- My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
- How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
- Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
- No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
- Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
- If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
- Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
- Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
- Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
- Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
- Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
- I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
- And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
- Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.
culture
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Please read this short article by Mark Shuttleworth. I’ve been saying this for years, but he’s a lot more famous than I am: Tribalism makes you stupid. It also means that you are owned, and are not a free man or woman.
- The Insight debugger front end for gdb has been removed from all Debian-based Linux distributions, and is not present in Ubuntu 10.4. The Debian package for Insight has been criticized as “insane” and unmaintained, and I’m curious: Has anyone here used it in recent releases of Fedora or OpenSuse?
- Autodesk founder John Walker has an interesting free Web toy for Greasemonkey, which attempts to spot “media trigger words” and alert you when weaselspeak is being attempted. (Thanks to Jason Kaczor for the tipoff.)
- Oh, no! It’s the Pluto Effect for dinosaurs! Triceratops is actually an immature Torosaurus!
- Man, turn your head for ten minutes and there’s a whole new kind of punk out there. But this one I may actually like: Dieselpunk. Think Art Deco urban fantasy, with the cultural clock set at 1920-1945. This might include the first Indiana Jones movie, and certainly one of my personal favorites, The Rocketeer. Lessee, we still need Musketpunk, for gritty urban fantasy in 1780 Philadelphia. Ben Franklin with tattoos. Could work, no?
- Don’t be drinkin’ Diet Mountain Dew while reading this site. Trust me.
- There is an entire news site devoted to good news. Perky people like me and Flo read it every day now.
- Sheesh. What’s wrong with “Hi! Is this seat taken?” (Wait, no, that was the 70s. And purely analog.)
- I don’t think I posted a link to this back in April, but I should have. There’s a rectangle of this identical cloth hanging on my workshop wall as framed art. Pray without ceasing, even when you’re soldering up a regenerative receiver.
Odd Lots
- I’m not very good at one-liners. So, in my contrarian fashion, I will present an Odd Lots composed entirely of…two-liners.
- Technical material (textbooks, manuals, computer books) rendered on an ebook reader? Now you’re talking.
- As someone fond of both astronomy (especially telescopes) and Star Wars, I consider this a wonderful building hack.
- Harrison Bergeron was evidently a Canadian kid soccer player. (Thanks to Bob Trembley for the link.)
- What’s your favorite app for extracting text from PDFs? Any experience with ABBYY’s PDF Transformer?
- And if you’re going the other way, slow but sure pays off: PDFCreator has finally reached version 1.0, after only seven years.
- Sigil is the only WYSIWIYG editor for EPUB-format ebooks. Why? When will we start editing ebooks and stop coding them?
- One of my cousins once had a sandbox in an enormous worn-out tractor tire. Now somebody’s recycled such a tire into a bike.
Las Vegas Quarters
I got a Las Vegas quarter in change the other day. This is a term I use for certain coins (generally quarters but occasionally nickels) that (after spending decades ricocheting from one slot machine to another) have a distinctive beat-to-hell appearance that can’t be mistaken for anything else. Las Vegas quarters don’t wear smooth and shiny like quarters that people use to buy burgers at McDonald’s. They’re full of dents and nicks and more matte than polished. They also look like they were dug up in some Roman ruins in Gaul after a century or three of service.
Vegas fired its quarters back in the late 90s, when computerized slotless slot machines began replacing electromechanical slot machines with a vengeance. They’re now gradually filtering out into general circulation. This is the second I’ve seen this year, after never getting one outside the city itself prior to that.
I never entered a Las Vegas casino before my first trip to Comdex in 1985, and I remember that the metallic racket of quarters being spit into stainless-steel pans at the Continental Hotel and Casino was continuous and never stopped for even a second. The psychological effect was intentional and obvious: People weren’t just winning now and then. People were winning constantly. And the quarters paid the price.
By the time Carol and I took a short trip to Las Vegas a few years ago, the coin machines were gone. The racket of interacting metal objects had been replaced by a continuous cacophony of crude digital jingles, a sort of MIDI hell that I found a lot harder to take than the now-vanished quarter clatter.
I have a little dish of odd coins that I’ve gotten in change over the years (mostly foreign ones and American coins with weird damage) and my 1977 Vegas quarter will join them. Such quarters are tokens (literally) of a piece of technology that slipped away when nobody was looking, and a hundred years from now, I wonder if someone will pick up such a quarter and think, “My God, what happened to that poor thing!”
Odd Lots
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Fixie, a fixed-gear bicycle; i.e., a bike in which the pedals always move with the rear wheel and coasting is impossible. Fixies are currently the rage among hipsters in stylish cities. It sounds deranged to me, but I lack the hipster gene and value my knees, so what do I know?
