- The xenon flash problem with the Raspbrry Pi 2 board has been explained reasonably well on the Foundation site, by Liz Upton. Key seems to be that U16 is not a typical SMT chip encased in black resin, but a naked BGA (Ball Grid Array) chip, which allows light to hit the chip’s silicon directly. HackaDay’s Brian Benchoff says that a cheap green laser pointer will also do it, suggesting that the wavelength of light hitting U16 matters crucially. Hey kids, this is a science fair project: What wavelengths of light trigger photoelectric emission on an exposed silicon die? (Many thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- Adafruit has a nice benchmark page for the Raspberry Pi 2, which also provides detailed descriptions of the differences between the new board and the older boards.
- What’s going on in the Martian atmosphere?
- There’s a single SMT chip at the heart of the Baofeng radios I described recently: The RDA1846. I would love to see this on a cape/shield for one of the popular embedded boards, especially the Raspberry Pi. Not quite a true SDR, but mighty close, and I’d guess damned useful for radio tinkering. (Thanks to Bob Fegert for the link.)
- By the way, “Baofeng” and “Pofung” are the same company. It sounds like they were trying to make “Baofeng” easier to pronounce for Westerners, but in truth I don’t think it was much of a problem to being with, and I admit I was confused when I first ran across “Pofung.”
- Norse’s real-time IP attack map is very cool in a War Games sort of way, but it takes some study to figure out what exactly it is that you’re seeing. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Here’s a nice collection of homebrew radio projects from Jim McNutt WA6OTP, with pictures and schematics. Fine work!
- An interesting short introduction to the geophysical differences between Earth’s north pole annd south pole.
- More crazy weapons, including but hardly limited to the Panjundrum. I’ve always liked the Triebflugel, which was a great idea until you had to land it, kind of like the XF-85 Goblin.
- That’s not a monkey on that marathon runner’s back. It’s a tomato-dispenser robot. I guess we’re in somebody’s vision of the future. It certainly isn’t mine.
Odd Lots
Review: The Impossible Baofeng HTs
I bought my first ham radio handheld (“handied-talkie” or HT) back in 1977. The Standard Radio SR-C146 had five crystal-controlled channels and weighed two pounds. (No wonder they called it a “brick.”) No TT pad, no CTCSS. I don’t recall what I paid for it new, but I’m thinking $350–and that didn’t even include a charger. (I built a charger for it from scratch!) That would be about $1400 today. It was a really big deal, and I used it for almost ten years, until I bought an Icom HT at Dayton in 1986.
In truth, I never used HTs all that much except at hamfests. I’ve had 2M mobiles in various cars, and for the past 18 years or so have used an Alinco mobile rig as a base. I still have the Icom in a box somewhere, but the case is cracked and it’s been in the corner of my mind to get a new HT for almost ten years.
Then Bob Fegert mentioned the Baofeng dual-band UV-82 HT, which now sells on Amazon for $37 brand new. (I actually paid $35.) In 1977 dollars, that would have been…ten bucks. So I ordered one. While cruising the Web looking at reviews and commentary on the unit, I happened upon the Baofeng BF-888S. Amazon had those for $15. $3.85 in 1977 funds. So I bought one of those as well, just to see what a $15 HT could do.
Both radios put out 1W or 4W selectable. The UV-82 covers the 2M and 70cm bands. The BF-888S covers only the 70cm band. Well, actually not only the ham bands, which is an issue worth a little discussion here. Many commenters on the ham boards loathe these radios, for a simple reason: They claim the ham radio positioning is only a ruse, to get around FCC type acceptance.
The problem is that for use on the several business bands, the Family Radio Service (FRS), the General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) and the Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS), a transceiver must meet certain FCC requirements and pass tests to ensure that it meets those requirements. This is called type acceptance. A type-accepted radio will transmit only where its type acceptance allows. There are other requirements that aren’t about frequency. FRS radios, for example, may not have removable antennas. Ham radio gear, on the other hand, does not require FCC type acceptance at all.
These are software-defined radios. Within a broad band of frequencies dictated by the output power amp, they can receive or transmit anywhere you want them to. A free program called CHIRP allows you to create a special-purpose database of frequencies and other settings, save it as a file, and then squirt it into the radio through a USB cable. It’s nominally illegal to use a radio like the BF-888S on FRS or GMRS, but a quick Web scan shows that it’s evidently done quite a bit. The type acceptance process takes time and money, so a radio pitched for amateur use can cost less.
