Posts

📖 4 min. read
I have toyed with the idea of writing a Twitter bot for posting weather updates for a while now. I've had one or two conversations with friends about if a Twitter account reported the weather in vulgar ways. It seemed like an entertaining idea. With that sitting in my head for a few weeks I set out on what would be a now almost two-month project (and still going), to write a Twitter bot that did just that (it's changed a little).

📖 3 min. read

A little over a week ago I finished building my new server. It's the second computer I've built (after my desktop), and is primarily a file and media server. Ryan (@ryanmr) asked me to do a spec sheet, so this is the result.

📖 3 min. read

While taking the Software Design and Development course last spring, we (the class) used Backbone as the main framework on top of Node.js. I never really got the chance to appreciate Backbone due to being slammed with a towering wall of new technologies that make up the Node.js world. I mostly stuck to my own world of Hogan templates, jQuery, and plain JavaScript. This worked reasonably well. While it got a little messy, it worked, and I knew how it worked. During this whole time I was slowly feeling more guilty for creating a monster of jQuery calls that who knows how I was able to keep track of. I wanted to use Backbone to manipulate the page and handle all the functions, but at that point, I didn't want to tackle the massive refactoring that would have needed to happen to move it to Backbone properly and moved to a different part of the website completely (design and usability). Maybe I'll go back and properly refactor the code someday, but for now, that's a ways off.

Brian Mitchell logo

📖 2 min. read

I had some time to kill today, so I thought to myself, "Hey, why not make a logo?" I then sat and thought for 30 seconds on how I could make a cool logo that had to do with my name, "Brian Mitchell." In the past, I've made little icons that were just squares with a 'B' or "BM" inside. An example of this is below:

📖 3 min. read

For the last two years, I've used an SSD in my 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and for the last ten months or so, I've used a Samsung 840 Pro SSD for OS X in my Hackintosh. I've become quite accustomed to the speed and reliability of solid state drives. Last April, I tri-booted my Hackintosh and installed Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04. I had an extra 500 GB WD Scorpio Blue hard drive lying around, so I put the operating systems on there. Performance was pretty good, I have an Intel 4770K and NVIDIA GTX 760, so things move pretty quickly, but both operating systems crawled a little at boot and could be a bit slow at times. I decided that it was time for an upgrade.