- From Aki Peltonen comes a link to probably the best volcano blog I’ve ever seen. Great photos, interesting analysis, and reasonably courteous comments. (Boy, you don’t see that everywhere!)
- While we’re talking volcanoes, how are the sunsets in the UK? Denmark? Any personal reports from readers here?
- Many have sent me a link to the Panoramic Wi-Fi Camera, a fascinating gadget that consists of 20 cantennas arranged in a vertical line on a frame that spins 360 degrees horizontally. Spin the device, and a netbook builds a panoramic image of the 2.4 GHz field in the immediate vicinity. Watch the videos. Fascinating on its own merits, and pay attention to what happens when somebody throws a cup of coffee into a nearby microwave oven: The oven blinds the camera to everything else. For all the tooth-gnashing we hear over cellphone radiation, microwave oven RF leakage never seems to get a whisper.
- This should surprise no one: Google’s Street View carcams have also been wardriving. There’s less to this than meets the eye (there was a project, now defunct, doing this in 2002) but it’s yet another reason I don’t power-up my Wi-Fi access point unless I need it for some reason. (My house has Cat5E in the walls, and I use PowerLine bricks for high-speed Net access in odd corners.)
- Dave Schmarder N2DS has given his homebrew radio site a major upgrade and its own domain, so even if you saw it a few years ago, do take another look. Gorgeous work.
- We blew through the range of SDHC Flash memory cards in record time: 32 GB cards are now in the supportable $60-$80 range…and 32GB is as big as they get. We did this in four years. Admittedly, SDHC was a cheap’n’easy hack, but hell, what kind of damfool memory standard only increases capacity by 16X? (Even SDXC, which takes us to 2 TB, should have gone much farther.) My guess: Standards authors don’t want to be wrong about future advances in hardware, and certainly don’t want to be a drag on future innovations by being too explicit about how hardware is supposed to work ten or twelve years on. I can see both sides. That doesn’t make it any less annoying.
- From Michael Covington comes a pointer to a 1952 riff on beer and ham radio, and a glimpse of what cash-poor radio guys dreamed of the year I was born. I’ve never met anybody who ever had such a rack (the radios, the radios!) but beer was and remains very big in radio shacks to this day. K1NSS is the cartoonist behind the Dash books, about a dog who does ham radio. (I found him last year while researching names for our current puppy…)
A Tree For the Ages
Not everything gets done on time, but at our house, at least, most things come in at or under budget. Carol and I budgeted an afternoon to take down and pack all of our Christmas decorations, and that’s about what it took. We’re certainly not on time (I had planned to be done a week ago) but a buzzing swarm of minor irritations got in the way, and it wasn’t until suppertime yesterday that the tree came down–and that only after everything else in the line of decorations was gathered in from the eight corners of the house and repacked in six cozy Rubbermaid totes.
And boy, what a tree that was! We put it up on December 10, which means it was on duty for almost five weeks. It had dropped some needles on the floor, but nothing I’d call a torrent, and when we got to picking ornaments off the tree’s high precincts, we discovered something else: The tree had been growing. On the very highest branches, there were new pale-green needles emerging from the branch tips. Those had certainly not been there when we brought it home back in December. This is not a trick we’ve observed in any other tree we’ve had in 33 years of marriage, nor with our respective families prior to that. We’re not sure how we managed it, but we’re going to buy our tree at the same lot next year and hope we get lucky again.
We broke only one glass ornament this year, and it wasn’t one of the old ones. It was perhaps ten years old, the sort of worked-glass item you see artists making in real time with a blowtorch at home and garden shows, out of thin glass rod. When Carol touched it to take it down from the tree, it literally flew apart in her hands. (There were internal stresses involved, as we vacuumed up fragments six feet away.)
A lot of our ornaments were inherited from Carol’s family, especially after we sold her mom’s house in 2006. Many are old, some extremely old, judging by the fragile cardboard boxes that had held them on store shelves decades ago and still serve in 2010, taped and patched though they may be. What I found remarkable was a price tag on the box shown above, from the venerable (and now extinct) Weiboldt’s department store in Chicago. The tag reads two for fifteen cents.
Wow.
Maybe it was a clearance sale price for the day after Christmas. I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything enduring for less than ten cents. (Hamfest junkmongering doesn’t count, though the junk certainly does endure.) Even the Hi-Flier kites I flew in 1962 cost me a dime. This may take us back to the early 1950s, and possibly to the late 1940s. Carol’s parents were married in 1947. We wonder if this box could be among the ornaments they bought for their first Christmas together.
I snipped off the branch tip shown in the photo at the top of this entry, and put it in a glass of water, just to see what happens. The tree is now out in the garage and will go to Rocky Top in the next day or so. The decorations and the Lionel trains are back in the Harry Potter closet downstairs. I gave Carol a hug while we moved the furniture back into its accustomed places. Christmas is over, but there’s still a little sparkle in the air, and I’m dealing well with the ordinary gloom of winter.
