I stumbled across a pretty cool site today. It’s not much to look at but the content is king as they say. Tons of plans for making your own Plasma balls, rods, lightening tubes and more. You know, those things they sell in Spenser’s gifts, cheesy stereo stores and head shops, that project lightening bolts or plasma corona’s inside glass spheres and tubes. They’re surprisingly cheap to make too, it looks like you could make one for as little as $20 or $30. If only I was more adept with electronics I’d be all over this.
Archive for April, 2003
I may be eating bread again before I die. I’ve been aware of this as a theory, this is the first time I’ve seen actual evidence of it working. Scientists succeeded in using gene therapy to ‘repair’ the livers of diabetic mice. This is so damned sweet. Assuming everything checks out this is still probably at least a decade away from being useful as a treatment for humans like me who have diabetes, but that’s fine with me, so long as I continue to take care of myself as I have been, it means I should be able to have a longer and healthier old age. 75+ here I come.
(sorry siblings, no inheritance for you! 
…writ large. Now this is cool. Grub is an attempt to use the world’s collective computing power to build a great search engine. It’s free to download and play around with (though you do have to register) and the potential payoff is there, imagine a search engine even better than Google.
For those of you unfamiliar with distributed computing, the idea is you use the cpu’s of machines that would otherwise be idle (like your office computer when you are home, or your home machines when you are at work) to perform computational operations. In the past I’ve noted projects like the iterations over common cold bacteria and the like; this is the first one likely to produce results I would use. Well, unless the SETI people find an alien culture or two
Tim Powers has the most fertile imagination of any author I’ve read in the past couple of years. I read his The Drawing of the Dark and enjoyed it well enough to pick up The Anubis Gate. It’s an excellent yarn about a time travelling literary critic who happens by chance into the machinations of ancient egyptian sorcerers, an evil clown on stilts in 1870’s London, a wealthy 80’s industrialist who aspires to immortality and world domination, and some of the literary figures of mid 19th century europe. Two thumbs up on the dave scale - it’s by no means an all time classic but definitely worth considering for a weeks light entertainment.
What the hell is with the animals in my neighborhood? I finished raking the yard this weekend thanks to the nice weather. In the corner of the yard I found heaps of animal droppings, deer and dog, piled in layers on top of each other. I’ve spotted the deer a few times back in the corner of the yard but it’s been a while. Why they’re competing with the dogs to see who can leave the latest and largest turd piles is for an animal psychologist to decipher, mainly it’s pissing me off. I had to take a snow shovel to the piles and heave them off into the woods. Hopefully that’ll sidetrack them and they’ll continue their battle off under the pine trees. If not I’m going to bring out the wrist rocket and some peanuts and let them know I’m not a fan of their work.
Hey just a heads up y’all. I am going to try updating the machine that hosts Dave’s Place this weekend, possibly as soon as tonight. I’m more nervous about this upgrade than any I have done in quite a while. It’s possible Dave’s Place won’t come back up once I’m done with the upgrade, which could mean as much as several weeks of downtime depending on how bad it borks things. So….wish me luck, hopefully it will all go smoothly and I’ll be back up and running in Redhat 9 by Saturday night.
Andrew reminded me about this today. I keep forgetting to post it. Having trouble with incredibly long URL’s and pasting them into emails or your instant messenger client? Try tinyurl.com. It’s an incredibly handy free resource to turn long urls into tiny urls. You just paste the long url into their site and it kicks out a short one for you to send to your friends. You can also install a tinyurl toolbar on your web browser if you want. Definitely recommended. You’ll see more of this coming from me in my IM’s from now on, I’ve been a slacker about it but no more.
And the substances ingested. Recognize any of these? I do actually. metafilter got me reminiscing about what seems like a lifetime ago. All I have to say is the obie chops are tasty if you’re in the right frame of mind, even if they might contain saccharine, and ignore the advice to stay away from the light lest you find yourself hopelessly ensnared in a bramble patch in the dark woods in the dead of night. Lunacy is guaranteed to ensue.
hear of Bittorrent? It’s another clever scheme to help distribute popular content. Many of you are probably familiar with the fileplanet problem, ie you want some hot new download, a movie trailer, a demo of a new game, but when you go to grab it you discover the server hosting it is overwhelmed and you get 2k/second downloads, or it’s hosted in in fileplanet and you have to wait in line for your file. Bitttorrent is trying to solve this problem by using peer to peer distribution - the idea is a file is published in bittorrent, and when you click on a bittorrent link, you download the file from the collective network of bittorrent installs. Meanwhile you also begin to distribute the portions of the file you’ve already downloaded to others who are trying to download the same file. It’s a very effective scheme to handle instances of instant demand, like the release of the new Matrix trailer.
