- Intel’s announced the Compute Stick, a complete $150 Win8.1 machine in the format of a fat thumb drive. Looks like the plug is HDMI, though, and the device gets power from an uncommitted USB port. I could see this melting seamlessly into a big-screen TV (or any monitor with an HDMI input) and giving you something that indeed approaches (as Michael Abrash said probably 20 years ago about 21″ CRT monitors) Windows on your bedroom wall. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- It’ll be awhile before this becomes available, but a brand-new antibiotic has been isolated from bacteria that live in dirt. I’m doubly enthuisastic because this may encourage researchers to look harder at bacteriophages, which live in dirt and worse.
- If you haven’t heard of Smart Pascal, it’s an interesting concept and worth a look: A commercial Object Pascal compiler that generates HTML5 apps. It’s basically a way of writing sophisticated Javascript apps without having to wash your mental hands and rinse your brain out every twenty minutes. To me that would be worth $42/year.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: A selfie stick (also known as a narcissistick) is a camera holder that allows you to take pictures of yourself or groups by parking your camera on it and holding it up in the air so that the camera is facing you. It’s usually just a rod with a handle, sometimes telescoping. Many support bluetooth to trigger the camera, though the details remain obscure to me.
- Beware the Facebook Logic Fallacy: One member of Group X is evil, therefore all members of Group X are evil. Much of my objection to Facebook memes is that this is a very common template. Attack memes must die. Not sure how to get there from here.
- The percentage of ice cover on the Great Lakes is now 18.7%. Keep an eye on this graphic, as I think our current winter stands to be an…interesting…season from a Great Lakes ice perspective.
- In general I’m no fan of government regulation, but here’s an excellent argument that both broadband providers and airlines could use a little consumer-oriented regulation.
- Related to the above: Air travel is a lousy business (rather like health insurance, in fact) and merciless price competition has led to creative fee-hiding and generally charging extra for a travel experience that hasn’t been made deliberately miserable.
- From the Department of the Painfully Obvious: There are many benefits in finding a spouse who is also your best friend. I guess it’s nice to have some research behind it, but damn, is this really news to anyone? (Maybe New Yorkers.)
pascal
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Sales of the Raspberry Pi board are closing in on four million. Wow. I’m an optimist, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t that much of an optimist!
- Some ISPs have apparently begun blocking encrypted traffic (especially VPNs) because VPNs make it difficult to throttle traffic based on what that traffic is. Basically, a user of Golden Frog’s VPN software started streaming Netflix in the clear and saw all sorts of stutter and other signs of throttling; the user then streamed Netflix through the VPN and the signs of throttling vanished.
- Internet toll roads? More evidence.
- Here’s a 3-D printed pump-gun that folds and fires paper airplanes. This should be on the cover of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog before Christmas… (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Stanford University reports that GMO foods appear not to bother farm animals at all; maybe we should look harder for cause and effect in humans. Conventional wisdom can be deadly.(Thanks to Jim Fuerstenberg for the link.)
- Deadly? Ancel Keys’ fraudulent science (which soon became conventional wisdom, once government got behind it) has killed many millions. Fat is good for you. Sugar is deadly. (Thanks to Tony Kyle for the link.)
- Adobe’s Digital Editions ebook reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe. As best I can figure, it’s DRM gone nuts–which is precisely what you would expect of Adobe. Don’t use Digital Editions.
- Whoops. Silly boy. Adobe isn’t the only one doing this. Once it becomes general knowledge, more and more people will pirate ebooks and sideload them, which will ultimately hurt publishers and retailers more than covert data mining will help. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- Lazarus/FreePascal 1.2.6/2.6.4 has been released. The damned thing is getting good.
- The Great Lakes’ water temps are about four degrees colder than average, (and six degrees colder than this time last year) after some lakes didn’t shed the last of their ice until June. It’s going to be an interesting winter here on the weather front.
- Scott Hanselman thinks that I might as well be Thomas Watson. (Go to 1:30 on the video and watch for a bit.) Alas, not only do I not think there will never be more than five computers in the world, there are already over five computers in this room. (Thanks to Ben Oram for noticing.)
- 18 English words that should never have gone out of style. “Spermologer” doesn’t mean quite what you’d think. Nor do “pussyvan” and “wonder-wench.” Me, I’d add “cerate” to the list. Look it up. (Thanks to Dermot Dobson for the link.)
