Its interesting to compare the styles between systems: some are refined and detailed, others are just lines.

See how many transit agencies you can name just from these map sections.

I was excited when I read about the Walmart data plan, a new $30/month, no-contract, unlimited (5GB) plan back in October 2010. When announced, it was initially only going to be available at Walmart stored. Visiting a Walmart isn’t very convenient for me living in San Francisco but would be worth the one-time trek for the potential savings. The new $30/month plan buys:

• 100 minutes
• Unlimited SMS messages
• Unlimited Data (capped at 5GB on 4G and then throttled down to edge)

I had been using a 2 year T-mobile contract with 500 minutes, unlimited SMS and “unlimited” data – and for this I paid a bit more than $90/month after taxes and fees. It turns out I used very few voice minutes, about 250/month on average. Data and SMS is what I used most, but I had to get the contract with 500 voice minutes to get the unlimited data.

It turns out the new $30/month plan is available via Walmart.com and t-mobile.com – so trekking to the Oakland Airport (nearest Walmart to SF) to talk to a Walmart representative isn’t required. Both websites offer a variety of “Monthly 4G” plans. Look closely – hidden in the middle is the ideal one. $30/month with only 100 minutes but all-you-can-eat SMS and up to 5G per month in data – all other monthly plans under $70 cap 4G usage at 30MB, 100MB or 2GB – quite a bit less.

Around the same time, Google released the Nexus Galaxy – the next phone in its line of “pure” Android devices. It is the first Android phone to run version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) – many phones will never see this upgrade. ICS has many new features and is widely regarded as a significant upgrade from Gingerbread and Honeycomb. The phone has been released in CDMA form for Verizon, but it hasn’t been released in GSM (T-mobile compatible) form in the US. It might never be.

Expansys sells imported GSM Galaxy Nexus that works perfectly with T-mobile (and AT&T – but why would you use them?) that you can buy at the unsubsidized price of $660 (use coupon 40offgnx for $40 off the full price). NewEgg also has the Galaxy Nexus.

Combining both the hidden T-mobile plan and the Nexus Galaxy gives you the best Android phone and cheapest US data plan – a great combo.

The catch is – how to you actually get the $30 plan onto your new Galaxy Nexus? You need a T-mobile Sim card which you have to physically get. If you go to Walmart, they don’t sell the Galaxy Nexus. If you want to get the hidden data plan they will require you to buy their cheapest phone (about $15) to get the Sim card from it. You can then dispose of the dumb phone and use the sim card in your smart phone.

If you go to a T-mobile store they don’t have the $30 plan either (nor do they have the Nexus Galaxy). The hidden data plan is officially only available on t-mobile.com. However, at the San Francisco Mission T-mobile store, one sales rep was very accommodating and was actually able to provide me a Sim card and activate the hidden $30 plan on the spot. I got the impression that this wasn’t something they promote, but it is technically possible for them to do. You should walk in and ask for the plan by name ($30 plan, 100 minutes, unlimited data). The sales rep knew exactly what I was looking for as this plan stands out as by far the best deal.

If you don’t have a T-mobile Store or Walmart nearby, you can get the Sim card starter kit from t-mobile.com for $9.99.

tl;dr Get the Galaxy Nexus GSM and a hidden T-mobile data plan and have 5GB of 4G data per month for $30.

A picture of me lounging in the net in our house became popular earlier today and already has over 200 comments and 60,000 views. A higher res version of the same pic is included in this post for your viewing convenience.

About a year ago the same picture made it to the top of Reddit, Digg and Google Reader “What’s Hot” list. It seems that the internet has a short attention span.

I think at some point I’ll do a more detailed photo shoot of the nets in my house.

I’ve moved my blog and other contents to http://blog.bn.ee so that http://bn.ee can be used as a URL shortener. If you’d like to create your own really short URL and you somehow think I’m more reliable than bit.ly or is.gd visit http://bn.ee/url. Its powered by yourls.com and there is even a browser bookmarklet for creating bn.ee links on the fly.

