time. I talked to people. I used a paper map. It wasn’t so bad. It turns out that not having connectivity to the world wide web forces you to live in… the world right in front of you.

That’s not a bad thing. Try it.

A while back, I got a Wakemate and was pretty gung-ho about it being a great device for monitoring your sleep and helping you feel a bit more refreshed when you wake up. I recently picked up a Fitbit as well, so as a bit of fun, I thought I’d compare the 2 devices for sleep monitoring and write up a bit of a review. Here we go.

Getting Started

Once you’ve got yourself a Wakemate ($59.99) and a Fitbit ($99.95), you’re ready to get started. There isn’t much initial setup with the Wakemate, since it just interacts with your phone. You have to pair it like any other device but that’s about it. For the Fitbit, you’ll need to actually install an app on your computer (I did it on a Mac, running OS X Lion). The app that is installed handles syncing your data when you’re in range, or when you plug the device in to recharge.

Sleep “Session” Handling

I prefer the way that you use the Fitbit for tracking sleep. It has some intelligence built into it so that when you record an “activity” overnight, it takes that as your sleep. To do that, you just hold down the (single) button on the device for 2 seconds. When you wake up, you need to hold the button down to stop your “activity” again, which I sometimes forget to do.

With the Wakemate, I need to load the app on my iPhone, make sure Bluetooth is on (sometimes I turn it off to save battery), turn on the wristband (I constantly have to turn it off because the battery life doesn’t seem very good), make sure it’s connected, then hit the button to start a sleep session (and make sure it initiates properly, because I’ve had problems with that as well. Once your alarm goes off, you need to wake up enough to enter your code to unlock your phone, then hit the “I’m Awake” button. Sometimes this can be tough if you’re half asleep

Between the two devices, I think Fitbit wins here for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s really easy (push button on, push button off)
2. No additional devices involved (doesn’t require interaction with my phone)
3. The wristband is more comfortable

Sleep Data

Both devices give you a website where you can review your data. Both devices also now have native iPhone applications which include access to your data (current and historical). The Fitbit app is a lot more full-featured, but that’s because Fitbit in general is targeting a lot more than just sleep. Here is a side-by-side comparison of data collected from each device, on the same night, wearing them on the same arm:

Wakemate Data

Fitbit Data

Features/Functionality

A big point to note here is that the 2 devices are fundamentally intended for different purposes, they just happen to cross over a certain amount. The Fitbit fundamentally measures steps (through motion) and will give you a distance and calorie approximation as well. The design of the device allows you to clip it just about anywhere on your both or clothes. The Wakemate tracks your sleep through the same mechanism, but does not give any measurement other than “movement” while sleeping. Since it is a wristband, your options on how to wear it are pretty limited. The Fitbit also allows you to view your current (for today) data right on the device (via an integrated OLED display) which is  a really nice touch. Being able to check how many steps I’ve done in a day is a great motivator to get up and do some more.

Verdict

Overall, I think the Fitbit is a better purchase, even though it’s nearly twice as much. Since it is a more general-purpose device, and since you will be more likely to wear it all the time, you’ll end up with a lot more, valuable information. With a longer battery life, simpler daily use and a more refined appearance in general, it’s just a better product.

Now that I’ve tried these, I’m really curious to see what the Jawbone UP is like…

This past Saturday, I had a test that was long overdue — a test that I originally should have taken almost 2 years ago. I tested to go from Level 4 (Green Belt) to Level 5 (Blue Belt) in Krav Maga at my gym here in San Francisco. I have missed this test twice now (once each year) because of scheduling conflicts, and thought I was going to miss it again this time around. Luckily things worked out and I was able to put the time in so that I felt ready for the test.

It feels like every time I walk around in San Francisco (and other places), I see all this cool artwork, quotes, stencils etc on the sidewalk that I’m sure a lot of people are missing or not appreciating. SidewalkScribbl.es will be a place to share those things. The site will most likely get a facelift to make things look better, but in the meantime I’m just getting started with some of the things I’ve already collected from around the place.

Keep an eye out for another *Scribbl.es site soon

A few weeks ago I attended a 3-day course titled “Scout Urban Escape & Evasion“, delivered by onPoint Tactical. The idea of it was to learn how to get around in a hostile  urban environment, assuming you were being pursued. That pursuit might be active or not, and might be post- or pre- apprehension of some sort (e.g. kidnapping). Sounds like fun, right?

