If you’ve spent much time trying to search multiple Craigslist sites at once, you’ll know that you can’t do it on Craigslist itself and, for some reason, Craigslist habitually shut down other sites that are set up with that intent. One thing you can do that’s perfectly fine with Craigslist is set up RSS feeds to track your favourite searches – however, it’s rather laborious doing this for every single Craigslist site you want to track. Well, I found a (slightly) quicker way of doing it. Perhaps some time I’ll write a web site to do this, but for the moment it’s manual.

To do this you will need:

• A text editor
• Some patience
• An RSS reader which can import OPML files. I’m going to use Feedly here, although I’d recommend using a mobile app that isn’t Feedly’s own horrible one – I use gReader

First you need to get a list of the prefixes of the Craigslist sites you want to search (e.g. seattle.craigslist.org). This is the most laborious part. They’re listed state-by-state. For each of the states you’re after, go to the equivalent of http://geo.craigslist.org/iso/us/wa (change the state prefix at the end). The easiest way to get the prefixes out is to view the page source in your web browser, then copy and paste the list into a text editor and do some search-and-replace and some manual editing. Hopefully you can end up with a list something like this:

http://kpr.craigslist.org
http://lewiston.craigslist.org
http://moseslake.craigslist.org

You’re probably also a bit bored. Fortunately, the next parts are less repetitive. Now you need to go to one Craigslist local site and search for whatever it is you’re actually after. Copy and paste the URL into a text editor. It should look something like:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/sss?catAbb=sss&query=dog+biscuits&zoomToPosting=&minAsk=&maxAsk=

You need to turn this into an RSS URL – ou can do this by adding “&format=rss” to the end of it. So you’ll end up with:

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/sss?catAbb=sss&query=dog+biscuits&zoomToPosting=&minAsk=&maxAsk=&format=rss

You now need to make a search-specific URL for every single one of the specific sites. I just did this by doing a search and replace on my site list and replacing “.org” with “.org/search/allmysearchstuff“.

If you’re carefully following my instructions, you should now be in posession of a list that looks like this:

http://kpr.craigslist.org/search/sss?catAbb=sss&query=dog+biscuits&zoomToPosting=&minAsk=&maxAsk=&format=rss
http://lewiston.craigslist.org/search/sss?catAbb=sss&query=dog+biscuits&zoomToPosting=&minAsk=&maxAsk=&format=rss
http://moseslake.craigslist.org/search/sss?catAbb=sss&query=dog+biscuits&zoomToPosting=&minAsk=&maxAsk=&format=rss

Excellent. if you only have a few of these you can add them to Feedly one-by-one, but if you have a lot then it’s much easier to do it via an OPML feed import file. Go to the feedshow OPML generator and just paste in the list of RSS links you have above. Click “Create OPML”. Hopefully your web browser will show you an XML file. Save this somewhere.

Now, off to Feedly. Under “My Feedly”, click “Organize”. You should see an “Import OPML” button – click on it, and import the OPML file you created above. Some time shall pass and then… tada! You now have RSS feeds to all the Craigslist sites you were monitoring. Depending on which app you’re using to consume the Feedly feeds, you should be able to get alerts on your phone when new listings appear.

There. Don’t say I’m not good to you.

I did say a while back that this blog would become somewhat random. Well, now I’m posting a review of a harness with which one can carry a camera. Variety, they say, is the spice of life.

I recently bought my first digital SLR camera, a Nikon D40. At the weekends I often climb up mountains, so it seems sensible that I use my nice new camera to take pictures of those mountains. As far as carrying a large camera up mountains goes, you have two options:

1. Leave it in your pack all the way up there and back again
2. Swear at it continually until you revert to option (1).

Enter the Cotton Carrier.

Simply put, The Cotton Carrier is a harness that straps over your chest and allows you to carry a large camera as though it was bolted to your chest. The unit has a sturdy plate which sits on your chest, and the camera attaches to that plate via a small mount that goes in the threaded tripod attachment on the camera. The camera is attached to the mount by turning it to face left and then sliding it into a groove – it cannot then be removed from the mount without turning it ninety degrees and sliding it upward, therefore making it unlikely (but not impossible) that you’ll disengage your camera from the mount by mistake. The device was created by Andy Cotton, a landscape photographer, and it’s described a lot better in Andy’s own introductory video on his web site.

