Make Smarter - Intro to Rails, JS Console Pro Tips, Getting to know GIT, Freeing Energy from the Grid

If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss about Ruby on Rails is about, nettuts+ has a great screencast for you. It’s over 40 minutes long and includes test-driven development to test the application’s features. Best intro to Rails I’ve found, hands down.

If you use Chrome’s JavaScript console so much CTRL-SHIFT-J is part of your muscle memory, this next video is for you. Paul Irish of Chrome and HTML5 Boilerplate fame gives a 7-minute power class on advanced console usage.

I have big geek-love for Mercurial, but all the cool kids are hanging out on Github these days. I think the next project I release the code on (coming soon!) I’ll try hosting on Github. Which means I’ll have to learn Git. Luckily, Github has some great learning resources, including this good introduction video. Now I have to figure out how to get Git to run well on Windows XP. Don’t ask.

And finally, in the doesn’t-have-anything-to-do-with-anything category, check out this TED Talk from Justin Hall called Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid. I keep reading interesting stuff about graphene; cool to see it in action. He doesn’t use the word graphene, but I think that what he’s talking about for the window stuff.