So what did we learn? Here’s a quick summary of the material we covered during the 2 days of class-work:

• Understanding stress and its effects on the body
• Situational diligence
• E&E priorities/immediate actions
• Gear priorities, tiers & rules
• Caching: where, how, what
• Knowledge of terrain/area intel/Briefing Book
• Escaping from custody: picking handcuffs, escaping rope, duct tape and zip-ties/flex-cuffs
• Basic social engineering
• Understanding the baseline of an environment
• Disguises: cover for status, cover for action, fake ID
• Surveillance: types, detection, counter
• Lock picking
• Urban movement at day and night
• Dealing with attack dogs
• Working with cyclone fence, barbed wire and razor wire

We spent a lot of classroom time learning how to pick handcuffs and locks which was fun. Once you know how to pick handcuffs they are ridiculously easy. Picking door/pad-locks is a bit harder but also surprisingly easy. The highlight of the course was the full-day field exercise on day three (Saturday), which went something like this:

On the Friday night  we cached anything we thought we might need on Saturday. Whatever you hid had to be put somewhere that someone wouldn’t find it, otherwise you’d have to do without it. It was suggested that we’d need lock picks and some cash would be a good idea. Disguises optional, but might help evading our pursuers. We hid some smaller pieces that contributed to disguising us (hat, glasses, bag, coffee mug) along with lock picks, cash, a map, a small bag, a frisbee and a few other things we didn’t end up using. On Saturday morning we arrived at the hotel in Santa Clara at 8:30am and were whisked off to a room upstairs. Inside, the furniture was pushed out of the way and the lights were off. A single lamp shone in the corner and there was a guy there in a balaclava and ski goggles, dressed all in black. After a bit of back and forth, he pushed us against the wall, frisked us (taking anything he found that we weren’t supposed to have) and then threw us on the couch. We were then handcuffed to each other, hooded, and our hoods were duct taped on.

At this point, the “kidnappers” all left the room and we jumped into action. My hood was relatively easy to remove, so I got it off and then went to work on the handcuffs. I actually had 2 different picks and a shim on me that had escaped my cursory pat-down, so I grabbed one from my sock and undid our cuffs. We picked up some instructions from under our feet that would guide us through the day. Once we were out of the room, we headed for the stairs to make our escape. Right away, we ran into a couple of “Hunters” (the people who would be pursuing us all day). We dropped down a couple of floors and bolted across the hotel to the other set of stairs. There we headed back up stairs to shake them (which apparently worked) and eventually made our way downstairs and right out the front. We had wanted to get down the service elevator but every floor we passed had someone working there.

From the hotel, we made for our caches and picked up our stuff. Then we started zig-zagging along back streets and improvising weapons along the way (mostly bottles and concrete chunks at this point). Our instructions had informed us that we were to rendezvous at a set location with a “partisan” who would give us some information if we convinced them we were who we said we were, and that it would be a good idea for them to help us. Once we got that information, we were headed off to a specific intersection down towards San José. We headed off on foot towards transit options (bus), again sticking to back streets.

Along the way we came across a soccer ball which became a part of our disguise. We ended up kicking that thing for a large portion of the day. It helped to set our pace and kept our focus off the fact that people were supposed to be hunting us. Our path took us along an abandoned railway line for a little while, which was a gold-mine of improvised weapons: steel hooks, broken bottles, strips of metal, you name it. Eventually we got down to a major road where we could hop a bus headed in the direction we needed to be going. That got us close, but then we realized we were setting ourselves up to go through a choke point, so we hopped another bus to get past there. That took us past where we needed to be, so we doubled back through some running/hiking trails and hit our target intersection from a different angle.

Here we had to pick a lock before we could get some more information that would guide us for the rest of the day. Once that was done we were headed off towards downtown San José, which is where we were to be spending the rest of the day. Once we got there, we were to stay within a bounded area and never stay in one place for more than 30 minutes. We had a list of tasks to accomplish that kept us pretty busy: things like finding a working pay phone, acquiring $2 from someone (legally) and location outdoor-accessible potable water. Once all of that was done, we had to meet at a final meet point (at 4:30pm) for a debrief and beer.

