Odd Lots
- Eating fat, protein, or vegetables before eating carbs can slow blood sugar spikes. I read that in a book decades ago, and it’s a pattern that Carol and I follow in our everyday meals. When possible, well, we just don’t eat the carbs. Works.
- If you have any desire to look at or find something in Turbo Technix (the magazine Borland paid me to create and edit for six issues before laying us off) it’s here, all six issues, in PDF format. We had a seventh issue complete and in flats, but the end came before we could publish it.
- If you need to do OCR on a .jpg file, you might try OCR Online. It’s free, but it makes you wait for several seconds before starting to work on each image, thus making massive use of the free site impractical. You can buy a subscription for $30/month, or a lifetime subscription for $80. Worked well for OCRing some text out of a Visual Developer issue from which I’d scanned a couple of pages.
- Hans Schantz posted a link to James Macleod’s Truth Decay Substack page about the hidden Internet—which is hidden because Google doesn’t make any money bringing back its pages from searches. I did a test, looking for “Jeff Duntemann” on Google and then on a site called Marginalia Search—and discovered that Marginalia brought back a lot of mentions of me that I’ve never seen before, on Google searches or anywhere else. It’s a long article but worth reading top to bottom.
- My friend WA4GIM sent me a link to a WordPress blog by Dave Richards AA7EE….in 2014. And I never cited it here on Contra, whoops. (That was a kind of busy time for me, moving back to AZ. And there’s still old email piled up…) The site is about homebrewing ham gear, especially kits, and what’s remarkable is the quality of the photos, and the discussion about kits, their quality, and their operation. Go take a look.
- I stumbled across a short essay on how a nuclear explosion at the sea bottom would proceed—and it was not what I thought. Don’t be swimming above the bomb—but what kills you isn’t radiation or a fireball.
- And after reading that item, I fell upon another one. When I was 15 (1967) I wrote a story about a starship with a new hyperdrive that allows it to go so fast that it circumnavigates the cosmos and returns to Earth from the opposite direction. “A Straight Line Is the Shortest Distance” was the first SF short story that I ever wrote. (It was never published.) But the story gimmick that I freely admit I pulled out of thin air may in fact be the way the universe works. (Alas, the story has been lost, or I might post parts of it if they don’t make me laugh too hard.)
- Popular Science has a section called “That Time When,” a collection of stories about weirdness in science and human culture generally. I’d heard of several of the topics, like the dancing plague of 1518. Perhaps the weirdest—one I hadn’t ever heard of—was “Lewis and Clark’s mercury-laced poop helped archaeologists trace their expedition.” Read ‘em all: They’re short and more interesting than I had expected.
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