Useful Things Archives - Chris Ullrich dot net

A Couple More Useful and Interesting Things

Posted on February 1, 2013

Yeah, been kinda busy, you know, making a movie and all that. Still, I can’t forget you, my dear Internet friends. So, in the interest of furthering our relationship, here’s another in my semi-regular feature I like to call “Useful and Interesting Things.”

I hope you find these as useful and/or interesting as I do.

• This weekend in LA you can take not one, but two walking tours of the secret life of Los Angeles. It’s fun, you learn something and get much needed exercise. What could be better than that?

• Like emoticons? How about a collection of all Japanese emoticons in one place? Yeah, that’s right. My favorite? This one: ⊂(￣(工)￣)⊃

• Are you a writer? Thinking of self-publishing a book? If so, read Guy Kawasaki’s top ten list of mistakes writers make when self-publishing. You’ll be glad you did.

• And, as I’m currently making a movie, here’s a list of five survival skills the movies have taught us that are completely wrong.

Some Useful And Interesting Things

Posted on January 15, 2013

I guess I might reconsider the title of this post and perhaps change it to something like “Things That Are Useful to Me” or even “Things That Are Useful And Interesting to Me.” Although, because I’m the only one writing here (at least as far as I know), I guess it’s pretty much implied that anything I list in a “useful” or “interesting” post is, or has been, useful or interesting to me personally.

That’s not to say you won’t find these items useful or interesting too, you may. In fact, I hope you do. Anyway, here we go. . .

• Because everyone seems to be getting sick these days, Lifehacker has a no-nonsense, non-alarmist, essential guide to Flu and how to deal with it. Useful indeed.

• The California State University system is going to give online courses a big test and offer a lot of them online during a trial program at San Jose State University. This could save the state quite a bit of money. I wonder how it will go?

• Facebook unveiled a new search feature today which will allow users to search, well, Facebook. The new feature, called “Graph Search,” is designed to allow users to search for content on Facebook such as news posts, status updates, photos, locations and more within the Facebook Social Graph. Sure, why not?

• Over at Sprouted Kitchen, Hugh details his Chemex brewing method. If you like coffee as I do, this is a great way to make it. To make things even easier, he’s put together a video demonstrating the process. Check it out below.

[vimeo 48920310 w=500 h=281]

The photo above is also from Hugh’s article. Just wanted to mention that.