- Here’s a nice graph of the smoothed sunspot number for the last four solar cycles (21-24.) Our current Cycle 24 is still young, but it stands fair to be the weakest solar cycle in 200 years. It may mean nothing, but 200 years ago we saw cycles like that frequently and were in the worst part of the Little Ice Age.
- Darrin Chandler pointed out Maqetta to me: an HTML5 WYSIWYG Web editor, free and open-source. And from IBM, yet. Haven’t tried it but hope to in coming days. Has anybody else played with it at any length? I use Kompozer for Web work right now, and it’s not evolving very quickly, let’s say.
- And what we may need more than Maqetta for Web pages is Maqetta for epub ebooks. I remain appalled at how much kafeutherin’ it still takes to do an epub with a cover image and even the simplest forms of paragraph differentiation. (Like no first indent to indicate a new scene in a story.) People continue to hand-code ebooks. This is idiocy to the seventeenth power.
- Sometimes you read a short, casual mention of something in a book or article, and the weirdness of it doesn’t really hit you. So stand ready for some pretty boggling astronomical weirdness: A 400-meter asteroid that moves in a horseshoe-shaped orbit. And guess who’s in the gap of the horseshoe?
- At our most recent nerd party, my new friend Aaron Spriggs mentioned Chisanbop, a method of finger arithmetic created by the Koreans and little known here in the US. This is very cool, and would be extremely handy on fictional planets (like my own Hell and the Drumlins world) where electronic computation either doesn’t work and hasn’t been invented.
- A brilliant new method of imaging underground structures like magma plumes shows that the Yellowstone supervolcano is bigger than we thought. The imaging is done by measuring electrical conductivity in the rock rather than the transmission of physical (seismic) vibration. The images give us no additional information on how close (or far) we may be to another eruption, but it may help us to interpret what little data we already have.
- Hoo-boy, here’s a problem I don’t think anyone anticipated in the wake of Japan’s recent catastrophic tsunami: Safes full of (soggy) money washed out of individual homes are now washing up on the seashore.
software
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Printed book sales fall, and ebook sales rise by 115%. Something’s Going On Here.
- I bought an iPod Touch from Jim Strickland and am currently figgering it out. Although I was surprised that it won’t display .mov videos, this article makes much clear about Apple’s video formats.
- Michael Covington’s 2008 tutorial on reading email headers to spot phish and phakes is worth reading again.
- Richard McConachy sent me a link to The Great Wetherell Refractor, a hand-made 200mm F9 with some of the guldurndest metalwork in it.
- There was a horned gopher during the Pleistocene. Really. It is the only horned rodent known, and the smallest horned mammal.
- From Henry Law comes a reminder of an xkcd item from a while back. For heavenly performance, ground your receiver in a jar of holy water!
- And that led to this one, which (Ben Franklin groupie that I am) has always been one of my favorites.
- I haven’t had a monster zin in some time, but last night I opened the bottle of Klinker Brick 2007 Old Vine Zinfandel that’s been sitting on the rack for almost two years. About $18 if I recall. At 15.8% alcohol, it’s among the strongest reds you’re likely to find that aren’t port. Dry but not bitter, with strong spice and enough fruit to balance the buzz. I had about 100ml. Puh-lenty!
- A cool hack and great visual humor. I have a couple of these little KingMax USB sticks (courtesy Eric Bowersox) and although it would be a bad use of my time, I’m sorely tempted.
- Accidental visual feast: Search for “steampunk jewelry” on Google Images. My favorite would be this one, which I would title “Time Flies.”
- In addition to bathroom heaters like the one I bought the other day, the Fitzgerald Manufacturing Company was well-known for making vibrators, (PDF) albeit not the kind that generated plate voltage for car radios! (Could this have been the original killer app for mains electricity?) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
The Inexplicable Pirate Box
I’m still on the long climb back to functionality and can’t do much computing because the current bug has hugely irritated my eyes. However, I did want to call quick attention to one more thing in the pirate universe before going back to bed: David Dart’s Pirate Box. I got the tip from the Jolly Pirate a couple of days ago, and most of the gadget blogs have now picked up the story. It’s a make-it-yourself wireless filesharing node in a pirate lunchbox.