The flexibility of using CHIRP to set frequencies and settings allows these radios to also act as scanners and receive public safety and weather channels. It’s possible to disable transmit on any frequency, which I did for the weather channels. (One of the downsides of the display-less BF-888S is that it’s not always obvious what frequency you’re tuned to. Mistakes are possible, and in this case may be rule violations that may cause interference.)
As 2M and 70cm radios, they’re pretty good. I can hit all the repeaters I usually reach from here, just using the “rubber duckie” antennas. Audio is clean and strong. The UV-82 has a better receiver: Weak local signals will break squelch on the UV-82 when they won’t budge the BF-888S.
There are some downsides:
- Neither radio has a squelch knob. Squelch levels are parameters that you set from the keypad (for the UV-82) or in CHIRP. This can be annoying if your noise level rises and falls for some reason, or if a weak signal is right on the edge of squelch. (The BF-888S has a button that turns squelch off while pressed, which is better than nothing.)
- The chargers are flimsy and almost weightless. I’m not sanguine about how long they’ll last, and they certainly aren’t physically stable. Nor are the chargers or charge voltages the same for the two radios.
- The antenna connectors are SMAs. I had to order some SMT-UHF adapters so that I could use my discone antenna up in the attic.
- Both radios “speak” a channel number when you move up or down the channel set. With the BF-888S this is the only reliable way to know where you’re sitting, as the numbers on the channel select knob are almost invisible.
- The UV-82 has a broadcast FM radio feature, which works fairly well but is not easy to use, especially if you switch stations a lot. (It is a little weird hearing classical music coming out of a ham radio HT.)
- Although it would be very useful, I don’t think it’s possible to control (rather than simply program) either radio through the USB cable.
Both radios have white LED flashlights built-in, for what it’s worth.
So. I’m sure a Yaesu or an Icom HT would be better in a great many ways. However, Icom HTs don’t cost $35. Given how little I use HTs, the price was irresistable. How well they will serve over time is an open question. They seem rugged enough to withstand a certain amount of outdoor rough-and-tumble. If they break (or if anything weird happens) I’ll certainly tell you here.
So far, recommended.
Odd Lots
- Scott Adams reminds us that science has failed us on diet and health so often that some people assume that science itself is unreliable. His point is good: Being wrong is part of the scientific method, but humans see patterns in things, and that pattern simply means that science is slower than we’d like, and refines knowledge over time by identifying our mistakes. We forget this at our peril.
- Intel’s latest rev of its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) has a Broadwell CPU and a swappable lid that provides a standard form factor for 3rd party extensions. The only big mistake is the total lack of SD card slots. We’re well along toward my 15-year-old prediction that computers will ultimately be swellings on the backs of monitors.
- Why the Feds are terrified of hobby helicopters. (Drones? No, you’ve got it backwards. Those are the Feds.) This is nonsense, and the whole thing is a dodge. I made this point some time back: Governments do not want to be watched. No governments, anywhere. That’s what the whole “drones” thing is about, top to bottom.
- Wired staffers bid farewell to Radio Shack. Me too. I considered a TRS-80 in 1978, and occasionally regretted not getting one once my friend Jim Dunn bought one in 1979.
- Radio Shack, yes. We also forget how the Model 100 (noisily) transformed tech journalism. In 1984 Xerox tried to field a competitor to the Model 100, which I evaluated for our department. It was hideous, and (worse) cost $2500, which would be $5700 today!
- Here’s the mother lode of scanned and browsable Radio Shack catalogs. I still have a few of these. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.) As an example, here’s the page describing the stereo I bought the first Christmas Carol and I were married, 38 years ago. It still works, and we still use it.
- Very cool physics demo on YouTube: An AA battery and four disk magnets pull themselves around inside a tube made of coiled copper wire. (Thanks to Bob Fegert for the link.)
- A supercapacitor made from nanoelectrodes and a kitchen sponge. (Again, thanks to Bob Fegert for the link.)
- Tides do not seem to affect earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The discussion is plainly written and I think anybody can follow it.
- I hadn’t heard of the Sad Puppies before a few days ago. (Whatever you may think of the concept, they have a great logo.) I guess I’ve been away from Fandom for awhile.
- Lileks has a feed on Tumblr. Worth following, as is Weird Vintage.