I was featured in the background of a promo video for the SOMA Grand Lifestyle condos.
You have to follow this link and fast forward to 1:00-1:10 but you’ll see me conversing with other trendy young condo-dwellers (actually roommates from my live/work space). To prepare for this I gelled my hair back and dressed as if I lived in a new LifeStyle Condo.

To be fair, the club room at the SOMA grand was very nice and we were given dinner and drinks in exchange for eating and drinking said dinner and drinks so it worked out quite well.

This picture was the 2nd top rated item on reddit.com with 388 comments and counting.

The same picture of me on the net also made it to “Whats Hot” on google reader and it just got dugg with 1400+ diggs and counting.

Check me out on Digg and Reddit.

No Exploding Suitcases, Please

This photo was taken in Hangzhou near a pedestrian underpass.

This work by http://blog.bn.ee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Posted via web from nee’s posterous

Really cool pics of nature reclaiming the biosphere. “The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart).”

Remember this?

I’ve kept track of all of the revisions of my website since 1997, you can see the whole progression on my old stuff page.

This new site features fewer images and more emphasis on links to the various web services I use, like facebook, twitter and goodreads. It also features the posts from the Blnktag blog, which is where I’ll be writing updates related to cities, planning, transportation and my business.

I also took this opportunity to remove the “www” from my sites URL. It makes everything shorter, and is very easy to do using htaccess.

• 7-zip – This program will handle nearly any type of compressed file. Its pretty solid and supports drag and drop. – Replaces WinZip & WinRar
• Daemon Tools – Daemon tools is a CD emulator, needed if you want to mount CD or DVD images. This download is freeware, but it comes bundled with a spywareish toolbar which can be deselected from the install. – Replaces Alcohol 120%
• Filezilla – This is a great FTP program. It keeps getting better with every new release. – Replaces lots of less fun FTP applications
• PuTTY – a telnet/ssh client
• Songbird – With an interface like itunes, but a whole host of useful add-ons, songbird is my new choice for when I want to listen to music. It supports syncing with ipods as well (but not iphones yet)Replaces Windows Media Player, itunes
• VLC – VLC will play the media files that windows media player won’t touch. Its also very lightweight, although the interface is not as smooth. – Replaces Windows Media Player
• Keepass Password Safe – Got lots of passwords? Keepass will help you store them securely and also can generate pretty tricky passwords & help you sort them. – Replaces random text files or spreadsheets.
• Firefox – This is the web browser of choice. Add extensions to enable firefox to do all sorts of things. Recently, I started using chrome, another open source browser started by google – Replaces Internet Explorer
• PDFCreator – Make a pdf from printing any document – Replaces Adobe Acrobat
• TightVNC – Remotely control a computer
• uTorrent – a very lightweight and solid BitTorrent client
• InfraRecorder – Open source CD & DVD burning – Replaces Nero & Roxio
• Notepad++ – Text editor with everything you need – Replaces notepad
• Open Office – This is a full featured replacement for MS Office. There is little difference between the two except the price tag. – Replaces MS Office
• Multiple IEs – As a web developer, I need to test my sites in multiple and outdated browsers. Multiple IEs lets me have internet explorer 6 & 7 installed simultaneously. (Note, I use IE for testing purposes only)
• NetMeter – I used to use dumeter
• Twhirl – Twhirl is a great twitter client built on adobe air. It has support for friendfeed and other services as well.
• mint.com – I now use mint.com, a free online web application to track my personal finances – Replaces Quicken or MS Money
• Dropbox – Dropbox is a free web app with a cross platform desktop client for quickly sharing files between computers and other users. Instead of emailing files, using FTP or trying to network, dropbox has a streamlined interface that makes sharing or storing files online simple.
• uTorrent – uTorrent is my torrent program of choice

Commercial Software I still use:

• Adobe CS3 Suite – This is pretty key for a web developer. I use photoshop, illustrator & occasionally indesign.
• Quickbooks – This is the industry standard for small business accounting. I track our expenses and account balances with Quickbooks. I use the online web application Freshbooks for accounts receivable (That was a referral link). I would love to be able to replace Quickbooks with an online application, and it seems like Freshbooks might move this direction.

