As soon as I got my shiny new iPhone about six months ago, I set up instant Push email. This remarkably useful feature has really changed the way I use my email accounts and respond to email. It’s also made me reflect on exactly how dynamic and instant the web has become.

A lot of people wouldn’t expect that posting a YouTube comment like this:

…would cause the device in my pocket (or on my nightstand) to vibrate and alert me instantly. This wasn’t even something I had to go out of my way to set up - YouTube’s default email notification settings accomplished this.

Responding to a tweet, commenting on Facebook, or any other number of nearly-instinctive online actions people do nowadays all cause unexpected side-effects: vibrating phones. It’s not a bad thing, nor is it even that annoying. (yet) Just somewhat mind-blowing that the click of a mouse on one side of the world will...

My second year of University has been wildly more productive and interesting than my first, by far. First year taught me how to try to pass exams, while second year gave me material I wanted to know, bypassing the need for a lot of pointless memorization. But it’s been more than that. Some things have become second nature now, completely. I’ve acquired new skills that I feel like I’ve always had.

From school:

• I built a compiler (from a subset of C to a subset of MIPS machine language) that taught me the basics of how all compilers work.
• I hand-wrote 1000 lines each of MIPS and Motorola 68000 assembly language, and I now feel like C is too high-level.
• I learned exactly how circuits and magnetics work, which is oddly more relevant to guitars, audio equipment and synthesis than computers.
• I learned how to interpret statistics and run unbiased studies.
• I learned how to mathematically...

I have a lot of media on my laptop. Roughly 140GB of music, 40GB of photos, 40GB of games, video and other random stuff on my internal drive alone.

Like any computer user, or lazy person, I suppose, I hate to wait. I want a faster internal drive. Of course, SSDs are the answer. They’re also ridiculously expensive for the drive size I want. The simple solution: replace my Macbook’s internal DVD drive with a second hard drive.

I foolishly missed an amazing deal on an SSD from Newegg.ca, so I went and bought an 80GB Intel X25-M from Future Shop instead. I then checked out eBay and bought a $20 hard drive “enclosure” of sorts. All I really needed was the proper connector, to bridge proper SATA to the odd variant of SATA (mini-SATA?) that the Macbook and most other laptops use internally for drive connections. I could have bought a cheap $1 connector for this, but the included enclosure...

OhLife is a brilliant site that emails you nightly and lets you keep a journal through email. I’ve been using the site for many months now, and it’s been immensely useful in spurring me to keep a journal. Not that I’ve read over the entries yet, but when I have a free moment, it’d be interesting to reflect.

![Beautiful service.]](http://petersobot.com/blog/images/body/ohlife.png)

As awesome as this service is (and it really is), I slowly realized there’s no need for me to email all of my journal entries to a third party. With a physical journal, you’d probably keep it very private, and not leave it with anybody at any time - why not do the same for a digital journal? To keep the same functionality though, I still wanted an online, email-based solution.

Enter OhJournal. (Yes, the name is a blatant ripoff of OhLife. Shush, you.)

By putting a 20-odd line PHP script on a cronjob every...

If you have a personal website, and you use Twitter, there’s a chance you already have a Twitter widget embedded in your site. Most people will opt for the default Twitter-provided (Javascript-based) widget, which does its job well, is relatively customizable, and is very easy to implement.

However, some people (like myself) are stubborn and would rather come up with their own custom solution that allows for complete customization. I wrote my own basic Twitter feed widget in PHP for the latest rendition of my homepage.

This custom widget has complete PHP and CSS-based control over how you display the latest tweet. It fits the content into the exact dimensions you want, with a bare minimum of content, so you can style it exactly how you want. I’ve also set it up to automatically grab the geolocation data from the tweet, or to fall back to the client used to tweet if there’s no...