Walk Like an Egyptian, Become an Australian
I’ve been trying red blends lately, and stumbled upon a very good one last week: 19 Crimes Red, 2013. Smooth, extremely dark, and highly drinkable, with enough residual sugar to banish the bitter pox of oak without making the wine taste perceptibly sweet. Falls somewhere between Middle Sister Rebel Red and Menage a Trois Red on my Chart of Wine Esteem. 19 Crimes is Australian, and a mix of shiraz, pinot noir, grenache, and cabernet sauvignon.
Somebody put a fair bit of money into their marketing campaign, which focuses on a peculiarity of late 18th Century British law: the list of 19 crimes that made you eligible for a one-way trip to Australia. They all seem like pretty minor matters and were mostly petty larceny: stealing cash or goods with a value of less than a shilling; stealing shrouds from graves; clandestine marriage; bigamy, and so on. Keep in mind that crimes like murder or treason were not on the list because those (and a great many other things) were hanging offenses, and as Colin Wilson vividly described in The Criminal History of Mankind, the British were not squeamish about executions circa 1800.
Then there’s Crime #5: Impersonating an Egyptian.
Tut, tut. Can’t have that. My WTF meter was pegged, and it took a little online research to figure this one out. First of all, it isn’t on all online copies of the list of 19 Crimes, and several lists give #5 as Stealing Ore from Black Lead Mines. But there it is, right on the 19 Crimes wine site itself, and a number of other places. The gist of Crime #5 is actually this: Don’t be a gypsy. The Romany in that period were thought to be wandering Egyptians (though they are in fact of East Indian stock) and were accused of all sorts of things, from idolatry to thievery to fortune telling. Like the Jews, they were convenient scapegoats, and subject to many of the same persecutions that Jews suffered down through history. Genetic testing didn’t exist back then, so if you looked more or less like a Gypsy, wham! Off you went to Oz.
It’s unclear from my reading how many of the Romany actually ended up in Australia, so maybe Crime #5 wasn’t enforced as ruthlessly as the other 18. (If any of my Australian readers know more about this, please share in the comments.) In fact, the greatest Romany population of any country is right here in the US, at about a million.
The wine itself is excellent. About $10. Highly recommended.
Odd Lots
- Big, big news today: The Raspberry Pi foundation is now shipping the rumored Raspberry Pi 2 board. (What this means in practical terms is that all your usual suppliers are sold out.) Will write more once I learm more, but geddaloadadis: Quad 900 MHz Cortex A7 CPU, plus a full gigabyte of RAM. And the sleeper, which is still tying my head in knots: The foundation has cut a deal with Microsoft to provide a version of Windows 10 that will run on the RPi2. The cost? Free. No more details than that right now, but I’ll be watching it closely. (Thanks to Bob Fegert for alerting me. Twitter has already earned its keep.)
- Update: The new Windows 10 deal with the RPi community is part of Microsoft’s larger strategy on the Internet of Things, and will be available without charge through the Windows Developer Program for IoT.
- Jim Strickland sends a link to Microsoft BASIC for 6502, in assembly. This is from 1978, and the oldest publicly available source code written by Bill Gates. The interpreter exists for the COSMAC 1802 as well, and I may still have it somewhere. It’s on paper tape, and I think in a metal 35mm film can. This was a great use for 35mm film cans, back when there were 35mm film cans, and paper tape to put in them.
- Wired‘s vulcanologist Erik Klemetti has a fascinating article on how magma forms hexagonal pillars a la Devil’s Postpile and Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. These figure in the yet-unbegun novella prequel to The Cunning Blood, so it was nice to get some science on them.
- If you liked the Panjundrum (see my Odd Lots for January 29, 2015) you will love this thing, whatever they call it: It’s a Panjundrum that flies. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- UPDATE: One of my readers just wrote to tell me that it’s called a “girandola.”
- Yes, this is short for an Odd Lots, but I wanted to get notice out on the RPi2 sooner than tomorrow or the next day.
Review: T-Bob’s Barbecue
Carol and I are planning another of our canonical nerd parties for later this month, which requires a fair pile of food. We’re tolerable cooks but we’re not foodies, and the skill of putting together enough chow for thirty-odd highly educated and culturally sophisticated eccentrics was not a gene we received. So once again, we’re looking at catering.
Which means we’re thinking about T-Bob’s Barbecue. I’d have Ted (the “T;” Bob has been gone for some time) cater the party like a shot. Only snag: He’s at Algonquin and Elmhurst Roads, which is…1,100 miles away. So it goes.