Thats pretty much everything on my computer at the moment. I only use google chat through my web browser, and I guess I don’t have any games.

Brendan Nee observed some children at a Hong Kong airport enjoying one of my favorite passtimes – dancing on a projected DOS prompt!

View the post on The Daily WTF

The DOS prompt reads: “Error on Web Fetching: Could not connect to remote server” over and over on the DOS prompt. Also, I misreported that it was in the Kong Airport, a closer inspection of my image library indicates that it was actually in a subway station near the Kowloon train station.

If anyone is planning to visit SF at some point, let me know as we do have a guest room available from time to time.

One option is to install the gmail notifier program. I opted instead for a quick change to the Windows filetype settings.

Note that following these instructions will cause all mailto links to open in Google Chrome, even if you are browsing in Firefox, Safari or (gasp) Internet Explorer so make sure you want to use google Chrome as your primary browser before continuing. In Firefox, you can go to Tools->Options->Applications and configure “mailto” to set Firefox to use gmail for mailto links and not the system default (thanks to Eric for the tip).

WIndows XP

In any windows explorer window (except desktop):

• Go to Tools > Folder Options > File Types
• Near the top of the list of filetypes, click on “URL:Mailto Protocol”
• Click on “Advanced”
• With “open” highlighted, click on “Edit”
• Change the application to:

  "C:\Pathto\chrome.exe" https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

This should all be on one line with a space between the quotation mark after the path info and the https. My path was “C:\Documents and Settings\Brendan\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” To find yours, just right click on a google Chrome shortcut (like the one in your start menu), go to “properties” and copy the “Target” field.

Windows Vista

Thanks to Ed H. in the comments below for these instructions

• Open your registry editor (Type “regedit” at your start menu)
• Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
• Edit the (Default) command from whatever it is (right click and select modify) to:

  "C:\Pathto\chrome.exe" https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

In Vista, your path will be something like “C:\Users\Brendan\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe ” with “Brendan” being your username.

Ubuntu

How-To Geek has great instructions on how to accomplish this in ubuntu.

Open with Google Apps

Another tip from Ed H. in the comments:

If you have “Google Apps for your Domain” (i.e. you’re having Google host your domain’s email,) you can customize it for your domain by changing the URL above so that instead of “mail.google.com/mail?…” it reads “mail.google.com/a/yourdomainhere.com?…” (obviously, use the rest of the URL mentioned above after the question mark; and use your domain instead of “yourdomainhere.com”.)

After trying both, I give the gold medal to Orange Chicken with Beijing Beef taking the silver and the Kung Pao chicken not even making it to the final round.

On a related note, a representative from Boingo wifi promptly commented on my last post and stated that they were looking into the firefox compatibility issue. I was impressed by their prompt response (someone at Boingo must monitor Twitter or google) but still surprised that this was the first they had heard of the issue.

On my return trip through Houston I didn’t check into whether or not the issue was resolved, I discovered the free wifi available from the Continental Presidents club you can use if you sit at the Gloria Jeans Coffee between E11 and E12.

I got back from my world trip, went to google I/O, spent two weeks searching for a live/work space in San Francisco, and since June 11 I’ve been working on extensive rennovations to the warehouse I and 7 others moved into (pictures to come). Between drywalling and scraping adhesive off of the floor, I and my business partner Jed have been ramping up our business, Horne Nee Inc.

Expect more posts and Twitters to come.

I decided to take a last minute trip to Belize with Lisa to meet up with Jed who has been traveling around Mexico for the last few weeks. Lisa found a $360 ticket at 8 PM leaving at 12:30 AM so we packed, hit up a Taqueria for a goodbye burrito and beer and BARTed to SFO.

