Ahoy, there be treasure hidden here.

In the Northeastern US, the yard sale season starts during Memorial Day Weekend and ends over Labor Day weekend. I love yard sales for many reasons:

• find stuff you need for cheaper
• keep stuff out of landfills a little longer
• discover items from your childhood or things you’ve only heard about but never seen in person
• interact with (mostly) nice folks

Some folks love yardsaling like I do, and others just hate it. And there are those who wonder what it’s all about. For those in the last group, I’ve listed some pointers and guidelines to maximize your yard sale experience.

Finding Yard Sales

I usually grab a copy of the local paper and look in the classifieds for upcoming yard sale listings. For those who live in a more populated area, I’ve heard that craigslist is a pretty good source too. IMO though, stick with the local paper; the local paper probably has a website that lists their classifieds too, and whatever route you create from the local listings will suffice, as you’ll most likely run across unlisted sales, neighbors taking advantage of the free advertising. With the local classifieds in hand, I mark the ones that sound promising (e.g., “electronics” or “old photography” ) and avoid others (e.g., “baby clothes”; baby clothes are everywhere ,  of course except when you actually need to find baby clothes). Then I enter the addresses into Google Map and see where the yard sales are relative to one another, plan a route, and print it out.

Around this time I also email friends if they’re interested in going. In addition to being a lot more fun than yardsaling solo, yardsaling with others also increases your chances of finding something you’re looking for as you have more pair of eyes scanning each sale, improves your negotiation (more on this later), and acts as a reality check (“are you really going to use that scythe to mow the lawn?” True story).

Day of the Sale

Early birds are annoying, but you do want to start your yard saling around the start time, which typically starts at either 8 or 9am. Here’s a list of stuff I recommend having on hand for a yard sale session:

• small change. Easier to pay for stuff and doesn’t look as bad compared to getting change for a $20 for an item you haggled down to $2.
• water bottle. Depending on the area you live in, you’ll get dehydrated quickly. Coffee is a common alternative.
• list of things you would like to get. This helps keep your searches more focused and reduces the chances that you missed something at a yard sale.
• hand sanitizer. You will be picking up and inspecting a lot of stuff of which you rarely know where it has been. Baby wipes are a good alternative too.

Depending on how big your list is, you’ll want to spend the first couple of minutes at a sale scanning the piles. If your initial impression is that it’s a bunch of crap, leave and get to the next sale. You can always come back if you regret it.

Haggling Guidelines

So you found an item or a couple of items that you’re interested in buying. Here are some guidelines:

• think whether you will actually use the item. This is where having a list comes in handy because if it’s on the list, you’ve already thought about it.
• think about what’s the most you would pay for it. Unless you ABSOLUTELY need that item, you should always be willing to walk away from the sale. You may have pangs of regret –I know I have on several occasions– but also know that you saved money and it’s one less item in your place. It also helps that you can usually find the same item at another sale.
• in general, you can reasonably start at half of the asking price. Anything below that significantly decreases your odds of getting the item and may also insult the seller. Exceptions to this are items that are listed for $1 or less. There’s an alternative to getting a lower price:
• see if there’s anything else at that particular yard sale that you’re interested in. Sometimes you can get a cheaper price per item if you offer to buy more items, as most sellers are most interested in getting rid of stuff rather than making a profit (more on this in another post on hosting a yard sale). This is where having friends along helps a lot, as you can pool the items that the group is interested in.
• be nice. (Most) Sellers put a lot of effort into running a yard sale, so be respectful. Even if their stuff is crap and/or the sellers are douchebags, be courteous, at least until you get into the car and drive off.  An aside to this is if you offer a reasonable price (i.e., at least half of the asking price) and they get mad about it, just walk away. It’s not worth it and more power to the seller.

Release the Hounds…

There are many sites that focus on yard sales with a ton of tips and how-to’s, but if you follow the suggestions listed above, you and your friends will have a productive and hopefully enjoyable yard sale experience. And if you do go yardsaling enough, you’ll most likely need to have a yard sale yourself, which I’ll talk about in another post. Until then, happy yardsaling!

Looking for a fun and immersive way to teach his 8th grade students about space, science instructor Chad Shumaker brought Activision’s 1984 sim Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space to his classroom…

This article brought a smile to my face for several reasons:

• using video game technology to create an engaging educational experience
• that you don’t need the latest and greatest games or hardware
• the budget was dirt-cheap

and

• the teacher took an awful game and made it fun (or less awful)

I’m curious as to how common it is for teachers to utilize old computer games  in the classroom. My guess is hardly, particularly as classic games such as Oregon Trail are now available on cellphone and Nintendo Wii.