When Carol and I are in Chicago, we have an emerging ritual of piling over to T-Bob’s with my sister and Bill after they drop the girls off at school, for a late (or for us, often second) breakfast. Wonderful place, the sort of one-off eatery we don’t have many of here in the Springs. It’s got deli-style blackboards and daily specials and…egad…Diet Mountain Dew. Better still, the guy who owns the place is, as often as not, the guy you see behind the counter.
Much good stuff here. Obviously, the barbecue, which comes highly recommended from afionados whom I trust, like Bill. (For still-unknown reasons, nearly all barbecue sauce from all sources disagrees with me, as much as I enjoy it.) I’ll personally vouch for the pulled pork, which you can get as a conventional sandwich or a wrap. Ditto the fried catfish, which is about as good as catfish gets, and swims rings around any other fast-food fish I’ve ever tried. Excellent fries and cornbread.
Given that we’re there mostly in the morning, I generally have scrambled eggs, bacon, and hash-browns, and although it’s easy to say you can’t do those badly, trust me, you can. Not here. The eggs are done and the bacon is crisp, the hash browns just brown enough. Coffee’s very good, though in truth, I generally cave to temptation and have Diet Mountain Dew, even with breakfast. (I don’t drink it at home anymore, so having it at all is a bit of an event, given that Carol and I eat out maybe three times a month.) Bob’s got a number of other things you won’t see in fast food contexts very often, like pulled chicken, cane-sugar sodas from Mexico and baked sweet potato.
Open 8:30 AM to 8PM, 9PM on weekends. Caters (sigh.) Highly recommended.
Practical and Impractical Swag
Carol and I were digging out the far dark corners of our walk-in pantry, and an interesting artifact came to hand: A plastic thermos bottle with the following inscription:
It keeps hot food hot, and cold food cold. How does it know? Is it the most “artificially intelligent” object in the galaxy?
At the bottom of the front face was Borland International’s logo. The jug was a teaser for Turbo Prolog, and I think I received it while I was still at PC Tech Journal in the fall of 1986. I had to quote the text here, because as you can see from the photo, a good part of the inscription has been worn away. Why? Because I used it. I used it a lot.
That is not generally the case for swag.
Once I became a computer journalist in 1985, I was offered a lot of swag, and took more of it than I had any need for, mostly to be polite. These were, after all, advertisers and potential advertisers. Carol and I have gotten (and still get) swag from various persons and organizations, and it’s interesting to look around the house and see what we still have, fifteen years after I ceased to have advertisers:
- In the summer of 1976, Carol attended an open house at a local real estate office in Rochester Minnesota, where she was at grad school. They gave her a yellow plastic noodle strainer reading “Joe Maas Gallery of Homes” and a phone number. Almost 39 years later, we still use it to strain noodles and dumplings and anything else that needs to stay in the pot while dumping the water. Joe Maas’s name is long gone to friction and detergent, but I still remember it. For swag, I’d say mission accomplished.
- Seven or eight years ago, we received a plastic flyswatter in the shape of a house from the realtor in Chicago who helped us buy our condo. It’s a little smaller than most flyswatters, meaning that it has less mass and is more maneauverable, as a good many flies have found to their sorrow. I’m not sure I’d want my company name slobbered up with bug guts, but I use it most days in the summer and will never forget Rohn Realty.
- In 1985, Quadram gave me a nice leather reporter’s notebook with their logo on the front. I used to use it a lot for pen-and-ink jotting, until technology made pen-and-ink mostly obsolete. Technology did the same number on Quadram, so I guess it doesn’t matter that I misplaced it some years ago. (I think I know where it is, but I don’t want to dig that deep in a pile that big.)
- Premia gave me a nice little pen knife / nail file / micro-scissors in 1992 or so with the CodeWright logo on one side. It’s still in my desk drawer and I still use it.
- Screwdrivers. I still have and use a pocket screwdriver from PK Ware, as well as the one that came in the box with Windows for Workgroups.
- Thumb drives. These didn’t exist back when still I went to trade shows, but Eric Bowersox gave me a couple of teensy little items that came loaded with just about every piece of documentation AMD was giving away about its processors and motherboards. Double brilliant.
- Canvas bags. Too numerous to mention. All that came to hand just now long outlived their vendors. A particularly good specimen from the 1991 OOPSLA is still my designated hamfest trick-or-treat bag.
Not everything makes good swag. Here are some cautionary pointers:
- Pens. Live fast and die quick; that’s the pen motto. All are long gone, although a spring-loaded Levitra gimmick pen given to me by a doctor friend remains in my Personal Museum of Very Odd Things.