As it turns out it’s a good scheme for other scenarios as well, take for example recordings of popular tv shows. Why bother with a VCR or a tivo when I can just use bittorrent to grab any show I’ve missed/want to see and download it? I’ve used this approach for over a year now using other mechanisms (mostly dc++ of late), but bitorrent makes it easier to get ahold of the content you’re looking for.
Anyway it’s all worth a look if you’re interested. I still have the problem of how to get this content onto my bigscreen tv - plugging the laptop into the home theater system is a pain in the ass, as is the constant recording of CD’s, they just don’t fit enough content. But that’s a problem for another day
I’ve complained many times here about how complicated home theater is. There are more wires by far coming out of my stereo system then there are coming out of my 5 computers and their associated devices (printers, routers etc etc). I’ve even posted pictures here of the mess that is the cabling situation. Cnet has posted a pretty good guide to all the different formats and what the bajillions of acronyms mean. For the record mine supports 6.1, all the Dolby formats with the exception of headphones, and DTS up to Neo:6.
This stuff is harder to keep up with than compyer stuff, I’m not exagerating.
Me wants. Mind you this is a babelfish translated page from the original Japanese so it’s a little tough to follow. Yes, I already have a great camera with a watertproof enclosure. Why would I want another? It’s mainly a size issue, mine is incredibly bulky. It’s fine for snorkling, though even then the thing is a little too bulky, but it sucks when I’m kayaking, it’s hard to paddle when I have this huge lump across my chest. This summer I am solving this problem one way or another, though I doubt I will solve it by buying a different camera, no matter how much it appeals to me.
Unless someone wants to buy my existing setup? Speak up if so.
The daily exercise regimen I’ve been following for the past 6 months has really been good for me in a number of ways besides the obvious physical benefits. I’ve drawn an interesting conclusion about self-discipline - I’ve used it to improve my physical health and decided it’s time to work on my faculties. If I can force myself to spend 1 hour a day exercising, I should easily be able to force myself to spend 1 hour a day studying technical materials that will help me with my career. So. First up is Linux, better Linux skills will help immensely at work and enhance my job prospects if the rug comes out from under. Starting tonight I’m spending ~ an hour a night reading this until I work my way to the end. I’ll give a progress report in a couple of weeks once I’ve worked my way through it. The Apache webserver is next on the list too (or possibly perl).
Without hardly trying. The Register is running a great overview on how to use Google and some clever scripting to completely screw over anyone who’s angered you by subjecting them to a deluge of regular old mail, literally 100’s of pounds of mail a day, so much mail that they will be unable to dig through it such that they can find their legitimate mail. Like bills for example. The mischevious imp in me loves the notion. It came to light because hacktivists subjected a spammer to such an attack. Mind you, this is almost definitely illegal, and far be it from to endorse such activity. And if my mailbox starts to fill up with fashionable footware and pet supply catalogs, I’ll know who to blame, so don’t even think about it!
This site doesn’t get much traffic. I’m going to do some things about that this summer, but for now it’s mainly a place for friends and family. There are around a dozen or so regular visitors and on any given day only 1 or 2 stop by. In fact I generate most of the traffic to the site, using resources most of you don’t know about (yet anyway). So a couple of weeks ago I was bewildered when in the course of investigating why my network connection was so slow I discovered it was because my web server was completely swamped with incoming connections. Why was everyone suddenly hitting my site? A little investigation uncovered that fact that this post (the fucking mutants one at the top of the page) had somehow become one of the top search results in google’s search engine for folks using a particular phrase when looking for nekkid pics of Ms. Spears. I’m not going to say what phrase exactly because I don’t want the problem to recur, but when I figured it out man did I ever get a laugh. Imagine the poor horny teenagers showing up at my site clicking all over the place muttering ‘where’s the boobs! Damnit, Google is full of it!’
Anyway the problem seems to have gone away, or at least it hasn’t happened again in several weeks, so fingers crossed, no more porn hounds.