(via GameSetWatch, The Times-Reporter)

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

You’ll need to restart the Finder to make this change go into effect, by either:

• log out and back into your account
• use the Force Quit dialogue (command+alt+esc and relaunch the Finder)
• or type “killall Finder” in the Terminal window

The rialvalue article also mentions an applescript that allows you to open a terminal in the current Finder directory, but I find it easier to do the following:

• open a Terminal window
• type “cd” and then click-and-drag the Finder window onto the Terminal Window

Are there other hidden OS X tips that saves you a lot of time?

sources:

Some little gems on OSX you might want to know (via Flash Art of War)

Top 15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Mac OS X Settings

Buying here not only gets you a great deal on indie games, the proceeds go directly to the developers. The Indie Bundle sale lasts through Friday (2/19)

http://www.theindiebundle.com/

The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google (via Lifehacker)

It’s a bug, Jim

AME 4.2 supposedly fixed deinterlacing if Max Render Quality was set for interlaced sources. Instead, the clip looks like it was possibly encoded at 15fps but is playing at 29.97, interpolating “missing frames.” I thought it was a playback issue, but I had encoded a sample clip earlier with AME 4.1 and using the same flv player, in this case VLC, you could still see a difference between the two clips. Here are two sample clips, one encoded with AME 4.1 and the other with AME 4.2. Take a look and you decide:

Video encoded using AME 4.1[See post to watch Flash video]

Video encoded using AME 4.2[See post to watch Flash video]

Although it’s not as obvious at this frame size, at 640 x 480, you can see how much sharper the image looks in the 4.1-encoded clip and the weird interpolating in the 4.2-encoded clip.

Solution and Workarounds

The current solution is to stick with 4.1. Already updated AME to 4.2? You have a couple of options:

Uninstall AME – Unfortunately, this is easier said than done: AME is a shared component, which means you have to uninstall every Adobe software that uses it. This is a royal pain for those with tweaked out preferences and/or using a Creative Suite. And don’t bother using AppCleaner; you’ll still be forced to re-install the “main” software (Flash, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc.).

Use Leopard’s Time Machine to restore from an earlier point - This is the easiest solution, assuming you’ve been maintaining regular backups of your system. I recommend renaming the current Adobe Media Encoder CS 4 and then restoring to a version before 11/10/2009.

Copy AME 4.1 from another system - Fortunately, the AME app contents is self-contained within the Adobe Media Encoder CS 4 folder, so you can copy it from a another system that hasn’t updated to 4.2 yet. Rename or delete the 4.2 folder before you copy it over though, to make sure that you’re not mixing 4.1 and 4.2 stuff.

Another option is to encode straight from one of the “main” programs, in my case, After Effects. The disadvantages of this is that you no longer have access to to 2-pass VBR and longer encode times as the file has to also get rendered, unless you pre-render the clips and then set up the render queue to then encode them.

I must be the only one that’s seeing this bug because I couldn’t find any related posts either on the Adobe site or from a Google search, but I’ve posted this stuff in the hopes that it may help someone else and reduce their frustration with Adobe support. Note to Adobe:

• include a bug report link on your support pages.
• include support pages for the shared components like AME. It’s not worth posting on the forums if I don’t know where to post it in the first place and reasonably get feedback.

Has anyone seen this bug? Leave a comment.

Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000.

Jane McGonigal of Avant Game is seeking game assistants to help run EVOKE, a World Bank Institute funded “10-week crash course in changing the world:”

The goal of the game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change.

Both projects sound challenging and fun. Why not apply and see what happens?

tiltfactor announces game design fellowships

URGENT EVOKE: help us run a 10-week crash course in changing the world

The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

If the survey numbers from this article are accurate, a broad-based curriculum is what employers want. Given the recent economy woes and increasing tuition costs though, such an education sounds more like a luxury. Maybe it’s an issue of quantifying learning: on a resume, it appears more impressive when you can list several specific skills, versus listing that you “work very well with others and articulate.”

What do you think?

Making College “Relevant” [via tiltfactor]

• allows a developers to concurrently work on the same section of code
• experiment with new designs without fear of breaking the current site/program/document
• document the development process, very helpful for troubleshooting and/or reverting to an earlier version.

Flash Guru Jesse Freeman offers some tips on setting up version control for a blog or small site, using Git and WordPress as case examples. It’s a nice outline of a version control process in general.

5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments

It was lying in the middle of a crosswalk, in front of a taxi that was veering to the side of the road to avoid it, mirroring the shifting crowds of shoppers, twenty crossing every minute, hundreds
crossing every hour, carefully skirting around that spot to as to avoid it on their sunday trip to the shopping district. Its eyes looked past me into the distance, its yellow eyes unblinking, body motionless. It seemed hidden in the field of white bars, accented by the cat’s brown fur and spackles of blood in front of it. It must have been hit by a car, as this was a busy area with cars and scooters moving through the area, looking for passengers, looking for parking.

I could only think of one thing: I must move this cat to the side of the road.

I recalled going home one night along Fuxing N. Road, where I saw an animal strewn across the road. It was not roadkill. Not anymore. It was a scattering of dull, pink, fibrous muscle atop the pavement in the right lane. I could not tell what animal it was, dog or cat or other. Not anymore.