I had some last minute work I had to get done this morning, and a 3 hour layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. I haven’t jailbroken my old-school iphone since I upgraded the firmware, so I didn’t have a good way to tether it to my laptop, nor did I have an SSH application on my phone, so I had to buy the $7.95 airport wifi provided by Boingo.

I opened up firefox and after sitting through a flash intro on the boingo website, I entered my credit card info. After a confirmation screen, I was presented with the data I had entered and asked to download the GoBoingo Utility, an application that could run on my PC and notify me whenever I am within range of a Boingo hotspot. Clicking “Download and Install” was the only way to continue purchasing internet access.

Only after beginning the download was the page redirected to the page announcing that my credit card info was incorrect. I retyped my info and even tried a different credit card with no success. Noticing how quirky the website was, I decided to open Internet Explorer just to see if perhaps this form couldn’t be completed in Firefox.

After downloading the GoBoingo toolbar for the 6th time (this time in IE) I was given a page showing that my credit card details had worked.

Not only did they make me download unwanted software (note: you just had to download the .exe file, it is up to you to install it) but I had to use IE. What if I was using a mac? Would I have been locked out of wifi at George Bush Intercontinental?

I was able to complete the necessary work before getting on my plane to Belize. If you ever run across a boingo hotspot, make sure you are using IE.

$pages = get_pages(‘child_of’ => [[THE PARENT ID]], ’sort_order’ => ‘ASC’);
foreach ($pages as $page) {
  // Do your thang
}

This seems much better than what I had previously used, but for reference, my old post is below:

I spent some time figuring out how to get the wordpress wp_list_pages function to return the results as a PHP array of URLs and page names. There wasn’t an obvious way to do this and searching google did not yield anything particularly useful. The wp_list_pages function has an “echo” parameter which when set to 0 returns a list of links as a string. That won’t help much if you want it as an array with links and page names.

I ended up writing a short script that will query wordpress for the name and URL of all of the subpages of a specified page. This could be used to make a function that formatted a list of pages a particular way (like making the list wrap into two or more columns). Its nothing fancy, but perhaps it can help other wordpressers who are looking for something similar.

<?php
$querystr = “SELECT $wpdb->posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = ‘publish’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_type = ‘page’ AND $wpdb->posts.post_parent = [[Parent Page ID]] ORDER BY $wpdb->posts.post_title ASC”;

$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);

if ($pageposts):
foreach ($pageposts as $post):
setup_postdata($post);
// Add your own logic or formatting here
?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endforeach;
else :
echo ‘Not Found’;
endif;
?>

Where [[Parent Page ID]] is the id number of the parent page you would like to get children from. If you want all pages included, don’t include this parameter.

I use buxfer to keep track of expenses among friends, it had really streamlined paying for trips and meals and cut down on the confusion. I use it almost daily.

Recently, I attempted to add a new group to share expenses among friends but I kept getting a popup that said I had encountered a bug with a form to submit a report. As I was in a hurry, I didn’t submit a report but almost instantly I got an email from Buxfer:

Hi Brendan,

We are having some difficulties with the group creation
functionality. It will be resolved by the end of the day
today. Please be patient until then.

Thanks so much!

That is the kind of support and customer service more web apps should have. I didn’t even submit a bug report.

I found a variety of solutions to backing up files using S3, but none that exactly met my needs, so I decided to post my work here.

Note that these instructions assume your web server is Unix, Linux or Mac OS X based. It also assumes you have a basic understanding of FTP, SSH, firefox extensions and compressed files.

1. Get the s3-bash code library

The s3 BASH library is a collection of scripts that can get, put or delete files from Amazon s3. You can grab them from Google Code.

2. Unpack and upload these scripts to your server.
They should probably live outside of your webroot. Depending on how your server is set up you might put them in:

/home/USER/s3

Where USER is your username.

3. Give s3-put the proper permissions
We need to be able to execute s3-put so chmod it to 744.

chmod 744 /home/USER/s3/s3-put

4. Sign up for an Amazon S3 Account
You’ll need an Amazon S3 account, so sign up and then get your access key ID and secret access key on the AWS access identifiers page.