Odd Lots
- Here’s a nice rant about something that’s always bothered me: that programming is more difficult than it has to be, that programmers revel in its difficulty, and ceaselessly ridicule tools and languages that make it easier. The ranter lists COBOL, Hypercard, and Visual Basic as examples, but even he seems afraid to mention Pascal (much less Delphi or Lazarus) which looked like it might once have driven C into the sea. I admit I don’t understand the constant emphasis on Web apps. Conventional desktop and mobile apps are still useful and far less fiddly.
- Speaking of Lazarus, TurboPower’s stellar Orpheus component suite has been (partly) ported to Lazarus.
- AV software vendor Avast pulled an interesting stunt: They bought 20 smartphones on eBay and then used readily available recovery software to pull off 40,000 supposedly deleted photos, including 750 of women in various stages of undress. That, plus emails, texts, GPS logs, and loads of other stuff. I’ve always treated my old phones to a speed date with a sledgehammer. Someday I’m thinking my Droid X2 will go on the same date.
- Ahh, now global warming causes kidney stones. Two Snapple bottled iced teas a day for a year or two just might have had something to do with mine. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- And while I was poking around io9, I stumbled across a piece I missed back in February. If you get 25% of your daily calories from sugar, you triple your risk of dying from heart disease. Again I say unto you: Fat makes you thin. Sugar makes you dead.
- Although not a gamer, I give points to a small Canadian game developer Studio MDHR who are creating Cuphead, a game series consisting of cel-animated action in the style of a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon. These cartoons were played on TV endlessly when I was a 7-year-old, and they were often creepy as hell. (See “Bimbo’s Initiation,” “Swing, You Sinners,” and Fleischer’s surreal riff on “Snow White,” especially once the action enters the Mystery Cave.)
- I generally don’t watch online videos, particularly of a talking head lecturing. I can read a great deal faster than I can listen to people talk, and watching informational videos is therefore a bad use of my time. Here’s an interesting example. Don’t bother with the video, but read the comments. A guy summarizes the whole damned thing as a list that I read in seconds. So who needs the video?
- Megan McArdle stops short of making the point in her essay on Uber “surge pricing,” but legislative attacks on surge pricing are thinly disguised protection for the medallion cab industry.
- Relevant to the above: The last time Carol and I took a cab, the chatterbox cabbie said he was going to look into Uber, not only to make more money but also to control his own schedule. (Uber just recently expanded to Colorado Springs.)
- New York police chase a hobby RC helicopter (and that is precisely what it was; this “drone” thing is loaded language intended to demonize RC aircraft) endangering themselves, their aircraft, and people on the ground. Governments are terrified of being filmed. That’s it. That’s all you need to know about “drones.”
Odd Lots
- Yet another take on the Amazon vs. Hachette dust-up: The publishers contributed to Amazon’s monopsony power by demanding platform lock-in via Kindle DRM. And now they’re surprised that Amazon controls the ebook market. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Pete Albrecht sent word that some guys at the University of Rochester have figured out how to trap light in very small spaces for very long times, on the order of several nanoseconds. (This is a long, long time to be stuck in one place if you’re a photon.) It’s done with evolvable nanocavities–and that gives me an idea for a tech gimmick in my long-planned novel The Molten Flesh. So many novels, so little time…
- Related to the above: The reason I stopped working on The Molten Flesh three or four years back is that I ordered a used copy of the canonical biography of Oscar Wilde (who is a character in the story) and the book stank so badly of mold and mildew that I threw it out after sitting in a chair with it for about five minutes. Time to get another copy.
- Yet another reason not to bother with The Weather Chanel: WGN’s weather website is hugely better, doesn’t require Flash, and works nationally, not only in Chicago.
- Lazarus 1.2.4 has been released. Go get it.
- OMG! STORMY, have you been messing around in Nebraska again?
- Over at Fourmilab we have a superb scan of the 1930 Allied Radio catalog, which carried not only radios and parts but waffle irons, home movie projectors, coffee percolators, toasters, copper bowl heaters, electric hair curlers, and much else for the newly minted upper middle class. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
- One interesting thing about the radios in the Allied catalog above is that they’re shouting about screen grid tubes. Tetrodes were invented in 1919 and weren’t in mass production until the late 1920s. I’m guessing that tetrodes were what separated the extremely fussy triode-based radios of the 1920s from the turnkey appliance radios of the 1930s and beyond. What the tetrode began the pentode completed, of course, but the watershed year in appliance radio seems to have been 1930.
