Regarding the heat issue you are having with your laptop: I was having similar problems with a different laptop, and I got an "XPad Slim" (http://www.xpad4laptop.com/) cooling pad to put under it. It weighs around a pound, has no fans, and does a pretty decent job of dispersing heat from the computer. No more burning legs!
Interesting. I didn't realize amazon affiliate links carried such a negative connotation. I'll definitely keep that in mind for future posts and remove a few of the affiliate links from this post.
I doubt I'll make anything. I honestly just posted the article to show how easy it is to upgrade the MBP hard drive. It's my first time messing with Amazon Affiliates, and blogspot has a nice plug-in that makes it really easy to go amazon-link-happy.
Last year a friend taught me about the bash trick "CTRL-R" <start typing 'ssh' or some other previously run command> on the command line for reverse history searching, and it is an amazing time saver. It acts as a great alternative to #8, "Find the last command that begins with “whatever,” but avoid running it"
I learned the basics of Haskell by doing some problems from http://projecteuler.net. It's probably not as exciting as actually building something using the language, but it's definitely worth checking out.
The maintainers of the contraptor project have done some pretty neat demonstrations with an Arduino. I was particularly impressed with this X-Y plotter/drilling assembly: http://www.contraptor.org/fast-drilling-contraption
Yeah the title is definitely misleading. The word "hacking" isn't even mentioned in the article besides in the title. Replace "hacking contest" with "programming competitions" and "NSA" with "NSA sponsored" and you have a more accurate title.
I am in the same boat with the french press - I really can't tell that much of a difference between a cup of freshly roasted/ground french press coffee and a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
However, I recently switched to an Aeropress single cup coffee maker, and it is a HUGE difference - it makes a small concentrated cup of coffee with very little bitterness, and brings out the coffee's natural sweetness. Also, I find it easier to use and clean than a french press. See http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress_story.htm
I started using the Railscast TextMate theme a few months ago and have been quite satisfied - it's got a dark grey-ish brown background. http://railscasts.com/about
I'll second the MS3 - it is a very fun car to drive and has amazing handling for the price. Like kcy said, since it's a hatchback you'll have plenty of space.
Comparable cars include the Volkswagen GTI, Subaru WRX, Audi A3 - Lined up against those, the MS3 is slightly quicker and is less aggressive looking (IMHO).
I am using (and loving) Unfuddle for a 2-person project. It's like trac, but with some nice extras. Creating new tickets is easy. They also have a Mac widget you can install for creating/viewing tickets (I don't use it personally).
The only downside is it's $9/month if you have more than one developer.. You can always sign up for a free account first to see if you like it though.
Very cool - this is pretty similar to microformats.org's design principles. I could see this kind of HTML markup used as an alternative to maintaining a separate REST based API.
I figured it out by thinking what would happen if you only had 1 mouse (500 bottles can make it to the party), then looking at the problem again with 2 mice (there's a way to prove that 750 bottles are poison-free using only 2 mice), etc. all the way up to 10 mice.