Lesse here: You carry this into a crowded coffee shop so that people can connect from their laptops and smartphones and download whatever pirate goodies are in the box, at least until somebody calls the Bomb Squad.
Ok, I’m just funny that way. But read through the DIY, and ask what I’m asking: Isn’t this a lot of fooling around just to create a wireless file-sharing node? Even a five-year-old beater of a laptop can run Debian and a file server, and software router apps are routine. Furthermore, a laptop looks like a laptop, and when there’s a dozen people at Panera running laptops, it’s a little less easy to tell who’s the pirate.
Unless that’s the idea. This certainly seems to be more about cachet than practical piracy. I’m reminded of warchalking, a silly near-hoax that was getting people’s twickers in a nist back in 2002 or so: marking the locations of wi-fi networks on the sidewalk in chalk, god help us, as though there were no other way to know something was there.
I have the late Harry Helms’ books about pirate radio and I think I understand the psychology. It’s about being a Merry Prankster more than actually getting anything accomplished. And I’m good with that, especially since the 17 people on Earth who will actually build this thing and hang out with it are unlikely to do much damage. (I do grant them points for creativity.)
The Pirate Box reminds me a little of AirStash, which has the advantage of being able to hide in your pocket. The notion of hidden local physical filesharing is an interesting one, and I’m sure that there are better concepts for it hiding out there somewhere. (A USB thumb drive mortared into a brick wall is just one of the gonzo notions I’ve seen recently; something like geocaching with data.) If you know of any more, send me links.
And now it’s back to bed for me.
Luck Happens: The Blotter and the Pocketwatch
A couple of people have asked me where I got the Windows blotter wallpaper discussed and shown in the photo on my January 19, 2011 entry. I stumbled across it while looking for art depicting steampunk airships. Jim Strickland and I have been tossing ideas around for a drumlin airship, and I wanted to see what other people had done in that area. Just clicking around, and alluva sudden I was looking at this. Egad, it’s 1600 X 1200 too–no need for me to do any resizing. If you’re widescreen, you might consider this one instead.
I like blotters. I had a desktop blotter at Borland that was an Ampad Efficiency Deskpad 24-003. It was basically a faux-leather frame surrounding a pad of 17″ X 22″quadrille paper, which I have always liked for sketches and off-the-cuff coding. When Borland laid us off they told me I could have it, since they were just going to dump it (and everything else in my desk) anyway. It’s followed me around ever since, though I’m not sure the quadrille paper for it is available anymore.
The only thing that bothered me about the blotter wallpaper was the pocket watch, which (while well-drawn) was just an image, and always read 3:37. (Days later, I found a version of the blotter wallpaper without the watch.) If the watch had to be there, it had to work. And then I remembered something I had seen a long time ago and forgotten.
There’s a widget engine for Windows called Rainmeter. It was mentioned on one blog or another that I followed back in 2008 or 2009. A widget engine is an app that runs without a conventional windowed UI, and allows you to display frame-less output on your desktop. The widgets are basically skins, and the output can be drawn in easily parameterized ways. There are myriad skins for Rainmeter, and while I was experimenting with it back then I ran across a clock skin called Pocketwatch. It looked a little bit Stickley (as does much else in this house) and I would still have it running had I kept Rainmeter across the last couple of Windows reinstalls. (I did not.)
On a hunch I did the obvious: I took a 6″ steel rule and measured the size of the Pocketwatch widget on the screen, then measured the static pocketwatch image on the blotter wallpaper. The face of one was precisely the same size as the face of the other. (The Pocketwatch skin is the face only; the blotter has the whole pocketwatch.) I quickly installed Rainmeter and Pocketwatch. I centered Pocketwatch over the face of the pocketwatch image, and then un-checked the Draggable setting on Pocketwatch’s context menu. Bang! The watch on my wallpaper now keeps time. All free, too. C’mon, people: What are the chances? Sometimes luck just happens.
