Check out the gorgeous blown glass sculptures at the Light Opera Gallery. If I was a slightly wealthier man I’d pick up this piece by artist Ed Kachurik in a heartbeat. Siblings take note, xmas gift potential is high on this site 
Archive for March, 2004
It’s a grey, sometimes rainy day today, so it’s fitting that I stumbled across unfortunate bit of research on Reuters. I’ve known for a while that I’m likely destined for a future with heart disease, but its still unsettling to see it portrayed in such stark terms. I lost my last girlfriend in large part due to my inflexible insistence on rigorous daily exercise. I wish I could send this link along for her to look at - it’s the reason why I’m so intense about it.
The only thing I can ask of folks reading this is to vote for candidates who support stem cell research and aren’t encumbered by reproductive issue-related policies. At present the stem cell research serves as the most promising research in the quest for a cure. I’m fortunate to be young enough that I can still hope for this - but only if enough folks vote on my side of the issue
So Tech tv has been purchased by comcast and is being merged with g4tv. This is sort of a bummer - some of the techtv programming is pretty good. As goofy and content light as the screensavers is, I still watched it most nights while eating my supper and occasionally some gems would come across on air, plus they often had interesting folks in for interviews. G4 tv meanwhile has almost nothing going for it - they have very little actual content which they replay endlessly - the same half dozen half hour shows replay at least 10 times a week, and almost all of it is fawning coverage of the big game releases that’s no steps above adware. Visit their website for a glimpse into this actually - what you get instead of content is a request for demographic information about yourself before you’re allowed into the site. That about sums them up I think - I won’t grace this approach with an actual link.
Anyway…bummers. I hope the screensavers and X-play persist under the new management. And maybe some of the management folks from Techtv, accustomed to producing a significant amount of new programming on a weekly basis, will manage to push the new network in that direction. Frankly I doubt it though. My guess this is about economics - Techtv wasn’t doing well producing lots of content, and G4 tv was doing sufficiently well with their approach of ‘not much programming, and most of the new programming basically is infomercials’ so I bet Techtv is absorbed, screensavers goes on in some form, and most of the rest of it is killed off.
When I was a kid, my neighbor had The Dark Tower electronic boardgame. I loved that game, despite the fact that it its core it was a very simple luck-based game. I’m not alone in my nostalgia for the game though - a complete copy of it sells for as much as $300 on ebay these days. More to the point though, fans have recreated the gameplay, in the form of a flash version of the game and an offline java version. Not sure if you’d like to play? Go read a few reviews on the boardgamegeek.com site.
What is it about magnets that makes them so compelling? Whatever it is, it’s induced a serious case of geek lust in me for these mesmerizing magnets. $30 or so shipped is a little on the steep side for a silly office toy, yet still I’m going to indulge myself. Check out the video of them snapping together for a hint as to why.
[link courtesy of Jesse, though he hasn't actually posted this to his weblog.]
There’s an article in the new york times [registration required] observing that the U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to review recent developments in cold fusion research. It turns out the Pons and Fleischmann techniques that had been so widely discredited in the early 90’s are still being researched and are showing promise in the labs. Here’s hoping they’re really on the right track this time.
After years (literally - at least 4) I’ve finally registered my own domain for this site - metamusing.net. In part the name is an homage to the sometimes excellent metafilter.com and in part it’s a simple play on words - meta musing or amusing, read it as you will, if you dig through the content here I think you’ll agree the site’s a bit of both. It will take a while for this to propogate, and right now it’s definitely not working. I’ll mention it here when it does start to work. I’ll probably get mail services going as well, and ultimately I’ll get the other services running on this site migrated over to the new domain. I’ll keep daves-place.dyndns.org active as well, so that no one ends up with broken bookmarks.
Have you noticed the proliferation of the little merit badge-like buttons folks are putting on their weblogs? Take a look at the bottom right of decafbad.com for example. Sort of a geek street cred item, the more badges you have the more ‘in’ you are with the vox digerati….or something. Actually I don’t mean to tease, though to some extent I do find it amusing and the comparison to merit badges pretty much sums that up. But anyway the point of this post is to note the availability of a handy web-based tool that will build the merit badges for you. Get with the program and add those badges to your site today.