Mission accomplished.
The Limitations of Celebration
Yesterday saw an annual ritual performed here: Popping the Christmas mix CDs out of the 4Runner’s CD changer, and dropping back in four non-Christmas selections from the 20-odd mix CDs I have in the CD wallet. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany, which, in the minds of most Catholics–my own included–is the end of the Christmas season. Our tree is drying out, and probably Thursday or Friday we’ll pull down and pack the ornaments, re-roll the 10 strings of old-style lights, and get everything back into its proper box. I’ll run the Lionel trains around the track one more time and pronounce them good, as I have now for 30-odd years of Christmas railroading. The tree will come down and be taken to Rocky Top, a local rock-and-dirt yard that recycles Christmas trees into mulch. The trains and all the decorations will go back down under the big stairs in the Harry Potter closet, to wait quietly for Christmas 2010.
It wasn’t that I was getting tired of the Christmas mix CDs, or the tree, or the decorations, or (especially) the Lionel trains. Far from it. What I don’t want is for them to become ordinary. That is in fact the risk of endless Christmas celebration, as it sometimes seems to lean in this country. Nor is it specifically a Christmas problem: Celebrate anything too much, and whatever you’re celebrating merges into the landscape of ordinary life, and loses its power to remind, to re-orient, to refresh.
It’s important to separate the mechanics of celebration with what is being celebrated. The ideas behind Christmas, whether the purely religious or the secular (there’s nothing essentially religious about “peace on Earth, good will toward men”) are worth keeping close at hand at all times of the year, and ideally through every waking moment we live. The tree, the lights, the egg nog, the creche, and all the rest of it serve as reminders, popping up on an annual basis to reinforce the importance of keeping generosity, civility, and patience in our everyday toolkits. If we engage in the mechanics of celebration for too long, the symbols lose their power, and because symbols demand attention, they can too easily become irritations.
So it’s essential to the mission of Christmas to put it all away after awhile, lest we get all Christmased out and cease to see the point of it. Come next fall (and a little later than November 1, perhaps? Please?) we’ll begin to remember again, and the symbols will re-emerge, refreshed in their power just as we left the previous Christmas season refreshed in our convictions. We’ll rediscover the delights of Christmas music and Lionel trains and colored lights all over the place. We’ll remember why we do it, and resolve to keep the ideals in our minds as we slog through yet another damned miserable winter.
It’s time. I’ll miss the trains (and maybe the egg nog) but yes indeed, it’s time.
Odd Lots
- So here, on the eve of the end of a year I’d just as soon forget, the last Odd Lots of 2009. Carol’s in Chicago and I’m staying home tonight with a lapful of dogs and a good book, which on this occasion will be Brian Fagan’s The Long Summer, his history of the Holocene Warm Period. Carol will be back on Saturday. Getting tired of meat. May have some mashed potatoes tonight.
- The Christmas tree is no longer taking water, and I perceive that’s it’s begun to dry out. We brought it home on December 10, so it has been standing guard in our living room for three weeks. This may be a new record for us. We’ve had trees stand (a little) longer, but their final two weeks were a rain of needles.
- The day after Carol and I showed Carol’s mom our Christmas tree via Skype video call, this Zits strip was published. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know–I read Zits but generally in the newspaper, and not every day.)
- 2009 is ending with 260 sunspotless days. 2008 had 266, and December was the most active month of the year, so we’re guessing that the Long Solar Minimum is mostly over. Can 15M skip be far behind?
- Ray Kurzweil has announced a new ebook software reader package called Blio. Not a lot of detail and no software to download yet, but it’s going to be a free product, with versions for both mobile devices and the desktop. Introduction will be at CES next week.
- The ebook technology to watch in 2010 is Qualcomm’s Mirasol, which promises color without sacrificing battery life or readability. Looks good, but what we need much worse are larger displays and higher resolution.
- Once again, Bruce Schneier nails it: The bulk of our antiterrorist strategies rely on magical thinking. This is not the way to win; alas, magical thinking appears to be a pervasive part of modern culture, and I’m not talking about Harry Potter.
- Recent discussions of digital media piracy reminded me of the 2005 article in Wired describing the media piracy “scene” ecosystem (topsites, couriers, races, etc.) and how it works. Big Media may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean that no one is out to get them.
- Pete Albrecht photographed two UFOs flying in formation (big animated GIF) while taking a long-exposure shot of M42, the Orion Nebula, through his big Meade telescope. Nothing spooky or alien about it, but before you click on the explanation (in his December 28 entry) think for a second and see if you can figure it out on your own.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: murse, more often called a “man bag,” which is basically a purse carried by a guy.