Odd Lots
- At our most recent nerd gathering here, four of my friends and I managed to carry our 1997-vintage, 198-pound Sony CRT TV set up our precipitous stairway out to the 4Runner, and a few days later I paid Blue Star recycling $37 to see it to its final rest. Many thanks to the guys–we had been pondering how to get rid of it for the past several years. Friends are most excellent to have, especially for people like me who can’t lift 100 pounds anymore.
- And this means we’re shopping for a downstairs TV. I came across a good site focused on plasma TVs, which as a class may be problematic at our current altitude of 6600 feet. Apparently they buzz and run far too hot, though the physics of the phenomenon remain obscure to me.
- I’ve found the first (thin) review of the Motorola Xoom. Few details yet, but I will say up front that the cloud-based ebook system doesn’t thrill me. Early releases of Honeycomb may not support the XD card slot, but Motorola hints that an OS update will take care of that. That’s important here: Given that 16GB MicroSD cards are already down to $35, sideloading my entire ebook library would be a snap, with room left over for lots of music and videos.
- I also recently found out that the Xoom GUI borrows from the quirky but interesting BumpTop, recently bought by Google and then pulled from general distribution.
- I may be too old to appreciate the BumpTop 3D metaphor (I always think it looks like working inside a refrigerator box) but some good themes have been created for it, including this steampunk specimen.
- Xoom has a “barometer.” Most commenters, including the LA Times , don’t seem to understand that a barometer can measure altitude with more accuracy than GPS. I doubt that the Xoom’s barometer will have anything to do with weather reports. (Else there’d be a thermometer and a hygrometer as well.)
- There’s a long-running feud between Samsung and US cell carriers over who pays for Android updates, with the result that many Samsung phones are stuck at Android 2.1 and may never get an update from the vendor. (Applying the update yourself is not for the squeamish.) Yesterday afternoon, of course, Samsung denied it all. As intriguing as the Galaxy Tab looked when I played with it back in November, issues like this may keep me away from Samsung wireless products entirely.
- Some images speak for themselves. Like this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Oxytocin may be the biochemical basis for tribalism, racism, political parties, and just about everything else that the human species would be better off without. “Cuddle hormone” my ass.
- Good-bye to seigniorage, not that one person in ten thousand ever knew what it was–or how to spell it.
- Ahh, well. I may have eaten my last pistachio.
Displaying Wallpaper on One Monitor Only
I got annoyed the other day (finally!) after being annoyed off and on since, well, almost forever. The problem was this: I was following a Web tutorial explaining how to do something in InDesign. I had InDesign up and maximized (as I always use it) and the Web tutorial in a Firefox window. Firefox wasn’t maximized, but that didn’t matter: Each time I selected a menu item in InDesign to tweak a setting, Firefox vanished under InDesign. That’s just the way Windows has always worked, and for a long time (ten years? more?) I was wondering if there were a better way. Tiling is not an option, not if I want to work on spreads in InDesign. So I just kept on keeping on, with Firefox appearing and vanishing as I ticked off steps on the tutorial.
Until this morning, when shadows on the wall told me that the light bulb had appeared over my head. Yes!
I ran downstairs and got an old monitor off the shelf. It’s a 15″ Samsung SyncMaster 570B, bought for Carol in 2003. She used it until I got her a 20″ display a couple of years ago. It has a mount pivot, and can be used in either portrait or landscape mode. I plugged it into the idle VGA video connector on my desktop, and without any fuss I had dual displays.
I’ve done that before to see how it was done, but never had the desk space for two identical (big) monitors. It wasn’t until today that I hit upon the refinement of putting the second monitor in portrait mode, which takes some space but not as much as anything in landscape mode. Now I can put a Firefox window on the secondary display while working on something full-screen on the primary display, without having to rescue the tutorial window from behind the app window each time I do something in the app window. Victory is sweet–and contains no fructose.
