Study Buddy is a super simple, mobile friendly app that takes data from Google spreadsheets and makes it into a flash-cardy kinda quiz. It has some helpful features like question shuffling, searchable quick view, and offline data storage. And it was built with sitting on the toilet and studying in mind, so it works really well on iOS and Android devices (not that I don’t bring my laptop into the bathroom, too).

Here’s a quick n’ dirty overview video of how to create a spreadsheet, import it, and start studying:

(Sorry if the instructions in the video are hard to follow. I don’t have time to re-edit the video at the moment. Give your pause button a little exercise.)

All that said, Study Buddy isn’t something that I’m going to be actively developing. I just figured that I’d throw it up here in case anyone else needs a quick study solution. If something’s really bugging you or not working, feel free to open an issue on github – or fork the shit and patch it up yourself Enjoy.

App: http://studybuddy.chrislyons.net

Code: https://github.com/choochburger/study_buddy

Thai Alphabet Flash Cards

It runs through the consonants and vowels in order, but you can click randomize at any point to mix up the pool. You can also click “Got it!” to remove answers from the pool. Fairly crude, but it’s been helping me a lot. This example only works in browsers that support mp3 playback via the html audio element (sorry Firefox). I’ve tested this on iOS/Android and, my shitty design aside, it works great. Hope this helps anyone else trying to learn the Thai alphabet.

Source code is here: https://github.com/choochburger/flash_cards/

Today I whipped up a jQuery plugin called SimpleIndent. When used on a textarea, the textarea will magically remember indentation (spaces only, no tabs). Oooooh, aaaaah. Now that shitty old textarea is almost useable for coding! Ok, not really, but it’s a hell of a lot better.

The plugin is invoked like this:

jQuery(‘textarea[name="body"]‘).SimpleIndent();

Just replace ‘textarea[name="body"]‘ with the selector for your textarea and you’re good to go. I know there are a lot of serious html/js code editors out there, but I didn’t need all of the functionality and it was more fun to write something myself

• Try it out
• Code on github

Update: Decided to make a Chrome extension for this. Just load this directory from the github repo into Chrome (Window>Extensions then “Load Unpacked Extension”), click the cheesy “SI” icon and the popup link, click a textarea, and you’ll instantly have simple indentation. WORD. FYI, don’t try it on a textarea that already has SimpleIndent applied to it (like the link above). It’ll blow up I’ll fix that eventually. Or maybe I won’t.

No need to worry, if you have access to a server in the US (I use linode.com), you can most likely tunnel your traffic through it via ssh. Here’s how I did it:

First off, make sure that your server’s /etc/ssh/sshd_config file contains the line:

AllowTcpForwarding yes

You may not need this line, but if it’s set to “no”, you’ll have issues.

Then, type the following into your OS X/Linux terminal (this can also be accomplished easily using PuTTY on Windows):

ssh -D 9999 yourusername@yourserver.com

9999 is an arbitrary portname. Feel free to adjust to your liking. You can also append the “-C” flag to enable compression, although I haven’t really messed around with this. Enter your password and you’re almost there!

Next, pop into your favorite browser (I’m using Chrome on OS X at the moment). In Chrome select:

Chrome>Preferences>Under The Hood>Change Proxy Settings

This will bring up your system network preferences. Check the box next to “SOCKS Proxy” and enter:

127.0.0.1 for the address and 9999 for the port (or localhost/whatever port you entered earlier)

Click OK and then Apply… Boom! You should be good to go. Traffic will be routed through your remote server and you should be able to view sites as if you were in the US!

Note: This will forward traffic for all browsers through your server. Browsers like Firefox allow you to set up a proxy for just that browser. I’m sure you can do that in Chrome/Safari, but I don’t really care to figure out how. Google it, I’m sure it’s easy Just make sure to disable this when you’re done. Oh yeah, if you’re in Firefox, ONLY enter this info into the “SOCKS host” field. Leave all of the other fields blank.

“Uncaught Error: Error calling method on NPObject.”

A lot of the time, this is a security error which can be cleared up by using System.security.allowDomain(‘yourmom.com’). In my case, it meant I had an argument mismatch on the method I was trying to call in flash. Very obvious from the cryptic error, don’t you think?

In javascript I was calling:

camera.captureImage();   <– notice there are no args

in AS3, the callback method was:

private function captureImage(e:Event):void…   <— expecting one arg

I had the ‘e:Event’ argument left over from some earlier tests. Shit! Changing the method to this fixed the issue:

private function captureImage():void…    <—- no args

Nice!

Link for non-flash users: Will We Ever (Featuring Aoife McDaid)

Also, I finally have http://www.chrislyons.net about 90% finished. It has some of my music and web work on it. Check that shit out!

Example

** NOTE: After messing around with this I found a few instances where the results were a little messy. Guess I was too hasty in posting this. Haha. I’m taking the source down until I fix it up.

The Great Destroyer

Still gotta do a little of the old mixin’ and masterin’ to it. I compressed the hell out of it to make it loud. Please don’t cry. It was really just an experiment to see how Toontrack Superior 2.0 drum software tracks. I think it did a pretty good job right out of the box. I’m sure with some editing you could trick even the most discerning listener into thinking that them shits is real

Mind blowing 3D Squares!

On another note, the FDT Roadshow was pretty kick ass. I got to hang with André Michelle, Chris Allen, and Joe Berkovitz. All of these guys are doing amazing stuff right now – it was awesome to be able to tag along with them. The new Audio Tool that André is developing is unreal. I can’t wait to start messing around with the dynamic sound stuff in flash 10. The Red5 stuff that Chris and the Infrared5 dudes are doing is wild too. If you haven’t seen this already, Joe Berkovitz has online notation editor/community called NoteFlight. This thing is absolutely unbelievable. I can’t believe how detailed it is. The concept of sharing sheet music like this is killer too – definitely great for teachers and students. Check it out.