It was a long day, and according to RunKeeper (which I had running for most of the day; we had to have our cellphones with us for safety reasons, but we’re allowed to use them to help us), we covered almost 18 miles (including the bus trip). We managed to avoid capture for the whole day, and in fact the only run-in we had with the Hunters was in the morning. One of them said that they had seen me towards the end of the day, but couldn’t get to me to capture me. We finished all of our tasks and got to the final meeting point roughly on time (although we had to get a cab for the last bit to get there on time, because we hadn’t realized how far out our final destination was).

All in all it was a great course that was a lot of fun for someone with no real training in this sort of thing but a solid interest. I feel like it gave me a better understanding of things in an urban setting, and definitely gave me a few new skills to practice (especially picking hand-cuffs/locks!). I was actually expecting to be roughed up more/treated a little worse during the field exercise, and assumed that we’d get caught, or at least chased. I don’t know whether to put that down to being too tough and good at this stuff, or that they were soft on us and weren’t great at covering all the ground they had to cover as Hunters. I’ll probably go with the second set of options Either way, this is a good set of skills to add to my hopefully-never-need-to-use-this-but-it’s-fun-to-know-anyway list.

About 9 years ago, I picked up the movie The Hunted from an ex-rental discount bin. I hadn’t heard of it, and didn’t know what to expect, but it had Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro in it, so I figured it would be at least decent. Instead of being just decent, I loved it. Apart from becoming a favorite movie, it started me down the path of discovering Tom Brown (who was a technical consultant on the skills and knife used in the movie) and a field of interest that continues today.

Tom Brown is a man with a lot of history. I won’t bother reciting it all, but to summarize; he was effectively raised by arguably one of the last truly native-living native Americans, an Apache known to him as Grandfather. Grandfather had spent his life learning the skills of all the still-existing “primitive” peoples, and passed on a good deal of that information to Brown. Part of Brown’s upbringing was to learn Grandfather’s love of the Earth, and his fear that modern people are destroying it, and before too long there will be nothing left to destroy.

Since 1978 (when the school opened), Brown has been on a mission to educate as many people as possible about the Earth and the peril it faces through our hands. Through the lens of these primitive skills and ways of thinking, he aims to bring people closer in touch with the world around them, and at the same time to make them more self-sufficient in a survival situation, or to even be able to live fully from the land.

Fast forward to about a year and a half ago, when I picked up a copy of the book Emergency: This Book will Save Your Life after hearing Tim Ferris talking about it. Amongst many other awesome things (it’s a fantastically fun read!) the book mentions attending Tom Brown’s Tracker School and learning skills for surviving after “TEOTWAWKI” (The End Of The World As We Know It). I’ve long been at least a little bit interested in the Survivalist mentality and community, so this caught my attention.

I looked into tom Brown’s Tracker School and found out that the “Standard” class (the foundation for over 75 classes run by his school) was run periodically in California, as opposed to his normal offerings in New Jersey. Convenient. In a conversation with my boss, we talked about the book I said that I wanted to do this class. To my surprise, he was also interested and threw down the challenge of “if you do it, I’ll do it”.

Done deal.

Now jump forward another few months to a Sunday morning in May and we were driving together down to Bear Creek, California (near Santa Cruz) in hammering rain, wondering what the next week would hold for us. After hiking our gear in to the camp area and setting up our tents (still in the rain), we were ready to find out.

What followed were 6 days of the densest transfer of information I’ve ever been a part of. We were up and at it most days before 7am, and often didn’t crawl into our damp tents until 11pm or later. Most of the time we were in a classroom setting, where I filled two entire notebooks with notes and diagrams, quotes and questions. When we weren’t in the classroom, we were outside in the classroom of Nature.

Rather than trying to walk you through the entire week (this is already a long post), here’s a list of some of the things we covered (in rough order):

• Knives: picking the right type for the job and how to sharpen a blade
• Survival mentality
• Fire: why it’s important, how to create it, where to position it
• Cordage: how to create it, basic techniques and materials
• Water: how it moves, where to find it, how to filter it
• Traps: catching game for food
• Tracking: gait, identification, standard vocab, pressure releases, movement, track aging, sign tracking
• Brain tanning
• Stone tools/flint knapping
• Camouflage
• Shelter (basic: debris hut through more permanent round-houses etc)
• Cooking techniques and approaches
• Throwing sticks
• Awareness (an entire section/discipline)
• Edible and Medicinal/useful plants

At the end of it, I’d like to think that we came away with a foundational understanding of some of the skills and attitude you need to keep yourself alive in a survival situation. I’m definitely not running out to live in the forest any time soon, but I feel a lot more confident that I could at least survive in some tougher conditions than before.