- Our current Pope has abandoned the bullet-proof Popemobile. It’s one step closer to the end of the Imperial Papacy.
- What dogs think of dog impersonators. Hey, man, the lack of a tail gives it all away…
Odd Lots
- Feeling a little better, but still lousy. Thanks for all your kind words and wishes.
- We may not lose the Nook after all. Or we may. At this point, I’ll refrain from taking sides.
- Calibre 1.0 has been released. Quite apart from its role as an ebook manager, there’s absolutely nothing like it for doing ebook format conversions. If you don’t have it yet (it’s free) you’re nuts.
- I’m boning up on my grade-school French, and this Lazarus component directory (as close as I’ve seen to Torry’s for Lazarus) is the reason. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the link.)
- Samsung is starting mass production of their 3D V-NAND flash memory devices. It’s unclear when we’ll see SSDs containing the technology (much less SD cards) except to guess that it may be sooner than we think. (Maybe it’s time to write my funny pirate novel, which depends on cheap terabyte SD cards.)
- New Zealand has outlawed software patents. Watch for innovation to explode from The Other Down Under.
- I’ve often wondered why phage therapy has not been much in the news, given the rise of multiply antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Maybe it’s because all the phage action is in Georgia. The other Georgia.
- You may have to send away to Tbilisi for real bacteriophages, but you can get stuffed ones from Amazon.
- Oh–unless you hadn’t heard, I’m a phage phan. The leaded glass design in my front door is a stylized bacteriophage. As is the design in the ironwork on our front porch. Friends who have been here either know this already or should look the next time they visit.
- Bill Meyer sent a link to a brilliant little prototyping enclosure that folds up into a cube for testing or deployment, or folds flat for tweaking. Very cool that it’s from Bud, whom I connect mostly with aluminum chassis.
- It can’t just be the Un-Pentium. (ARM has that franchise, I guess.) It’s gotta be the Un-Un-Pentium. And it’s evidently coming to a periodic table near you.
- Shameful thing to admit by a man who’s been in publishing for thirty years and was an altar boy in the Tridentine era to boot, but I always thought the canonical “lorem ipsum” greeking text was nonsense Latin. It’s not.
- Having flown a lot of Hi-Flier kites with flying wings printed on them as a kid, I was always a fan of the unlikely aircraft. Here’s a very good multipart history of the flying wing, which is not as modern a concept as most of us like to think.
- H. P. Lovecraft’s back-of-the-envelope notes for his novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” Really.
- From the Word-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Twerk . If you don’t know what it is, well, that may be a plus.
Odd Lots
- I recently reinstalled Windows on a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD, and have been wondering how long it will last. Here’s a nice intro; read the comments too. I’m guessing that it will last longer than the system itself–especially given my recent history.
- The just-released Firefox 19 has a built-in PDF renderer. So far it’s worked fairly well for me. One caveat: I haven’t figured out (yet) how to disable scripting within PDFs, which is worthless and an invitation to pwnership. It may not even be possible, since the renderer is itself a JavaScript app. Still researching it.
- Here’s a good overview article on SD card speeds, and where the extra money for a faster card could be worthwhile.
- I ordered a digital flash unit board from a surplus house, to see if it could generate 800-1000VDC (at virtually no current) for my Geiger counter circuits. I was surprised to see that the unit works perfectly while generating only 325VDC. I don’t have the schematic and so jiggering the circuit is probably not an option. I’m guessing that some sort of ladder multiplier is now the way to go.
- Although the majority of Sherlock Holmes stories are pre-1923 and thus in the public domain here in the US, the author’s estate is still demanding licensing fees from authors using the characters in new works. Now someone is suing the estate to get a court to declare that the characters (and not just the text) are in the public domain. Go for it!
- Does anybody remember Ann Hodges and the Bruise That Came From Outer Space? What I’ve never quite understood is why there’s any question about whether or not you own a meteorite that falls on your property. (Even if it doesn’t fall on you.)
- People are still fighting about camelcase (i.e., CamelCase) versus underscores (i.e., under_scores). Well, duhh. Fighting’s fun, eh? The gates of hell open upon my head every time I suggest that Pascal’s reserved words should be in uppercase. The bigger question is this: Why does such piddly crap make grown men so violently angry? (Thanks to Nick Hodges for the link.)