One peculiarity: My desktop wallpaper was partially duplicated on the second, lower-resolution display. The wallpaper image is a desktop blotter (complete with stains) and it just looked wrong having only part of it on the smaller monitor. I wanted the wallpaper on the primary display only, with just a blank color field on the secondary. Remarkably, there is no obvious way to do this. I dug around for most of an hour, trying things in both Control Panel’s Display applet and the NVidia control applet, without success. Then I hit upon this article. The gist is this:
- Return the wallpaper image setting in Display | Desktop to None; that is, turn off your current wallpaper. Both screens will now have the same blank color field for background.
- Select Desktop | Customize Desktop | Web. What you’re going to do is add a static image (the wallpaper of your choice) for Active Desktop, instead of a Web page.
- Click New. In the New Desktop Item dialog, click Browse, and select your wallpaper image from wherever it lives. Open it. Click OK on New Desktop Item. Click OK on the Web tab. Click OK on the Display applet as a whole to close it.
- The image you selected will be displayed, probably spanning both monitors. (It did on mine.) Hover over the top edge until the Active Desktop title bar pops up. Click and drag the image to whichever minotor you want to have it as wallpaper. When it’s moved completely onto one display, click the maximize button in the title bar. Bang! There’s your wallpaper, on one display only.
Now, as best I know Active Desktop was eliminated from Windows Vista, so this mechanism applies only to XP and (I presume) earlier versions. (Let me know if I’m wrong about that; I have no Vista or 7 instances here.) Active Desktop used a lot of CPU time and memory, but I think that was due to continuous refresh of the Active Desktop HTML and inane things like Pointcast that people have long forgotten. I don’t see any resource hit for having a static image in place of a Web page.
If I see any system flakiness in coming days I’ll reverse the change and let you know, but so far I haven’t seen a downside. I may try other uses of the secondary display, but I also think I may just turn it off unless I need to read a Web page while doing something else on the primary display. We’ll see.
Restoring Grub with Rescatux
If a task has to be done often enough, sooner or later somebody will automate it. And so it happened with a very common task that I’m glad I didn’t have to do the hard way: Restore Grub to the MBR after a Windows reinstall overwrote it.
Windows does not play nice with Linux the way Linux plays nice with Windows. When you install Linux on a hard drive that already contains a bootable Windows partition, Linux adds the Windows instance to the Grub bootloader menu, allowing you to choose which OS to boot on startup. On the other hand, when you install Windows to a hard drive that already contains a bootable Linux partition, Windows ignores the Linux partition and puts its own bootloader link into the master boot record (MBR.) At startup, the system boots straight into Windows. Linux is still there, but you don’t get to choose to boot into it at startup.
Getting Grub back into the MBR after a Windows reinstall isn’t hideously difficult, but it’s a bit of picky terminal work done from a LiveCD. The trick is knowing how. The canonical description of how to do it is borderline incoherent, including advice like “This method apparently no longer works. Use with caution (if at all.)” The information is all there, but you have to dig a little to make sense of it. (Being a Linux geek helps a great deal.)
There’s now an easier way that I wasn’t aware of the last time I had to reinstall Windows on a dual-boot system: The Rescatux LiveCD. It’s a Debian instance with some scripting added that puts up a wizard and automatically detects installed bootable partitions. It then rebuilds the Grub bootloader menu and points the MBR back to Grub.
A couple of cautions:
- The wizard is fairly terse. Don’t expect a great deal of handholding. If you don’t have any prior experience with Grub, read the documentation on the Web site. Then read it again.
- Give the wizard time to work at each step. When you click the OK button, the options reappear immediately, but when there’s some disk access to be done, the script goes off to work and doesn’t give you any indication that it’s working. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds. Be patient.
I failed to be patient the first time I ran Rescatux, and clicked something once too often. (I’m still not entirely sure what.) When I booted the system again, Grub ran and Ubuntu was listed, but this time Windows was missing. There’s some rough justice in that, I guess, but I need to get into Windows just as surely as I need to get into Ubuntu. So I rebooted back into Rescatux and ran the wizard again, giving it enough time to finish each step. Another reboot, and Windows was back in the Grub bootloader menu.