I heard about this system from my boss, Doug – after explaining the whole concept to me he was then inspired to go out and buy one himself. It arrived on Thursday, and rather generously he lent it to me immediately so I could take it on my backpacking trip down the side of Lake Chelan that weekend. This I duly did, and here are my thoughts about the device. I ought to point out that Doug, being a man of great means, purchased the $170 complete system, but the parts that I am reviewing really just represent the $99 camera vest for regular cameras. The complete system has attachments for a secondary camera, bottle opener, lightning conductor, divining rod et cetera. Neither of these systems are cheap, so let’s hope it’s good!

Okay, it’s good. I was never an expert at suspense.

Putting on the harness was pretty simple and after a few experiments I found a height that works well for me on my chest. After you’ve done it a few times, taking the camera out of the carrier becomes almost instinctive. Once it’s out, it seems to magically end up exactly in the right place to take a picture – you can have the camera out of the carrier, take a photo and put it back in within a few seconds. It fits solidly into the mount so there’s never any doubt whether you’ve got it successfully in or not.

Historically I’ve always taken a point-and-shoot camera in my trouser pocket where it’s nice and accessible – carrying the SLR on the Cotton Carrier actually made it much simpler to take photos on the spur of the moment, especially given the extra power-on time that my compact camera seems to need. At one point, one of my backpacking companions leaned over and grabbed my SLR from my chest mount because he didn’t have the time to take his own compact camera from his pocket. It’s amazing the times when a handy pocket is actually not handy at all.

Alright, I think I’ve gushed about this enough now, so I’ll analyse a couple of details. First off, the way in which the camera is mounted to the stand. This is done via a small machined button – I’m please that it’s not heavy, but it does mean that the camera doesn’t sit level any more when you put it down on a table. The only real annoyance here is that it’s hard to take long exposure shots without actually using a tripod – I’m used to just sitting the camera on a rock, and it’s tricky to do that with the button on the bottom. The button comes off easily with the tool provided – it would be great if either the button was a little wider (so the camera could sit flat on it) or the tool could easily be attached to the harness itself (because, umm, I left it in the car). The slot to unscrew the button is pretty generic and the button could easily be removed with a coin or some other similar object, but I stopped short of this one given that the harness belonged to my boss and it might be a bit difficult to explain on Monday exactly what I had been trying to do with his brand new piece of camera equipment and a bent spork.

I was concerned that wearing the harness all day would make both it and me somewhat sweaty – somehow, this didn’t happen but I’m not exactly sure why. The carrier is made of some sort of mesh – Mr Cotton, I don’t know what this is or how it works, but please keep making it that way. Somehow, my rucksack straps ended up soaked, but the carrier did not.

On the subject of rucksacks, the carrier can easily be worn at the same time as a large pack. As you can see from the photos, I was carrying somewhere around 20kgs of stuff in a 70 litre pack and the carrier fitted fine underneath. The shoulder straps are wide enough that they cause almost no discomfort, although if I had to choose I’d have them wider rather than narrower, as that would mean the backpack sat entirely on them which I think would be even better. The carrier was sitting high enough on my chest that the chest strap sat just above the waist straps on my rucksack, so this worked ideally. I could easily have worn a climbing harness as well, and the carrier wouldn’t have got in the way.

Any minus points? Well, I jotted down a couple. However, I’m very much convinced that the positioning the Cotton Carrier uses is precisely the correct place to carry a camera, and some of my gripes are around this. Firstly, I was using a water-bladder inside my rucksack to drink from – the problem with this is that you’re drinking water from a spout directly above the back of your camera so you have to be a little careful not to cheerfully pour a torrent on top of the thing. The solution to this one is, I think, just to drink more carefully. Secondly, it would be inadvisable to keep the neck strap on the camera when using the carrier unless you were going to also put it around your neck as an emergency measure – there’s a reasonable chance it would slip down and you’d end up putting a knee through it when climbing steep terrain. Again, not sure of the solution – the carrier itself comes with a “jesus strap” that you can attach to the harness, so the right answer here is probably just to embrace that, and ditch the old neck strap.

Overall, this is a superb piece of gear – as you know, I don’t make a habit of writing equipment reviews on this blog but I was so impressed with this harness that I felt I ought to write something. I was approached by two people during the backpacking trip asking me what it was and where I’d got it, and my backpacking chum told me he was sorely tempted to buy one because right now his $1000 DSLR camera was largely worthless, gathering dust in his basement. I’m amazed that this device isn’t an open secret in the climbing community, but it isn’t – I’ll certainly be doing my best to remedy that, and I hope Mr Cotton continues innovating because he’s onto the right thing.