- Coffee mugs. Part of the problem is that everybody gives out coffee mugs, and your swag mug gets lost among all the others, and is eventually given to the local thrift store. The other part of the problem is that coffee mugs aren’t always microwaveable, and if you can’t nuke the brew, that mug is on the short path to oblivion. I gave away the nice OS/2 Warp mug I once had because it was plastic. And early on, swag cups often had foil trim, which catches fire in the microwave. The Borland mug shown above is a very nice item, but man, you should have seen the fireworks when I turned the microwaves loose on it in the early 90s.
- Clothes. Ok, folks, look at me: Am I an XXL? Then why are all these trade-show T-shirts size XXL? Because you can’t stock six sizes at your booth? Well, look at whose canvas bag I’m toting. It isn’t yours, hint hint.
Not all those XXL T-shirts are gone. We still have a couple, and Carol uses them for nightgowns and swimsuit coverups. A famous example has those cute little whatevertheyares from the cover of O’Reilly’s book Sed and Awk. When we were in St. John’s in 1998, a vacationing geek chatted up Carol, hoping that she was that rarest of beings: a beautiful woman who uses sed and awk. (Carol referred him to me. His disappointment was palpable.)
I’m sure there are others in drawers and cabinets around the house. The wonder isn’t that we still have them (we’re legendary packrats) but that such cheap and usually plastic geegaws can actually serve real needs for longer than ten minutes. Borland’s AI thermos will doubtless see ice-water service again this summer, now that it’s no longer in the bottom of a box. Houses have flies, and thus realtors will give away flyswatters. And a swag strainer that sees near-daily use for 38 years with no end in sight? That should be in a glass case in the Vatican, because God in heaven, it’s a miracle.
Odd Lots
- Although I created a Twitter account back in November, I haven’t done much with it until a day or so ago. I’ve begun posting what amount to instant Odd Lots on Twitter, so if you were waiting for me to do something useful before following me, well, the wait is over.
- Twitter has been using its own link shortener t.co to shorten all links in tweets since 2011 or so. It’s automatic and requires zero additional keystroking. Why, then, do tweeters still use services like bit.ly and goo.gl?
- The FCC may change the definition of “broadband” today, which could demote tens of millions of people (mostly DSL users) to some weird limbo between dialup and broadband. Most of the DSL connections I’ve used have been hideous, some providing measured speeds right down there with 1994 dialup, along with weird lockups and general bit-mayhem.
- Update to the above: Yup. It happened. Next on the agenda: net neutrality.
- NASA’s New Horizons probe is now waking up. We’re about to get our first close-in views of the last (known) un-visited planet in the solar system. Pluto and its gigantic moon Charon are only 12,000 mles apart and orbit one another in 6.3 days, so I’m expecting that some of the upcoming images will be startling, to put it mildly.
- Your coding style gives you away. Mine certainly does–all my reserved words are in uppercase. Why run with the pack?
- Wired tests five wine-stain removers. $18 a bottle? I dunno. At $3.50 or so, Spray & Wash Resolve Stain Stick always works pretty well for us. (Me, actually. Carol drinks white wine.)
- Apple’s app store billed more than Hollywood’s entire box-office take last year.
- It’s easy to say “We’re going to tie health-care payments to health-care outcomes. It’s a lot harder to measure those outcomes objectively.
- This thingmajigger–called a “Panjandrum”–is almost certainly the silliest weapon in 20th century military history. I invite you to nominate competitors, but I warn you, it’s a tough act to beat. (Make sure you scroll down to the video, even if you don’t read the whole thing.)
- Finally, from the Global Vaporizing department: 2,960 degrees in Cave Creek. Boy, it didn’t get quite that hot back in the 90s… (Thanks to Bill Roper for the link.)
The Strangest Computer I’ve Ever Built
Lee Hart sent me the guldurndest thing for Christmas: One of his RCA COSMAC CDP1802 Face Card kits. I needed a distraction from a number of things, starting but not ending with publisher disputes. Lee’s Face Card was just the ticket. I haven’t done much PCB soldering in the last few years. Most of what I have done in the electronics sphere was point-to-point, generally on tube circuits. I hadn’t soldered a 40-pin DIP in, well, um…decades?
