Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 249)

This photo of some skiers at Hatcher Pass, Alaska comes from this Facebook page. (Don’t tell anyone, but Hatcher Pass is one of my favorite places in Alaska.)

Love this “authentic igloo,” built in Point Hope, Alaska. (More info at this Facebook page.)

The Providence Zen Center is having a one-day retreat tomorrow. At times like this I sure wish I lived in that area.

I was watching the movie In Your Eyes again last night, and in it they used the word “moll.” This image is from freedictionary.com, and shows the meanings of moll. Wikipedia further shows that a gangster’s girlfriend is a meaning in the United States, while the other definition is used in Australia and New Zealand.

Anchorage, Alaska ... frozen. (Image from this Twitter page.)

Want to use an outhouse at -28 degrees? (Image from this Twitter page.)

Some sled dogs playing “ball” before the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest starts in a couple of days. (Photo from this Facebook page.)

This photo is from a Business Insider story titled Arnold Schwarzenegger says a year of practicing Transcendental Meditation in the 70s changed his life.

As a followup to my previous post, this image from the Android docs shows a “contextual action bar.” See the link for more information about when this should be used.

I’m just getting back into Android development after several years away, and I thought the Android standard was to have the tool icons on the top of each app window. However, I’ve seen several apps where the toolbar is on the bottom, including this large toolbar on the stock Android Photos app. (After some research, the Android docs show split action bars here.)

I couldn’t get an Android ActionBar menu item icon to appear in the action bar until I followed the XML namespace example shown in the image (which comes from this url). Android Studio kept warning me that android:showAsAction... wasn’t right, but I didn’t know how to solve the problem until I found this code in the docs.

For the record, my menu’s resource XML file now looks like this:

I just ran into an Android problem where neither my ActionBar or menu were showing up. I was trying to create my menu in a FragmentActivity, and in short, you can’t do that. You need to change the FragmentActivity to an ActionBarActivity, which (fortunately) is a subclass of FragmentActivity. A necessary side effect of this is that you end up importing a lot of support library classes, like this:

This SO page has some information on Android’s startActivity vs startActivityForResult methods. There’s much more information on the Android Activity javadoc page.

From the article: “Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos.”

:)

As a note to self, I like the design/layout of this Arduino documentation page. It’s well organized and easy to read. Although the alignment could be better, the use of the orange color for the headings really makes them stand out.

An answer to the Android FAQ, “What are the values directories in my Android project, like values-v11, values-v16, etc?” (Image from this SO link.)

This image shows examples of the Android “Roboto” font family. This android.com typography page shares more details about typography in Android applications. This SO page shows these possible Roboto styles:

android:fontFamily="sans-serif"           // roboto regular
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-light"     // roboto light
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-condensed" // roboto condensed
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-thin"      // roboto thin (android 4.2)
android:fontFamily="sans-serif-medium"    // roboto medium (android 5.0)

The Yukon Quest is a 1,000 mile dog sled race that leads up to the Iditarod. It starts in four days. (Image from this Twitter link.)