In addition to those “basic” survival skills though, are some of the more interesting ones which can influence your every day life. Appreciation for the uniqueness of everything in Nature. Thinking about the very style with which you walk (and therefore leave tracks). Increased awareness of what’s going on around you. The near-meditative state of wide-angle vision, and maybe even the Spiritual connection of all things to a single thread.

Tracker School was a truly unique experience, something I will never forget. I don’t know if I’m ready to go back for another class of some sort just yet, but I quite possibly will at some point. I have a huge new family there now, who have all shared experiences that most other people don’t understand, and won’t understand just from reading these words. If you feel any desire to do anything like this, I would strongly encourage you to act upon it. The experience might just change your life a bit.

I’ll be at WordCamp Orange County, presenting a session on plugin development, specifically looking at some of the more advanced things we did in Jetpack. It will be fun — you should go.

Jetpack is a new plugin that delivers a bunch of popular features from WordPress.com (the hosted site, which Automattic runs) to self-hosted installs of WordPress (such as the one that runs Dented Reality). Once you install Jetpack, you get some of the cooler things available on WordPress.com, automatically enabled on your own WordPress site. The modules you get today are just the beginning though, there are a lot more planned for future releases. We’re going to be targeting some of the biggest features that are easier for us to do on our massive grid/cloud infrastructure, but harder for folks to do on their own shared-hosting accounts.

We also managed to partner with a bunch of leading web hosts, so if you’re doing a one-click install on Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, or Network Solutions, you’ll get Jetpack as part of your install. This is huge for people installing their own WordPress.

This has been the coolest thing I’ve worked on at Automattic so far, and it’s been awesome to be involved in a project that has seen so many contributions internally (over 40 people were involved in everything from UX to design to internationalization to testing and debugging) and so many iterations since its inception. I’m really proud of what we’ve created, and hope that it sets a new bar for the design of WordPress plugins (I really think Jetpack is beautiful, amazing work Joen, Hugo and MT!).

So – check out Jetpack if you’re running WordPress on your own server, and let us know what you think!

Which features would you most like to see in Jetpack? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do

PS: This post proudly proof-read by After The Deadline, as delivered via Jetpack

I’m on a bit of a “body modification” kick since reading The Four Hour Body and also Born to Run, and am making some changes and testing the waters in a few different things.

I’ve signed up to get full bloodwork done to check all my different nutrient/vitamin/everything levels checked (“NutrEval FMV Amino Acids”), and also to see what/if food allergies I have. Should be pretty interesting. The tests are I think $120 and $160 or something (with insurance). They are both done through a company called Genova Diagnostics.

I’ve always been skinny, and I finally decided to try to do something about it and put a bit of weight on. I got some Withings scales and have been tracking my weight. Baseline was around 160 lbs. I’m 6’4″. So yeah, lighter than you’d expect. I’ve already put on 5 lbs since I started tracking (Feb 10), just by being more aware of it and trying to eat more. As part of trying to gain weight, I’m trying to consume a lot more (at least vaguely healthy) calories. The target is 3000+ per day to get up to at least 180 lbs without blowing my body-fat ratio too far out of the water. I had been manually keeping a food log to add it up manually at the end of the week, but I found an app for the iPhone that seems to be pretty good for doing it all easily. Apparently if you mark someone as a friend, it shares all your information with them though (weight etc), so don’t do that if you don’t want folks knowing exactly how much you weigh

I’ve started running (I hadn’t run in literally about 10 years), and I got a new pair of Vibrams that have slightly thicker soles to try them out (was previously running in these, which I’ve had for a while). Went for a run in them today (right after buying them) and they felt good. Here are the results of that run (as tracked by RunKeeper, which I’m using to track all of my runs). I know running isn’t going to help me gain weight, but I’m enjoying it anyway. And still going to Krav.