Now to persuade the wife…

This is what happens when your company gives free soda to its software developers.

   

This fine creation is located in building 35 of Microsoft’s main Redmond campus. It was made by a friend of mine called Thibaut, who informs me that it contains 512 cans. He matched up the drinks to the pixels in Excel (obviously) and then put up a “wanted” poster for the appropriate number of each.

As I’m sure you’re wondering, the artwork contains:

• 170 Diet Coke cans
• 82 Peach Nectarine Talking Rain cans
• 36 Coke Zero cans
• 120 Coca Cola / Dr Pepper full caffeine & sugar cans
• 4 Caffeine-free Pepsi cans
• 68 Pepsi full caffeine & sugar cans
• 32 Mug Root Beer cans

Apparently the hardest ones to find were root beer. Proof that software developers are not without a sense of taste.

As you probably know already, I am not a great gun fan. Like everyone else, I spend my lunchtimes sitting watching videos that already agree with my point of view. Because, y’know, otherwise how would you learn anything? Anyway – one of the things that is often cited by people on my side of the debate is the vast number of gun deaths in America compared to other civilised countries. And, sure enough, there they are on the list, right up there with all the places you’d not like to live. But I think this is a kind of meaningless statistic – of course hardly anyone in the UK is killed with a gun. There aren’t any guns there. There are very few snowmobile-related deaths in Afghanistan.

I would assume that, every hour, about the same volume of the population in America and the UK decide “Right. That does it. I’m going to do that twat some serious damage”. Then, with the finest murder weapon they can get their hands on, off they trot. Americans obviously have it comparatively easy as they can either use one of their own guns or pop to the supermarket and buy an AK-47. But us Brits are resourceful souls. We could run someone over with the car, or throw a waffle iron into their bath, or push them out of their bathroom window. How hard can it be?

Instead of comparing firearm murder rates, what we really want to compare is any-old-weapon murder rates. And, actually, Americans do way better on that list. They have 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people – this compared to a world average of 6.9. They’re still behind most of the places I’d like to live (UK 1.2; France 1.1; China 1.0; Switzerland 0.7) but they’re ahead of some surprising locations (Russia 10.2; Saint Lucia 25!). So perhaps it’s not such a bad spot after all.

Another thing to think about is the fact that a gun is probably a more sure fire murder weapon (ha, ha) than whatever the angry but resourceful Brit might have come up with. So presumably America has a higher successful-murder rate but Britain will have higher rates of other injuries. There aren’t so many clear numbers on this, but the Wikipedia page about American crime has a section devoted to comparisons. Summary: probably not.

Of course, there are probably quite a few murderers in the UK who run out of steam while trying to find a murder weapon, or their weapon of choice fails entirely to injure the person they were after. I’ve no statistics on that. Hopefully they got it worked out some other way. Maybe it’s for the best.

I have a rather bad carbon footprint. We have two cars in which we drive around 25,000 miles a year (11 tons of CO2). We have a large house with ancient oil-powered heating (9 tons). I fly several  times a year for a mixture of business and pleasure (15 tons), I don’t make any attempts to buy local or in-season produce and I have carbon-expensive hobbies. All told, the Carbon Footprint Calculator tells me that my footprint is around 45 tons a year. This compares badly with a US average of 20 and a world average of 4.

And, of course, I’m doing this every year. CO2 production varies a lot with age so it’s hard to come up with a figure for my entire life, but using the UK Carbonica calculator and extrapolating it to my life, I’m guessing I will consume somewhere around 2,000 tons of CO2.

I could get a job that involves less flying, and probably save 200 tons over my life. I could get the bus instead of driving, and perhaps save 150. I could start shopping more carefully, and maybe save 20. We’re converting our heating to electricity, which should save 50 or 60. These are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about in order to reduce my footprint.

The United States government are also doing their bit to shove me in the right direction. Last year they gave me $300 in subsidies to help insulate my attic (which should save 1-2 tons a year). They’re taxing motor fuel to encourage me to drive less, and that’s certainly made me carpool more often. They’re taxing air travel, and that’s cut down my number of work trips somewhat. All these seem like moves in the right direction.

This is my son, Philip. He’s probably the cutest baby in the world. Well, top ten anyway. My wife and I made a choice to have him, and we’re very happy indeed about it.

Unfortunately for the planet, he’s munching through CO2 with gay abandon. He’s been born into a world that is more careful with this sort of thing and where carbon munching is more expensive, so I doubt he’s going to hit the 2,000 tons that I’ve used up. Let’s be conservative and say he is going to consume a tenth of what I will – 200 tons.