- A Napa winery is trying aging its wines by submerging them in the Atlantic Ocean. Hey, whatever floats (or sinks) your bottles. But…if you’re in Napa, wouldn’t it be cheaper to dunk them in the Pacific?
- From the I-Never-Thought-I’d-See-This-In-My-Lifetime Department: Yesterday the Denver Post published an article on how to grow your own marijuana.
The RPi Enthroned
I wonder how many Raspberry Pi boards will spend their entire working lives sitting cockeyed on a desk somewhere, at the center of a tangle of cables. That’s how mine was until a couple of days ago, when despite my cough I allowed myself a few minutes of quality screwdriver time to pull a proper RPi system together.
It didn’t take much. Mostly what it took was a 2004-era Dell SX270 all-in-one system minus the SX270, which I now use as a bookend. The key component is a heavy stainless steel base with a VESA monitor mount and a bracket to hold the SX270 behind the monitor. The monitor itself is an unexceptional Dell 1704fp, with a native resolution of 1280 X 1024. (Those now sell for ~$50 on eBay.) That’s more than enough pixels for an RPi, although I tested it on one of my 21″ 1600 X 1200 behemoths and the little gadget did quite well overall.
I had already mounted the board on an aluminum plate, and all I had to do this time was drill two holes and bolt the plate to the SX270 mounting bracket. I may dress the wires a little to keep them from placing any torque on the connectors, but it works well as-is.
I was surprised to find out that the MagPi magazine is actually laid out on an RPi, using the open-source Scribus layout program. I installed Scribus via apt-get and poured some text into a layout. (I’ve been playing with Scribus for years.) Brisk! I guess we need to stop boggling at the capabilities of tiny little computers with all of two ICs on the mobo.
It certainly does a good job with FreePascal and Lazarus, which is why I went to all this trouble. They’ve now sold half a million of these things. At least a few of those people ought to be willing to buy a Lazarus tutorial for it. We’ll see.
Odd Lots
- Making you fat and diabetic is the least of it: Sugar (especially fructose) sabotages your brain. If it’s your first favorite organ (as it is for me) put your brain at the top of your personal food chain. Be a caveman: Eat more animal fat and less sugar.
- Eat more fat and less sugar, but do it this way: Trade sugar for sleep. Lack of sleep makes you hungry, and I’m guessing that chronic lack of sleep makes you lots hungrier than you would be if you just admitted that you can’t get by on six hours or possibly even seven. Cavemen slept when it got dark. Dark is your friend. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- While we’re talking Inconvenient Health Truths, consider: The downside of demonizing salt is that people have begun to show symptoms of iodine deficiency. (I myself am…unlikely…to ever have that problem.)
- Instagram walked back from the cliff and withdrew its mind-boggling policies on commercial use of user photos without permission or complication. The Internet firestorm was one reason, I’m sure…but I’m also guessing that someone in their legal department got the message through that the firm would be sued into subatomic particles if it went ahead.
- I wasn’t aware that a sack of potatoes stands in well for a human being in Wi-Fi tests on networking in crowded spaces like aircraft cabins. I do wonder what happened to the potatoes.
- “Thorium” is my answer to the question of how to best reduce CO2 in our atmosphere. We need base load; wind and solar are necessary but not sufficient.
- There are at least five planets orbiting SF favorite Tau Ceti, and one may be in the star’s habitable zone. What the article does not mention is that the habitable planet is considerable closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, and at a distance closer than Venus is probably tidally locked on its star. That’s not a dealbreaker, but tidal locking certainly makes the journey from slime to sublime a lot less likely.
- My ongoing (and slow-going) project of rewriting Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal continues, and there’s a new and expanded PDF up on my FTP site. 9 MB. 180 pages done out of about 350 or 400 planned. Not all 800 pages of the original book will be included, because some of it is now mostly useless, and some will be kicked upstream to a Lazarus book that I’m planning.
- FreePascal contains a clean-room clone of Borland’s TurboVision, which I actually named way back in 1989. (Its original name was TOORTL: Turbo Object-Orietnted Runtime Library.) I’m going to recompile my Mortgage Vision application in FPC with FreeVision and see if it still works. That is, if I can find the source…
- We’re getting our Mayans, Aztecs, and Oreos mixed up. Actually, I read the oreoglyphics on the cookie and it said that the world will end in 1947.
