reviews – Stuff Yaron Finds Interesting

A frustrating attempt to improve on GitHub code review

Thali uses GitHub’s PRs for code reviews and the UX is not up to the job. There is no good way to track which comments are and are not resolved. There is no good way to see comments when the file they are on has changed. I don’t need much, but I really need that. To solve this problem we want a GitHub based code review tool that is hosted. To this end I reviewed five possibilities, none where great and none really solves the problem. But we’ll at least try out codereviewhub.com.

Three weeks of walking

Three weeks ago I got my sit-stand-walking desk put together (see here for the gory details of how I picked the equipment). In this article I examine my experience. Over all I would say it’s pretty positive. I absolutely can code and walk without serious problem. Typing is actually a genuine joy while walking thanks to iMovR’s Omega keyboard tray. Seriously, it rocks! Mousing is still a bit tricky but it’s honestly not that big of deal. Motion sickness was a bit of a problem early on but I found a way to deal with it. The biggest problem is probably moving my monitors around, the Ergotron arms, especially the one with the iMac, are not fully up to the job. But all things considered the whole setup works and I’m happy.

Buying a sit-stand-walking desk

My job has increasingly become almost completely coding focused which means I’m sitting, a lot. I need to get up and move. Knowing my personality I decided the right way to do this is with a sit/stand desk using a treadmill. But I also need to be able to sit and I don’t have the room to move the treadmill around. So I’m buying the 72 inch iMovR Omega EVEREST desk which has enough room to put the treadmill and my chair next to each other. I’m picking the TR1200-DT3 treadmill. I’m adding an ERGOTRON LX HD Sit-Stand Desk Mount LCD Arm and it’s lighter non-HD sibling. I’ll also need to pick up two VESA mounts for my Apple hardware. Apparently being healthy requires breaking the bank. See below for the absurdly painful process by which I figured this all out.

Buying a new plastic free variable temperature Tea Kettle and the cost of corruption

Because FDA seems to work for industry and not the citizens of the United States I can’t trust that cordless variable temperature tea kettles for sale in the U.S. are actually safe. Is having BPA or other kinds of plastics in contact with boiling water o.k.? A functioning FDA would long ago have investigated and come to authoritative conclusions. So I’m stuck spending a ton of time and effort trying to find a kettle which seems as harmless to my family’s health as possible. When I first wrote this article in December of last year my choice of kettle was the Pino Digital Kettle Pro. Unfortunately all of four months later (but out of its 90 day warranty) it’s stopped working. I list below all the candidates, the final winner was nothing. I literally can’t find a variable temperature plastic free kettle that meets our needs.

Why I ran a-waze

Waze is a navigation app that you can install on your phone. It shares out your phone’s location and speed in order to create a real time speed map based on data from all the users around you. For that purpose Waze works really well. It was able, for example to route me around a traffic snarl in my local neighborhood in a really creative way. It’s really an awesome app for doing things like daily commutes if there are issues with variable traffic patterns. Given how well it works it was with regret that I uninstalled it.

Parallels 7 vs VMWare Fusion 4

I use a VM on my mac to run Windows for the sole purpose of using remote desktop to my work laptop. Yes, I know that Microsoft offers a free RDC client for the Mac. But the client doesn't support multiple monitors on a mac and that's a show stopper for me. I've been using VMWare Fusion 2 & 3 for a bunch of years now and I can't say I was ever really happy with it but it seemed to do the job. But I recently compared VMWare Fusion 4 to Parallels 7 and for my use case Parallels 7 is slightly better than VMWare Fusion 4 and with Parallel's upgrade offer for VMWare Fusion 3 users it's a no brainer in my opinion to switch to Parallels 7. So I have. More details below the fold.

Chef’s Choice SmartKettle Model 688

I love green tea and its variants such as jasmine and genmaicha. But these teas only taste good to me when made with hot water around 160’s. Anything hotter just turns them into an acid brew. But seriously, sticking a thermometer into a cup to measure the heat just wasn’t working out. I bemoaned the lack of a kettle with a thermostat to save me. Thankfully Wired clued me in to a great solution – the Chef’s Choice SmartKettle Model 688. My wife was nice enough to buy me one, it works great and my green tea tastes outstanding!

Autosocking it through the winter

How do you get a Prius through the snow? I didn't used to care but in the last few years Redmond has had snow sitting on the ground for a week or two. There are low profile chains that will work on a Prius but that's a bad solution for me because the main roads in Seattle will be clear of snow, it's the neighborhood roads and side streets that will be covered. So after a mile or two of driving I would have to take the chains off. Studded tires could work but most of the time there is no snow on the ground and having to have my wheels put on and off is a pain. Snow tires could work but the snow season is only a month long and temperatures go all over the place, besides we get more water than ice/snow towards the end of the down fall and snow tires do badly on that. In the end I found and have tried out a reasonable solution to my problem âÄì The Autosock.

I tried out the autosock on my car last winter and this winter. Both times they worked really well. They gave me excellent traction both on packed and loose snow. They take literally 60 seconds to put on and take off. They aren't perfect but they work pretty well. Where I ran into problems with them is on slushy snow. I had to rock the car several times, driving back and forth, to get through a few really slushy patches. And when the snow started to seriously melt the autosock met it's match and stopped working. But so long as the snow was reasonably solid (e.g. power or packed) they worked well. I tried them on the steep hills around my home and they gave excellent traction both going up and down hills. Besides the looks on people's faces as a Prius with what looked like a shower cap on its wheels confidently drove past in the two foot snow was priceless.

I have never driven a four wheel drive but my guess is that autosocks are no substitute for a four wheel drive or real snow tires. But they got me around just fine and the cost is certainly right.