I didn’t want this to happen to the cat, so I walked out to the center of the road and carefully slid my hands underneath its small frame, careful to hold the cat evenly, supporting its head to tail with my two hands. Something in me was worried that it could be dangerous, that I shouldn’t be doing this. The rest of me didn’t care. Its fur was dry, soft, as it would be normally. It lay still in my hands, its body light but with a weight of its own. I walked to the nearby corner and set it down, its white fur breaking the red no parking strip of the curb, where it would be easily seen yet not easily hit again, and I walked away.

I walked west, then north towards the game area to exchange my game disc. I didn’t know what exactly I was doing, a million thoughts running through my head. I think too much. I know this. What else could I have done? Should I have called some sort of animal services? I didn’t know if there was anything similar in Taipei. Should I have found another place to place the body? Maybe a trashcan, but seemed wrong, too cruel to dispose of a cat as such. Maybe some dirt, but that would be near impossible to find near the main train and subway station. Maybe a veterinarian, I could call my own and see what he could do with the body. But what could he really do? How would I even bring the cat? I couldn’t just carry it into a taxi and tell him to drive. Could I have given some sort of last rites for the cat? Shit. I should have. At least something. Shit. I didn’t even close the cat’s eyes, so that it could finally sleep. Shit. I haven’t even checked the cat’s eyes to see if its pupils would dilate, to see if it could be….

…alive? there wasn’t much blood, just specks out on the street – it hadn’t bled out – the fur was dry – the body had not gone cold – it was sunny outside so maybe that’s it but still – i hadn’t checked for a pulse – how could i be so stupid – the body hadn’t gone stiff – why didn’t i check for any of this – i could take it to a vet still – i would need to find a box to keep it level and cover it to take in a cab – should i call my vet – i’m so far – what if it’s still alive – could it be still alive – what should i do

I promised myself I would hurry up and finish my business at the game shop, then run back as fast as possible and examine the cat. If it showed any possible signs of life, I could take it to my vet. Then it would at least have a chance. If not, I did all I could, so be it.

I arrived at the game shop, and told the clerk my problem, that the game disc wouldn’t read, that the Xbox 360 always thought it was a DVD, and so forth. I hoped they would simply exchange the disc and I could be on my way, back to check on the cat. Not so. They took out a 360 to test the disc.

why is it taking so long to check the disc – can’t they just hurry up – what if the cat is dying while i’m dicking around with this fucking game disc – i’m already here it’s only a little bit before i can exchange this – come on just connect the a/v cables already i could do this – no don’t sync the controller you can see the problem if you just put the damn disc in and watch the error come up – god what am i doing here what are my priorities

The small 9″ TV screen brought up a blurry, cramped image of the Xbox 360 dashboard, and I ejected the tray and put in the disc quickly as I had grown impatient waiting for the wireless controller to sync. A game screen appeared, then a message saying “put this in an Xbox 360″. Finally. The shop worker tried loading the disc again.

come on can’t you see it isn’t working – just hurry up dammit – why don’t they just get it

The next time, a full read error message appears on the screen, and a co-worker tells him to simply change out the disc. He grabs a game off the shelf, opens the package, and puts it in to make sure it works. I go through the start screens and it works fine. I grab the replacement and run out of the shop.

It’s hot outside and I’m sweating, my face becoming slick as I run down the street in bursts. I want to wipe my face, but I’ve recently touched a dead cat. Not dead. I don’t know yet. I have to check.

I return to the crosswalk, but the cat was gone.

where did it go – what happened – who was here – i’ve only been gone fifteen to twenty minutes – did somebody take it – did somebody take it to a vet – does it look like anybody here saw what happened or who moved the cat

The curb had a tiny amount of blood where the cat used to be.

it was bleeding a little – it hasn’t bled out yet – maybe it’s still alive – who moved it – where could it be – did somebody dispose of it – there’s a nice hotel right here – maybe they moved it – maybe it looked bad with a dead cat near the entrance – it’s not that close – what if someone disposed of it in a trash can

I spent the next ten minutes peering into nearby alleys, streets, trash cans. No sign. I’m to go watch a movie with friends in half an hour and I’m late, and there’s nothing left I can do. I already missed my chance. I already made my mistake – why did I go ahead with the exchange when I could have done it some other time? Was I so wrong? What am I doing?

After the movie, I talked it over with a friend, and came to the conclusion that someone most likely had taken it to a veterinarian because the cat was gone, and it was daytime. In Taipei, nobody will touch or move an animal that has been hit on the street unless it is someone who will take the animal to a nearby hospital for help – it will lie there indefinitely. The only people who would otherwise dare or care to move it would be street cleaners. I thought back to the previous incident of the unidentifiable animal littered across the road. I was consoled by this fact some, but the empty hole of possibilities remained, and I didn’t actually know where the cat had gone to, who had moved it. Maybe I’ll find out someday. Maybe I never will.