- Furthermore, it’s a lot tougher to dunk a Mesoamerican stone calendar in your coffee.
Odd Lots
- 32 years ago today, Darkel’s Lucky Guess–known to more than a few of you as Mr. Byte–came into our world, and eight weeks later Carol and I took home our very first bichon puppy. Although not show quality, Mr. Byte was a spectacular dog, and even seventeen years after his passing we miss him terribly.
- A study at Michigan State shows a strong correlation between use of multiple forms of media at once–e.g, watching TV while surfing the Web–and depression. We don’t know if multitasking causes depression, or if depressed people multitask to distract themselves, but simply establishing the correlation is a good first step.
- Now this is nothing less than brilliant: an app that examines a design destined for 3D printing and lets you know whether it will print well, or at all. 3D typos cost money, and it’s not always obvious looking at a design where a typo lies, or how serious it might be.
- Oh, and there’s a browser-based CAD system that was created with 3D printing in mind: TinkerCAD. Have not used it and generally don’t like browser-based software (what if I develop skills with it and then it goes away?) but it’s a niche that had to be filled.
- Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has just signed the state constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana. As long as you’re not in a public place, using it is now legal under state law–which is, pardon the expression, mind-blowing.
- Only slightly less mind-blowing was the savaging that Rolling Stone gave Obama for not jerking the leash on the DEA. Wow.
- If the elderly–who have nothing if not life experience–are peculiarly vulnerable to scammers, it may be due to the failing of a region of the brain that acts as a “crook detector.” I agree: smug, smirky mouths are not the signs of integrity. Nor is the desire to run for office.
- Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a search site for locally grown food and farmers’ markets. We buy local when it’s possible (though we don’t make a fetish of it) and things like this can only make it more possible.
- Line up the cover spines on Wired‘s 20th year, and read the secret code.
- Lazarus 1.0.4 is out. It’s a bug-fix release, but bug fixes are good to have. I’ve already been messing with it, and I’m starting to think the product has really quite sincerely arrived. Get it here. Many components and demos available here.
Odd Lots
- I’ve installed Lazarus 1.0 without mayhem, and have created a few simple programs with it. So far, no glitches. My recommendation is still cautious. Nonetheless, I’d be interested in hearing other people’s experiences with the new release.
- Carmine Gallo wonders why more people aren’t doing image-rich PowerPoint presentations. Um…it’s because drawing pictures is way hard compared to writing text. Why is there no mention of this either in the article or in the comments?
- Here’s a great timesaver: Instead of making political posts on Facebook, point to this. Done! Effortless! (Link courtesy S. Hudson Blount.)
- And if that doesn’t work for you, this may. (Link courtesy Jim Mischel.)
- I guess the evidence is piling up: It’s time to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and ask yourself: Does this political opinion make my head look small?
- I’m glad that somebody else besides me noticed that The Atlantic came back from the dead mostly by publishing articles calculated to raise people’s blood pressure. I was a very satisfied subscriber back in the 90s and early oughts, but I suspect now that I never will be again.
- Don’t believe what the MSM says about volcanoes. Or about DNA. Or maybe anything else.
- Maybe we can give them (the MSM) something for Christmas this year. And then tell them to put a sock in it.
- The article I mentioned in my September 8, 2012 Odd Lots about transistor radio manufacturers tacking unused transistors onto their circuit boards to up the transistor count was in fact “The Transistor Radio Scandal” by H. M. Gregory, in Electronics Illustrated for July, 1967; p. 56. Some manufacturers used transistors for diodes, which was maybe half a notch better. The article includes some mighty weird schematics, too. Worth digging for, if you have piles of old mags somewhere.
- If our understanding of solar physics is accurate, sunspots might become impossible (at least for awhile) by 2015 or 2020. (Full paper here.) The magnetic fields that create sunspots have been getting weaker by about 50 gauss per year for some time. Field strength is now at about 2000; once that value hits 1500 gauss, some research suggests that sunspots may not form at all. This is not new news, but it’s interesting in that it’s a bit of poorly understood science that most of us will live to see confirmed or falsified. At any rate, I’m guessing we will not be working Madagascar on half a watt into a bent paperclip again for awhile, as the late George Ewing WA8WTE used to say.
- I’ve identified a new trigger for Creeping Dread: Hearing the fans incrementally rev up on what was assumed to be an idle computer.