In environmental terms, my child will be the equivalent of:

• Driving around the planet nine times in a Hummer H3
• Seven Space Shuttle launches
• Flying first class from London to Sydney 16 times

And all this only if he manages to produce ten times less CO2 than I will.

I understand that reproduction is an important thing for human beings, and I don’t propose that we stop anyone from reproducing. But we could at least quit encouraging each other to continue banging them out. It seems odd to me that we’re all quick to look scornfully at the person zooming around on their own in an SUV, and at the same time smile demurely at the person with 3 kids in a Prius. It seems odd to me that kids get to eat for free in a bunch of restaurants, and that a person earning $100,000 in the US gets a $1000-per-child tax credit.

Which brings me on to China.

China is the world’s largest emitter of CO2. There are a lot of things that are a bit wonky about China’s one-child policy but it seems to me that, while the rest of the world footles around making subsidies for hybrid cars and solar panels and having pop concerts to “raise awareness”, China is the only country that’s actually made any effort to reduce the greatest cause of environmental damage.

Well, that’s the end of my child-hating blog post. No doubt my child will wave this at me at some point claiming it’s a fine example of my bad parenting (although hopefully he won’t have printed it out).

There are some people who spend their lives determining what makes an R-rated film and what makes a PG-rated film. And, of course, there are all sorts of factors. But if you took the visuals out and compared just the dialogue? What words appear in R-rated films but not PG-rated films? And vice versa?

I used the Internet Movie Script Database and several computer programs to build a list of the most common words in the 519 R-rated films they had scripts for, and the most common words in their 332 PG-rated film scripts. Obviously the majority of the words contained in these scripts are pretty unsurprising. The most common word in both is the, which is also the most common word in the English language. Where it starts to get interesting is where the proportions differ.

Some differences you’d expect – the word fucking has the greatest disparity, occurring in 80% of R scripts and only 33% of PG ones. The rest of the top four are taken up by fuck, fucked and fuckin. In at 5th is asshole (56% of R; 31% of PG). Then comes jesus, shortly followed by christ, so obviously it’s the two words together that are making the difference. It’s amusing to see that “jesus christ” is used in language so much more often than either “jesus” or “christ”.

Shortly behind our lord and saviour is motherfucker and the top ten is rounded off nicely by bullshit and fucker (29% of R; 6% of PG). Some of the words I might have expected to appear in the top ten are nowhere to be seen – murder is way down at 20th and gun comes in at a miserable 517th (just 18% of R-rated films and 12% of PG-rated ones). It’s interesting that cigarette (in 12th) beats joint (in 13th), which in turn beats drugs (29th).

Of course, there must be some words that appear in PG films but not R films, right? Well, there are, but the difference is less distinctive. The biggest hitter is the word ship, which appears in 40% of PG films but only 23% of R ones. It’s followed closely by bows, excitement, cloud, larger and tower (41% of PG; 26% of R), but sadly I think any statistician would tell you this was irrelevant on a data set of this size.

Without further ado, here are the words that appear the most in R-rated films compared with PG-rated films. The words are sized by discrepancy.

 

And, in case you’re interested, here is the entire list in a big spreadsheet. Want to guarantee a PG rating for your film? Steer clear of any sort of fucks, don’t mention cigarettes (other drugs are ok) and don’t blaspheme. Perhaps add a nautical theme and your film is practically guaranteed a PG. Unless its primary visuals involve people being gunned down while conducting sexual acrobatics with a chain-smoking Shetland pony.

It’s possible that films are rated on more than just dialogue.

Atheists will all tell you that atheism isn’t a religion, but I think these days it’s becoming one. I constantly see more and more people posting links to posts proclaiming that “science” beats “religion” every time, even though the majority of the world’s religious population are perfectly normal people who also believe in “science”. And plenty of the world’s not-religious people are blithering halfwits.

Perhaps I’m getting old, but there’s a sneering pompousness about atheism these days that doesn’t really reflect my own point of view. Sure, I don’t believe in gods. And yes, I think that people who do are a slightly odd. I also think you’re slightly odd if you want to drive a car with an automatic gearbox, but I won’t align myself with a group of people whose only entertainment in life is slagging off people who have automatic gearboxes. It just seems a bit too negative.

So from now on I’m not an atheist. My religion is “none”. I don’t believe in a god, and I don’t believe in taking pot-shots at people who do.

Who’s with me? I need money to build our church.