There’s a knack to it, and I had to dig around a little to find my roll of Ersin .022 Sn63 solder, but after a few minutes’ careful practice it all came back. The kit doesn’t include a 40-pin socket, but I always socket CPUs. The CPU chip I used (see above) has a distinguished history: It was the very same chip I ordered for my original COSMAC Elf project in the fall of 1976. Later it migrated to my second, heavily hacked Elf design (here’s the board mounted on what really was a scrap Xerox 3100 platen cover) with ten banks of CMOS memory (2,560 bytes!) a breadboard block, and a hex keypad. That second Elf board, in turn, became one of two CDP 1802 machines in my well-known robot Cosmo Klein:
Cosmo and I did the SF con circuit from 1978 to the early 80s, and we were actually featured in Look Magazine, as well as an early cable TV program that no one saw.
So I have a certain history with RCA’s peculiar COSMAC architecture, and have built a number of peculiar computers with it. I’m pretty sure none of them were ever quite as peculiar as Lee’s Face Card. Why? The Face Card has no memory, volatile or nonvolatile. It does not run software. Actually, it’s strapped specifically so that it doesn’t run software. (More on this in a moment.) What it does is light up groups of LEDs to make an animated face. How it does this is, well, peculiar: The LEDs are driven from the 1802 chip’s address lines. The data bus is left floating. The 1802, when reset, begins executing code starting at address 0000 in memory. If there’s no memory and the data bus is floating, the chip just executes empty air. The patterns that appear on the address lines aren’t quite random, but close enough so that the LED eyebrows, face, and mouth move in almost random variations. Oh, and the clock speed? One cycle per second.
Peculiar enough for you?
One of the data bus lines has to be pulled high to prevent the binary instruction 00 from executing. This is the HALT opcode, and if empty air delivers 00 to the data bus, the Face Card will freeze and the face pattern will no longer change.
I have special affection for the Face Card because one of the two COSMAC machines in Cosmo displayed an animated face on a portable TV atop his body. Cosmo could look around, smile, frown, and (on a touchtone signal from my 2M HT) lick his chops.
I built the Face Card in about an hour and a half. I’m careful, I work slowly, and I test most components before soldering them into a circuit board. It worked as designed when I turned it on. Theoretically, the system can run on any power source from 4-6VDC. I found that a 5V supply didn’t quite cut it. Some of the LEDs didn’t light fully, and the patterns seemed to get “stuck” now and then. The board has been running at 6V for two days now, and things are brighter and livelier. They’ll be even livelier when I cut the clock generator resistor in half and double the clock speed to two cycles per second.
$19.95 + $5 shipping. CPU socket not included, but I think using one is a good idea.
Highly recommended.
Odd Lots
- This item may not be visible after a few more days, so catch it now: A very weird “hotspot” turned up in the satellite water temperature record at the far eastern end of Lake Superior. For a short while, water temps excursed from the 30s up to the 60s F. Instrument Error? Cargo ship on fire? UFO exploding? STORMY baiting and then rounding up firenados? No one can tell me, though I suspect that the truth is out there.
- The FCC is trying to redefine “broadband” as 25 Mbps down / 3Mbps up. The big carriers are livid. And what are they saying? “Nobody needs Internet that fast!” Just like Esther Dyson said that no home computer user would ever need a CPU as fast as the 286.
- The dropoff in some ebook author revenues this past fall (which many blamed on Kindle Unlimited) may have been a sales cycle thing, unrelated to Amazon.
- Dare we hope that this new Facebook feature will be the end of hoaxes and hate memes? Be on notice that I intend to use it a lot.
- Slashdot inadvertently invited all the Pascal-haters out of their caves for one more hatefest. Heh. Maybe not a hatefest. The emotion I pick up when C partisans’ eyes roll back in their heads over Pascal is not hate, but…fear.
- Angry Twitter posts are harmful to your health. Duhhh. Angry anything is harmful to your health. Anger is jack-in-the-box suicide: You can’t tell quite when, but the more you turn that crank, the sooner the thing’s gonna pop.
- The Pirate Bay has a phoenix logo and a countdown timer on their old site, suggesting that they’re coming back online on February 1. I consider this unlikely, but I’ve been surprised by these guys before.
- From the same site: Dozens of Pirate Bay clones are not nearly as useful as the real thing.
- And while we’re talking about (if not like) pirates, whatever happened to Antigua’s blanket permission to distribute copyrighted files? Lots of news about that in midlate 2013, nothing since.
- The highest-paid YouTube video author films herself unwrapping Disney toys. That’s it. And for that she earned $5M. I think I’m in the wrong damned business.