Supposedly Rescatux works with both Grub 2 (the current version) and “Legacy Grub,” V0.97. My system uses Grub 2, and thus I didn’t test its dealings with older Grub versions.
It’s still a little rough, but it saved me a certain amount of eye-crossing terminal work this afternoon, and that’s always a good thing. Be careful and read the doc before you begin, but having said that, I do recommend it.
The Importance of Sideloading
You haven’t seen much of me here since the first of the year because I set myself a target for writing fiction, and, micracles of miracles, I’m sticking to it. Blogging is second priority, and if I spend my creative hours working on stories, I’m likely to post a lot less in this space. (What posts I do write I hope to make longer.)
Anyway. CES 2011 is now history, and I followed it more closely than I might have in past years because I’m actively shopping for an Android slate. (I hate to call them “tablets;” we’ve had tablet PCs for almost ten years and there’s one on my desk.) I played a little with a Samsung Galaxy Tab at a Verizon store in Tampa in late November and was much impressed, even though the demo unit did not have any kind of ebook reader installed. (Wireless carriers are pushing video hard, because video will use up a lot of deliciously profitable minutes.) I’ve played with Apple’s iPad as well and have been just as impressed, but there’s a huge worm in it for me: Apple wants to absolutely control its content ecosystem, and sideloading of apps is a gnarly business. Sideloading an iPad is easier with books and music, but I’d like to try my hand at slate apps, and I’m not going to work in a playground with barbed wire around it. The open-source Android just suits my temperament better. I have some faint hope of programming Android apps in FreePascal, but Android is really a Java-like platform (apps run on the Dalvik VM, which has its own specific register-based bytecode set) and a Pascal-to-Dalvik compiler is unlikely, as much as it has precedent in the ancient UCSD P-system.
Sideloading is important in a number of ways. (The term as I use it simply means the ability to get apps and content onto a device locally through a cable or a plug-in memory unit, rather than from a tightly-controlled online store or cloud locker of some kind.) I don’t have a lot of ebooks yet, primarily because the e-ink display on my Sony Reader makes my head hurt. Furthermore, the ones I do have are a very mixed bag, from many different sources and in many different formats. I have novels, but I also have tech books, many of which have intricate art and layouts that don’t reflow. A lot of things I’ve picked off Usenet are image scans of transformer catalogs and ancient manuals for Fifties Heathkits, none of which are legible on low-res e-ink screens. I need a good high-res color display, but more significantly, I need the ability to install arbitrary apps to render any arbitrary content format, including minority formats like DjVu, which I don’t favor but must deal with occasionally. I could readily sideload the files on an iPad, but the apps to render them are another matter.
Sideloading of ebooks is still a geek thing, primarily because the ebook business is so damned young. If you can get everything you want from Amazon or Apple, cool–and almost everybody is starting from scratch, with little or no existing ebook library to deal with. In years to come, people will be jumping from device to device and reader to reader and store to store, and at each jump must face the question of how to pack along the books they’ve already paid for. DRM makes this hugely more difficult, but even in a world without DRM, different kinds of content would require local storage transfer and different rendering apps, not all of which will be readily available from the current vendor’s store, especially for new devices incorporating new OSes.
Sideloading also allows local scanning for malware, which will become increasingly important in coming years, certainly for apps but probably for compromised content files as well.
Any slate I buy will have to support sideloading of both apps and content. Android seems to be the OS for that, and I’m now watching the Motorola Xoom, a dual-core 10″ Android slate running the Honeycomb version of Android. There’s some weirdness involving the SD slot (the CES prototypes didn’t have it) but without that, there’s no sale. More intriguing for many reasons is the Notion Ink Adam, (above) which does have a MicroSD slot and 2 USB ports, and the intriguing PixelQi display. Its Android OS is a custom version that anticipates some of the Honeycomb features but is technically V2.2 Froyo with a proprietary UI. (Their blog is worth following if you’re interested in slate technology.) I just hope they don’t do a FusionGarage thing, but if they can hang in there they’ll be a contender.