Oh, and I have a 40 lb “SandBell” (sand-filled KettleBell) on the way from HyperWear so I can try it out as well.

Updates to follow.

Since I’m mostly using them on an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have 2 extra requirements on my earphones (in addition to sound quality etc).

1. Full remote (Play/Pause, fast forward etc)
2. Inline microphone for hands free use on the phone (and for Voice Control)

Recently, my Klipsch earbuds suffered the wrath of the TSA when they were munched in the rollers of an x-ray machine. Time for new headphones. I ended up ordering a set of ZAGG Smartbuds. At literally half the price of my Klipsch, I didn’t know what to expect, but have been so far pleasantly surprised:

• Interesting design — hang down from behind neck so you can easily take out one or the other (I normally only have 1 in at a time around the city) without them dangling all over the place.
• InvisibleSHIELD on the cables makes them less prone to tangling and apparently pretty tough.
• Microphone seems to be pretty good on calls.
• I like the right-angle/low profile plug.
• Sound quality is great (I’m no pro, but it sounds good to me and I listen to all sorts of bass/highs etc).
• I’m using the foam-style buds and they are really good at blocking out background noise if you put them in properly. Even on a plane they’re solid.
• They look pretty cool (as far as ear buds go).

But it’s not all rainbows and puppy-dogs — there are a few things which continue to bug me about these buds after a few weeks of heavy use:

• Separate volume/remote units on the cables feels overdone.
• 2 adjustment beads between volume and remote seems like overkill.
• The adjustment beads need rubber lining or something to prevent them from moving around. If I put them in a position, I don’t want them to just jiggle their way down the cable 5 minutes later.
• The volume control SUCKS. Seriously. It’s one of those generic slider/resistor type ones that will work on all audio sources. I’d rather just pay an extra $10 or something and get real up/down buttons that talk to my iPhone.
• Lots of cable to juggle (since there is “double” cable for a lot of the length, so it can do the around-the-neck thing).

Despite these niggles, I’m enjoying these buds and will continue to use them. I might end up just sticking something in the beads to prevent them moving around, and the volume control is I guess survivable (but annoying).

My theory has always been that after I had glandular fever about 12 years ago, sleep has never left me feeling rested or fully revived. That’s been very difficult to quantify or keep track of though, other than saying “I feel crappy in the morning.”

I had been looking a little bit at a new startup called Fitbit when Matt turned me on to Wakemate, a company that not only is he investing in, but they are building a system specifically for analyzing your sleep and helping you figure out what helps you get better quality sleep. They also have a “smart” alarm system that wakes you up during lighter sleep cycles to avoid that groggy feeling in the morning that I’m all too familiar with.

Last week I received my Wakemate and here are some of my initial reactions:

• The device itself is a comfortable, padded wristband that you wear to bed. It communicates with your phone (iPhone, BlackBerry or Android) via bluetooth to keep track of your sleep cycles via movement.
• The smart alarm thing works! If you’re using an alarm of any kind to wake up at a certain time, this is a better solution. Your new alarm will go off up to 20 minutes before your specified time, and you’ll wake up immediately, feeling like you’ve just taken a quick, refreshing nap.
• I had to wake up to get to the airport after only about 4 hours sleep, and woke up using the smart alarm feeling surprisingly fresh and ready-to-rock.
• It’s obviously early days. The bracelet is a little rough-around-the-edges, with raw-feeling components inside. The app (I’m using the iPhone version)is very simple and feels like it was designed by an engineer, but it works.
• Battery life could be longer. It’s kind of cumbersome to charge via a USB cable, so it’d be nice if you only had to do it once a week at the most.
• There’s no option to set an alarm for ‘x’ hours for now (you can add it up yourself obviously, I just mean a quick way to say “wake me up in 8 hours” would be good).
• The Wakealytics service they provide for looking at your data for each night and comparing nights is interesting, and I’m really looking forward to collecting more data so that I can hopefully start seeing some trends and seeing my sleep change as I make changes (like getting a new bed).

All in all I’m really happy with it so far, and will definitely keep using it. Even without the analytics side of things, just having the smart alarm is worth the current price. I’m not sure how useful it’d be if you had someone else sleeping in your bed and/or waking you up, but for a single guy, it’s working out just fine.