A simple recipe to make $25-50. This recipe requires you to have an ebay account with a solid positive rating, I would suggest at least +20 with no negatives.
Go to ToysRus. Pick three popular games. I would suggest Midnight Racing II, Splinter Cell, NBA Street 2, Def Jam Vendetta, or any of a number of other popular titles. Pay for them - due to ToysRus buy 2 get 1 free sale this week, your total cost will be around $105. Now head home and list your games on ebay. Use a 3 day auction format. Charge whatever you want for postage; I use priority mail $3.85, if you’re a chiseler you can charge more and pocket the profit. Watch as your auctions bring in a minimum of $120. If you’ve done your research and picked hit games your auctions will bring in ~$150, and possibly you’ll get an idjit or two bidding things above retail and you’ll bring in even more cash. Repeat as often as you liike but remember, this week only.
I’m not actually doing this, though I will sell the games I bought yesterday (Dragon Warriors, Primal and midnight club racing II, link above) for a small profit once I am done with them. I did the same thing around xmas the last time they offered this deal and it worked out great - I got to play the latest games essentially for free.
Anyway, best of luck with your auctions
check out Scripteur, a cool OSX only solution to media publishing. If you’re a mac only household and you want to share MP3, video and other files seamlessly across your lan to the other machines on your network, this may be good for you. It’s a clever use of Rendevous and Applescript. No Tivo-like recording functions or anything, this is only about publishing, but what it does it does well.
Rendevous is cool stuff and one of the cool things to be found on OSX. It’s based on Zeroconf, an international standard for zero configuration networking. Apple is as far as I am aware the first big vendor to support it, though some of the printer manufacturers are following along in Apple’s wake. The idea is network devices should be able to autodiscover network services, so you plug in a new PC and it finds the DHCP server and all nearby printers. You turn on server on that box, like FTP or HTTP, and any other machine on that network segment can see the server without having to know its address. It’s really pretty damned slick. Just cross your fingers MS gets around to incorporating it into windoze so apps like Scripteur can work seamlessly across platforms.
I spent basically all of Sunday proving I’m a techno loser. First I tried to reinstall WinXP on my laptop. The laptop is an engineering sample of a model that originated in Japan so support for it is non-existent. This is what you get for trying to save a buck
Anyway everything goes smoothly including wireless internet, until i realize the video is unaccelerated. That’s right, Windows can’t detect the video card so it’s using its default driver. Ugh! many hours of fruitless searching later, still no joy. So I decide to proceed with a linux install (which was part of the reason I was re-installing XP to begin with, so I could get linux on the thing). Linux goes smoothly and even detects the video card, except it’s detected it incorrectly and has video artifact problems. Drag the mouse across the screen, leave a trail of mouse poop. Pull down a menu? There’s nothing in it! But wait, wave the mouse around over it and stuff appears. Oh joy.
Anyway 8 hours later I have a laptop with not one but 2 basically non-functional OS’s on it. I gave up in frustration and played Indiana Jones. Nothing cures a pissed off Dave like bashing Nazi bastids for a couple of hours (Indiana Jones is a blast btw).
Tonight I am back at it with the laptop, we’ll see how it goes.
Now this is interesting. The developers of divx have released a beta of their new software which provides an easy way to play all your media files on all the computers you have. As regular readers know, I have been planning the construction of a ‘media box’ to hook up to my home theater system so that I can play my mp3 collection and the movies I grab using my tv capture card without having to hook my laptop up to the home theater. The basic idea is a sort of tivo/digital media box. Anyway I have been investigating my options. Lately I am leaning towards going with an Xbox because of the excellent xbox media player project, which I could have up and running for around $250 (as compared to the PC I specced out to do this, which would cost around $6-700). The downside is, no tivo functionality, the upside is, cheap! But Mastermind looks interesting also, I’m going to play around with it and see if it’s viable. the downside is it seems to rely on their centralized server, which I don’t like. I want to run the server on my own boxes, I have no interest in marketers building a usage profile on me.
More as I learn about this, over the next couple of months I will be installing something in the living room. What that something is remains to be seen
tech-report had a great friday night topic this week. Everyone posted their favorite little utilities they use. I found several gems in there, including a great registry tweaker, a free alternative to DU meter and a nice free alternative to ACDSEE/Irfan Viewer. Go forth and seek
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