- Ditto above: prepper , a person who prepares for the end of the world by stockpiling peanut butter etc. They called themselves survivalists until survivalism became equated in the public mind with psychos packing machine guns; watch for the word to vanish when 2012 ends but the Earth is still here. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
How Do I Know You Again?
It happened again this morning. I got an email from LinkedIn with the headline, “Mary Mankiewicz wants to keep in touch on LinkedIn!” I scratched my head. No recall of Mary Mankiewicz. I went to her LinkedIn profile page. Interesting, ambitious woman, eight or nine years younger than I, lots of experience in publishing. But no least clue that I have ever even met her.
I get machine-generated notes from LinkedIn and Facebook all the time asking to connect to my network, and generally I friend those who ask. I turn off Mafia Wars and Farmville and all that other stuff (no offense; I’m not interested in who you stabbed last night or where that new piglet came from) and enjoy the short posts, even though the scroll rate has gotten mighty fast lately. But I think it would be very courteous to include a note saying something like, “Hi Jeff! I was down the hall from Randy Osgood at Ziff-Davis at One Park Ave and we all had lunch once while you were up from Baltimore for a meeting. Oh, forgot–my maiden name was Chisholm.”
Ahhh. Sure. Mary Chisholm. Worked for PC Mag when I was at PC Tech Journal mid-80s, and (I think) was dating Randy, who was one of our sales reps at the time. (Note well: All these names are utterly fictitious. The situation is utterly real.) That’s all it would take, and would obviate the awkward need for me to ask her straight-out when she wants to network: How do I know you again?
This problem is not unique to me, though I imagine even moderately famous people have it far worse than I do. Here’s my solution: Every friend request sent by any social network must require a fill-out form that at least has a list of checkboxes under “I know you from…” for high school, college, job, church, volunteer work, or whatever. And under that a simple text box with a noodge over it saying something like, “As a courtesy, please jot a short note here indicating how you knew this person in the past.”
That’s all it would take. Ladies, please include your maiden name if that’s how I knew you back in the day and you don’t use it anymore. Thanks!
Odd Lots
- Here’s a great graphic strongly suggesting that the much-denied Medieval Warm Period really existed, and was indeed a global phenomenon. (For further evidence, read The Little Ice Age, which predates the worst of the current Global Warming hatefest and thus may be considered reasonably reliable.)
- I had not heard this before: The imminent Nook ebook reader from Barnes & Noble will have a Wi-Fi connection, allowing owners to browse free ebook previews that are only accessible through store hotspots. This gives people a reason to come into physical stores, Nooks in hand, spend time, drink coffee, browse the print collection, and leave with a bag full of print titles that aren’t available as ebooks. Assuming it’s true, as a marketing gimmick, it’s brilliant.
- The Nook has a slot for a Micro-SD card with a capacity of up to 16 GB. Assuming a typical text-mostly ebook file to be 500K in size (which is very generous; most fiction titles I’ve seen are about half that, or less) a Nook is capable of storing about 30,000 books. If you read a complete book every single day, that will last you for…82 years.
- I’ve already seen the Nook e-reader referred to as the “Nookie reader.” Which it will be, trust me.
- People are quibbling in the comments that it’s not a self-propelled model train, but screw it: This guy made a Z-scale model of an N-scale model train layout, working effectively at a scale of 1:35,200. He gets serious points for, well, something, and the video is very cool.
- And at the other end of the scale, here’s the world’s largest model train layout. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.) Makes me want to go back and work on The Million-Mile Main Street, positing a 1:1 scale model train layout that covers an entire planet, where the trains (each a sort of AI hive mind) run things, and the people are hired actors.
- Researchers at Purdue have demonstrated ALICE, a new species of rocket fuel consisting of aluminum nanoparticles and…water. Larger aluminum particles have been used in rocket fuel before (they’re part of the formula in the Shuttle’s strap-on boosters) but the smaller the particles, the more efficiently they burn. As aluminum is common just about everywhere, if you can corner enough solar radiation to smelt the aluminum and dig up some water (guess where, Alice!) you can go places.
- Pete Albrecht sent me a link to SeatGuru, which provides detailed floor plans for all major aircraft on all major airlines, including where the power ports and extra legroom are. If you fly a lot, it might be worth a close look. Here’s a good example of a specific aircraft.
- This insane vampire business has evidently begun to affect the cosmetics business; the Daily Mail reports that pale foundation and powder are pushing their tanner competitors right off the market.
- I stumbled upon the above item after stumbling upon this, which may be the most inexplicable Web site I’ve seen in the last several years. They pay people to put that together? And what kind of organism from what planet reads it?
- Word must have gotten out that I’m a liturgical conservative. I therefore find this funny, in a slightly painful kind of way. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