Got multiple machines running multiple operating systems? Wish you could afford one of those killer USB KVM switches from Belkin so you could run all the machines off of a single keyboard and mouse? Turns out there’s a workable software solution to this issue, Synergy. It’s got less overhead than VNC and unlike Timbuktu, PC Anywhere and so on, it’s free. Runs on Win32, Linux and OSX.
When I gave the presentation to the Waynflete school in February I promised them I would keep the materials I created for them online for a month. It’s been a month so I’ve pulled them down and the old homepage is back in place. If you’re looking for the presentation outline, you can find it here.
Blizzard is releasing a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) this year, hopefully this summer. For the first time a MMORPG will be available at launch for both Mac and PC so if you’re a mac user you’re finally in like Flynn Blizzard seems confident enough about the qualilty of their game that they’ve skipped the NDA that normally accompanies beta tests. Their publi beta test just began and since there’s no NDA, beta reports are already showing up. You can read a great, thorough overview of the state of the game at present. While I was very curious about this game it didn’t seem likely I would go for it. Now I’m not so sure I was right, the game definitely sounds very promising.
How annoying those wall warts are - buy a new power strip and find you can only fit 4 plugs in it out of the available 8 because most of your devices terminate in wall warts - the ubiquitous power converters that clog power recepticles everywhere. I stumbled across a great solution to this problem on the cyberguys.com site - a short 1 foot splitter. You plug the splitter into your power strip, then plug the wall warts into the splitter. Very nice - a cheap ($3), effective solution to the problem. I’m ordering up a dozen so I can clean up my office and home theater power situation - I have 4 power strips and a UPS in my office and 3 strips by the home theater system, leaving me with a rat’s nest of cords. This won’t solve the problem but at least it will reduce it somewhat.
So…like most bachelors, I hate cleaning the bathroom. One of the tools I use to help me avoid this chore is the toilet tablet, you know, those little tablets you put in your toilet’s water tank that contain cleaning substances and scents. Recently I tried a new brand that advertised itself as the ’super blue’ tablet,’ and it led to one of those trademark Dave moments. Of course I have to share.
A couple of days after I popped the thing in my toilet’s tank, the toilet bowl water started changing to odd colors and occasionally had chunks of waxy cottage cheese looking material in it. Two nights ago I investigated and found this:
What the hell is growing in there I don’t know - it’s foul looking yet pleasantly scented. But as I was peering in the tank, the candle I keep on the back of the toilet slid into the water with a splash, spattering me and the bathroom walls with the gunk and the deep blue juice the tablet had made of the toilet water.
I flipped. The label on the tablet had warned to keep the thing away from one’s face when opening the package and to avoid skin contact with it. Now I had it all over myself, in some mad-scientist’s congealed cottage cheese form. God only knew what it was going to do to my skin. I dropped everything and stuck my head under the shower faucet to rinse it off. Then I made matters worse. I needed to get the candle out of the tank, so I got a wooden spoon from the kitchen and tried to dredge the candle out of the goop, but I couldn’t seem to fit it past the toilet bobber. In frustration I just forced it, which caused the toilet to start leaking from the hinge on the bobber. I could stop it by holding the bobber on an angle, but left to its own devices the tank was going to overflow. What to do…what to do. Eventually I decided to dash down to the basement to get tools, and I ran back upstairs with toolbox in hand convinced that the toilet would be leaking goop all over the bathroom. Fortunately I made it in time and some almost Fonzie-class fiddling with the bobber made it stop leaking.
All’s well that ends well, 2 days later and I have no shedding of skin or odd rashes, and though I was convinced the blue stuff was going to hopelessly stain the bathroom walls, it came off easily with soap and water. I have to say to my credit that once I’d rinsed myself off, instead of getting mad I just started laughing, the whole situation was just too comical. There is one lesson I’ve learned though - don’t take the blue toilet tablets, they’re toxic
[I have to point out the best Dave moment I've captured on the blog - the jalapeno juice incident which is definitely worth a read if you haven't seen it]
Holy shite, I have no idea how I’ve missed this up till now. etree.org, which has been around for ages, added abit torrent section with absolutely tons of excellent concerts free for the downloading. This is all lossless stuff (flac and shn and so on), meaning you can download this, burn it to cd, and crank it to 11 on the ol’ stereo without and fear of the compression-induced blues
As an added bonus, they even have an RSS feed [<-link to the actual feed - open it in your RSS reader] for the concerts. This is great great stuff. And as I mentioned in the title - it’s all legal.
