Station in the Metro

How big is your vocabulary?

Jun 25, 2014 linkage

An independent American-Brazilian research project is attempting to measure English vocabulary sizes according to age and education, and whether or not you’re a native speaker.

I tested myself, and they estimate my vocabulary size at around 33,000 words which, according to them, is upper range of average for native English speakers.

Interestingly, even they say the results may be skewed at the moment, with people who have participated in the survey so far being quite a bit more literate than the wider population average, and with an average self-reported language SAT score of 700. (With the cheeky comment in the FAQ that “Basically, we need more YouTube commenters participating. :)”)

They’re still looking for more results, especially from children and teenagers, if you’re so inclined to contribute.
Veruca Salt

Jun 24, 2014 Seattle, tunes

The missus and I saw Veruca Salt at Tractor last night, and it was a blast! I think I’ve finally seen all of my 90’s band obsessions live in person now, aside from Curve, which will be some crazy miracle if Toni and Dean reunite and decide to tour the west coast of the US.

If someone enterprising soul updates the setlist, you should see it below. Unfortunately, I was too busy enjoying the concert to write it down myself. I will say, though, that it was pretty cool that the first song that they played was the one that had been stuck in my head all day.

Edit this setlist | More Veruca Salt setlists
Xcoders Seattle: How to App Video

Jun 12, 2014 finalcutprose, geek, howto, Seattle

These are the “show notes” from my How to App Video talk at Seattle Xcoders, on May 21, 2014 at 7:00 pm.
More
It always pays.

Jun 4, 2014 ramblings, tunes

I realize this is a very Southern Maryland-centric request, but does anyone out there possibly have an audio or video recording of the ads for the supermarket McKay’s Food Store with their crazy earworm of a jingle? Extra bonus points if you come up with the late-80s/early-90s TV ad with jingle that consists entirely of grocery employees nodding in slow motion at customers, and shaking their hands.

The song:

It always pays to shop at McKay’s,
Where quality is discount every day!
To you and your family,
We give you this guarantee,
It always pays to shop at McKay’s!
…McKay’s Food Store!
Copy File Path as Text in Mac OS X

Jun 4, 2014 geek, howto
Posting this here because I keep needing to recreate it whenever I start using a new machine:
- Open Automator.
- Select the Service template.
- Set options at the top to “Service receives selected files or folders in Finder.”
- Drag over “Copy to Clipboard.”
- Save the service with a name like “Copy Path.”
That’s it! Now you can right-click on any selection in the Finder (even multiple selections) and select Services > Copy Path and then paste the text anywhere you like.

You can also use the keyboard system preferences to assign a custom hot key such as Option-Command-C to the service, so you can invoke it directly.

To do this: System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Files and Folders > Copy Path > Add Shortcut. I usually use ⌥⌘C (but only because ⇧⌘C is default for Go > Computer).

Some details via this post on CNET.
Django MultiRangeField and MultiRangeFormField

Jun 1, 2014 geek, howto
I’m building a website, and needed a way to save a list of pages and page ranges from a book or magazine. I wanted to to be a little more strict than just saving it as a string without any cleanup or validation, so I wrote a custom Django model field (and accompanying form field).

It either just validates and cleans so that
```
4-33, 43, 45, 60-65, 44, 59
```
becomes the tidy
```
4-33, 43-45, 59-65
```
…or, if you comment out the raising of the ValidationError in the form field’s validate() method, it will actually clean up any junk characters for you, so even this horrible mess:
```
;4-33, 46a fads i44 ,p45o
```
gets cleaned to
```
4-33, 44-46
```
Enjoy!
3D Printer Re-calibration

Feb 22, 2014 geek

It’s been six months since we moved to Seattle, so I thought it was finally time to get my 3D printer out of mothballs. Well, at least that giant box full of Styrofoam peanuts.

I hadn’t left it in a great state the last time I used it. ABS plastic had gotten stuck in the […]
More

Mark Boszko

Categories

Tags