5. Put your secret access key in a text file and upload it to the server
You could call it s3.key and put it in the same folder you uploaded the s3-bash scripts to. Chmod it to 640.

chmod 640 /home/USER/s3/s3.key

6. Create a folder for the backups
Make a folder on your webserver for backups, perhaps:

/home/USER/backups

Where USER is your username.

7. Create a bucket on Amazon S3 for your backups
The easiest way I found to do this is to use the firefox extension S3 Firefox Organizer. Add the extension, restart firefox and then in Firefox go to “Tools” > “S3 Organizer”. Click “Manage Accounts” and enter your access key ID and secret access key and then login. Create a bucket (directory) for your backups. I created a one called bnee.

8. Write the backup script
This is the tricky part. Here is the script I came up with. The [[Double Bracketed]] items are places where you’ll have to enter information specific to your account (see below).

#!/bin/bash
USER=[[USER]]
mysqldump –add-drop-table -u [[DBUSER]] -p[[DBPASSWORD]] -A >/home/$USER/backups/mysql.sql
rm /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz
tar -czvf /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz [[PATHTOWEBROOT]] /home/$USER/backups/mysql.sql
NOW=$(date +_%b_%d_%y)
/home/$USER/s3/s3-put -k [[S3ACCESSKEYID]] -s /home/$USER/s3/s3.key -T /home/$USER/backups/backup.tgz -v /[[S3BUCKET]]/backup$NOW.tgz

[[USER]] – Because the username of my web server is used a lot in the paths, this is a variable
[[DBUSER]] – The username of the mysql database. You can get this from the wp-config.php file of your wordpress installation.
[[DBPASSWORD]] – The password for your mysql database. You can get this from the wp-config.php file of your wordpress installation.
[[PATHTOWEBROOT]] – The path to the webroot. Its likely something like /home/USER/public_html
[[S3ACCESSKEYID]] – The access key ID for Amazon S3 (see step 3).
[[S3BUCKET]] – The name of the bucket (directory) you created in step 6.

You might have to change the various paths depending on the way your web server is set up and the folder names you chose in previous steps.

Paste all of this into a text file and name it something like backup.sh. Upload it to your web server, outside of the webroot.

/home/USER/backup.sh

9. Test the script
Verify that the script is working by running it.

sh /home/USER/backup.sh

If everything is working ok, you’ll see a lot of output as each file of your website is added to the compressed backup and then uploaded to Amazon S3. It may take a minute or so to run, but when it is done you can verify that the script worked by using the S3 Firefox plugin to check that the file ended up where you expected it to.

10. Automate it
Add a cron job to run it every night

0 0 * * * sh /home/USER/backup.sh

If everything is configured correctly, this should perform a full backup nightly at midnight.

Note for subversion users: if you’d like to exclude all of the .svn folders and files from your backup, just use

--exclude=".svn"

before the [[PATHTOWEBROOT]] in step 8 above.

I chose to pay £5.00, which gives Radiohead much more income on that album than if it was sold via a record label in stores, and it gives me direct non-DRM access to the mp3s I want. What I don’t want is a physical CD. I probably wouldn’t pay £5.00 for most albums, but since Radiohead is pioneering a different model I thought I would give them some financial encouragement.

The last mainstream album I purchased was Blue Man Group which I bought after seeing them perform on a high school band trip. I purchased the disc used on half.com, so maybe that doesn’t even count as a real record sale. More recently I bought all of the albums in compact disc form from the New Orleans Bingo! Show off of the Louisiana Music Factory Website. (If Clint or any of the Bingo Show members read this, I love your music and would really love to be able to download it from y’all directly using the Radiohead model, and if anyone from the Lousiana Music Factory reads this, I like lots of your musical offerings but your website really needs some user interface work and search engine optimization).

Update: In writing this post, I realized that the first New Orleans Bingo! Show CD, Bingo!, is now available to order so I ordered it for $12.99 plus $5 shipping. I’m curious what percentage the band receives from that sale.