A Japanese company is releasing light emitting diodes that require no power source - you power them by shaking them. Imagine the fun Deadheads would have had in the 70’s-80’s with these. My bet is they start showing up in the clothing of ravers and other nighttime party folk in the near future.
source: [engadget]
Put that office laser printer to work. I don’t know why I find paper models so interesting, but for some reason of late I do. So here’s another collection of paper models you can print, cut out, and build. This time they’re all free, and some of them, like the oil rig, can get rather elaborate. Simple fun for the kids, or the kid in you
…and it is going to require petabyte storage systems in the home. A clever programmer has married two of my current fave geek toys, Bit Torrent and RSS. Imagine a system where you subscribe to certain content channels, say ‘1970’s comedy tv’ and ‘classical music,’ and every morning when you wake up, there’s a selection of such content available to you on your home machine/network. Seem far fetched? Wired has an article covering a prototype of such a system, built by a clever programmer. It’s not really ready for the average user yet, and it’s built on Userland’s Radio, which limits the potential audience, but the concept is just fantastic. I really hope (and expect) that refined versions of this are going to pop up like wildflowers over the next couple of months. Get ready for a multimedia content rich summer and a freaked out broadcast television industry.
As an aside, I really feel like there’s an opportunity here for Apple. Imagine a setop box from them that works like a tivo, but has the RSS publishing and bit torrent file sharing built in. Tie this to their .mac and iTunes architecture. This would offer Apple the opportunity to bypass the broadcast and cable networks in the same way that iTunes and the music store offer Apple the potential to become the music distribution point, bypassing the recording studios. Steve Jobs is just the iconclast to bring this to the public over the loudly protesting corpse of the existing broadcast and publishing industries that can’t bring themselves to adapt to the always on networked future.
Well, not exactly. But the amount of stuff they don’t know versus what they do know (factory workers exposed to some combination of the compounds emitted from a bag of microwave popcorn are getting lung disease) would suggest that at the very least you should be careful with that bag of microwave popcorn and the vapors it gives off when cooking/first opened. There’s an article on cnn with the particulars if you happen to eat popcorn and want more specifics
I’ve mentioned carbon nanotubes in the past, and how they can ultimately lead us to the ability to build a space elevator. Progress was made recently on this front - again in vein of ’small things that change the world,’ scientists have succeeded in spinning a 100 meter long carbon nanotube by means of a newly discovered manufacturing process. Though the nanotube is missing a number of characteristics that make the material useful, it’s still terrific incremental progress - prior to this no one had been able to manufacture one even remotely as long. It’s also amazing how quickly this science is evolving. I’ve been reading about the potential of space elevators since I was a kid in the ’70’s, but there’s been more progress towards them in the last 5 years than there had been in the preceding decades. Keep those fingers crossed, I may yet manage to get my ride into space
Most folks have probably stumbled across the Home of the Underdogs at some point - it’s the definitive abandonware download site on the net, with literally thousands of games available that are no longer being published. It’s a wonderful resource, but unfortunately in order to pay the bills they’ve been forced to use increasingly…invasive advertising schemes, to the point where it’s a hassle to get stuff from them. Today I happened across an alternative site, XTC Abandonware. They don’t have the comprehensive selection of content that Underdogs has, and they seem to lack any of the Mac content, but there are more classics there for the grabbing than any one person could play in a lifetime. Go grab yourself a copy of the original warlords for example, and enjoy one of the better strategy games ever made. A weekend of enjoyable gaming is but 539k away
(For Mac users, I’ll note that most of the games are sufficiently old that they’ll run just fine under Virtual PC, with no performance issues).
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