I must emphasize that I’m being careful and I’m not in any particular hurry. Much of my personal Jedi self-training in recent years could be summarized as Stop wanting stuff. Buy, or buy not. There is no “want.” When jump I, know you will!
Odd Lots
- I may be the last person to aggregate this, but if you haven’t seen it yet, consider: The Sun being eclipsed simultaneously by the Moon…and the ISS! Thanks to Bill Higgins for pointing it out. (Talk about having to set up a shot!!!)
- And for further astronomical boggle-fodder, consider this: A ten-year-old girl discovered a supernova a few days ago, and is the youngest person ever to do so.
- Here’s a site listing a great many 19th Century and early 20th Century studio photographers, many with addresses and sometimes timeframes. All but one of the studios I’ve seen on old family photos I’ve scanned (circa 1880-1910) are listed. How useful this might be is hard to tell, but if you’re currently doing genealogical research it’s worth a bookmark.
- RF Cafe has a nice table of dielectric constants, useful if you’re winding coils on odd scraps and not commercial forms or cores.
- The same research yielded this short discussion of how good PVC piping is for RF use. Quick form: Most plastics are better, but they don’t make polystyrene pipe. They don’t even make polystyrene vitamin bottles anymore. (Fortunately, I still have a few in the scrap box.)
- From my old friend Dennis Harris comes a pointer to Televisiontunes.com, which has short MP3 clips of 18,351 TV theme songs and all their variations. Elmer the Elephant is missing, but damn near everything else is there, from Supercar to The Ugliest Girl in Town .
- Last week while we were in Chicago, my nephew Brian showed me Google Sky Map on his Android smartphone. Basically (assuming your phone “knows where it is” and when) you can hold your phone up against the sky, and it will show you what stars and planets lie in that direction, even in broad daylight. Aim the camera at your feet, and you’ll see what’s on the other side of the planet, swinging toward rising or circling the opposite pole. Way cool.
- From the Words I Haven’t Heard In A Long Time Department: bric-a-brac , a collective term for odd items of low value. I realized, digging through a box in the garage, that I must hold one of the world’s largest reserves of bric-a-brac. Damn. I shoulda invested in rare earths.
- Related to the above: Rubrique-a-Brac , a long-running cartoon strip by French cartoonist Gotlib. His 1971 Taume 2 collection of strips is the funniest book in French I ever read without knowing French. (I do have a French-English dictionary, which helps, but the art largely speaks for itself.)
- As if the Nazgul weren’t enough: We’ve gotten word that there was once a giant stork that preyed on the Flores Island hobbits.
Akismet
I didn’t get much comment spam the first year or so that the main Contra instance was on WordPress. (The LiveJournal instance is a mirror.) I moderate all comments from new commenters, and now that the daily comment spam rate has crept from three or four up past thirty or forty, I figured it was time to do something.
So yesterday morning I installed Akismet, a server-side comment-spam detection plug-in for WordPress that applies a Bayesian signature scheme to incoming comments, and bins the ones it considers spam. Installing it was effortless, and for personal blogs like mine it’s free. (For commercial entities the Akismet service is $60/year.) So far, in about thirty hours it’s identified 80 spammy comments, which remain in the bin so you can scan for false positives if you want. Everything Akismet has fingered so far has proven to be spam. However, I’ve gotten no genuine comments on my WordPress instance since installing it. If you posted (or tried and failed to post) a comment on my WordPress instance today or yesterday, let me know. If nothing is in fact interfering with legitimate comments, this thing is a godsend, and if I sound a little nervous, it’s only that it feels maybe a little too good to be true!
[UPDATE 12/10:] Well, four comments successfully posted, and nothing spammed that shouldn’t be (or not spammed that should have been) suggests that Akismet is a win and I should stop worrying.
