- I confess to some surprise at reading that we really don’t know yet whether antimatter falls up or down. Falling up might explain why we don’t see a lot of antimatter in these parts.
- By now I’d guess you’ve all seen the movie. Now see how it was made. (We used to do animation with that few pixels. But the pixels were, well, a lot bigger.)
- There’s been much discussion recently about bitcoin mining using GPUs, including some systems designed specifically to mine bitcoins and not do much of anything else. Such systems basically turn electricity into money, and you have to make sure that the bitcoins you get are worth more than the juice you have to spend to mine them. So…how about using solar panels? I have easier ways to make money (and don’t trust the bitcoin infrastructure to begin with) so it’s not an experiment I’m willing to make, but with enough solar panels and a bitcoin box, how long would it take to break even? Bitcoin math is pathological, but I’m aware that the more people start mining with such rigs, the harder the mining becomes.
- Here’s more cautionary advice on bitcoin.
- Somebody thought that mining bitcoins on user PCs while they play your games could a new business model. Mmmm, no.
- We are already shoveling our way through the second-coldest spring on record. If May doesn’t warm up quite a bit (it’s still going below freezing at night here) we will soon be facing the coldest. The photos of my deck under 4″ of snow on May 1 continue to boggle. I may have one of them framed.
- Suing your customers for criticizing your business is epic dumb, as Chicago’s tort-happy Suburban Express has discovered.
- I don’t use Visual Basic so I’m unlikely to try it, but OsenXPSuite could be useful for creating embedded database apps without a great deal of coding. The screenshots are intriguing. $150 for a single-seat license. They also have a freeware SQLite management app that I will try.
- There’s nothing healthy in most “health foods.” (It’s PR.) I like the bit in Men In Black III. K: “Do you know the most destructive force in the universe?” J: “Sugar?” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- From The-Ghosts-of-Friendships-Past Department: LinkedIn just sent me a message telling me that a friend had just celebrated his fifth anniversary at a local firm–even though he died four years ago. This led me to check my Facebook friends list, and sure enough, there are two dead people there as well. This is a weird business.
hardware
Odd Lots
The Pibow Case and Vesa Mount for Raspberry Pi
Last week I bought a Toshiba 23L1350U 1080p TV set as a display for the Raspberry Pi. It’s a terrific TV set, as TV sets go, and a reasonable monitor. I had to do some hunting around the configuration menus with the remote to get it out of TV mode and into PC mode, and then reduced the brightness until it didn’t make my eyes want to fall out and roll under my desk.
With that accomplished, boy, it’s a sweet display for the Raspberry Pi. The effective resolution is 1920 X 1080, which is a lot of pixels to push around for something not quite the size of a business card and running at a bare 700 MHz. It runs Scribus, Lazarus, and AbiWord tolerably well. In fact, the MagPi magazine is laid out with Scribus on an RPi, which makes this old magazine geek boggle.
Like a lot of people, I just let the RPi board lie in the thick of its nest of cables for awhile. I then cobbled a mount out of scrap aluminum for an old SX270 all-in-one stand, and that works pretty well on the matching 2004-era Dell 17″ 4:3 monitor. That’s now my spare RPi system. I bought a second board for the Toshiba and wanted a case to put it in, to get it off the desk and out of the way.
The Toshiba provides an ideal place to put the case: on the 100mm VESA mount at the back of the TV. The Pibow people sell these slick transparent cases consisting of seven layers of CNC-cut plexi, stacked, with vent-perfed front and back panels. The board fits snugly in the void left in the slabs by cutting. The plexi layers are not glued or fastened to one another in any way, which makes assembly tricky. Four long nylon bolts hold the assembly together. Tip: Don’t get the layers out of order, as they are not numbered.
Pibow sells a VESA mount as a separate item. It’s simply a different rear panel, with four ears drilled for both 75mm and 100mm VESA templates. Bolted to the VESA inserts, it’s up and out of the way and reduces cable clutter radically. I’m wondering how warm the board will get inside the case, but as I’m not overclocking the board (yet) I suspect it’ll be fine.
I’m going to use Adafruit’s nano-Wi-Fi adapter for networking on this unit. It hasn’t come yet, and I’ll report on how easily it goes in and how it works in future entries.
Odd Lots
- May 1 here in the Springs will see a high of 36, and a low of 16…with 2-4 inches of snow likely. I’m thinking I’m going to have to drain the sprinkler system yet again.
- The end must be near: Jeff spent some time fooling with a Samsung ATIV running Windows 8…and was impressed. It’s a 12″ tablet with a dockable keyboard, not unlike a bigger version of my Transformer Prime. The first thing the Best Buy sales guy showed me was how to flick away the Windows 8 UI like a bug. What remained was enough like Windows 7 to be usable.
- Alas, Office 2000 will not run on Windows 8. Nor will Office 2003. But Atlantis will. As will Libreoffice. Not sure about AbiWord.
- Something shot a hole in one of the ISS solar panels. Guys, the Universe is armed and dangerous.
- And unpredictable. There are now more spots on the Sun than I’ve seen in years. Will need to spin the dials a little later today to tell if it’s doing us any good.
- Wikipedia’s psycho editing community got on the wrong side of feminists recently, and Salon did a nice piece on “revenge editing.” Requiring that real names be published for all editors would help this problem a lot. (If I had a Wikipedia entry, I’m sure I’d be vandalized for saying this.)
- Poking around Salon led to this: We once tried to weaponize the weather. (So much for those bucolic 1950s that everybody seems to love.) Of course, the key to weaponizing the weather is knowing where to deploy your butterflies.
- Suddenly I’m seeing the word “adorable” used with what appears to be a straight face. Is this a hipster thing?
- These see-through highlighter pens were a long time coming, but they’re simply adorable.
Why I Like Old Software
I still use Office 2000. I still use Visio 2000. I still use InDesign 2.0. I still use VMWare Workstation 5. Hell, I still use Windows XP. Am I lazy? Am I cheap? Am I nuts? No, no, and hell no. Every piece of software I use is the result of a calculated decision and a certain amount of research. I am by no means averse to paying for software, and I do so regularly. But I don’t always upgrade, especially if the upgrades cost money and/or deliver 80% of their value to the vendor. By that I mean software designed to win what I call “pip wars” (feature-comparison charts on review sites) or place new restrictions on installation and use ostensibly to limit piracy. (Mostly what anti-piracy features do is massage titanic corporate egos.) There are loads of people who will stand there drooling in wait of the next major release, money in hand, never suspecting that the largest single reason for the upgrade is to keep the revenue stream flowing.
The longer I use my Old, Old, Software, the better I like it. Here are a few reasons why:
- It’s already paid for. The longer I use it, the more hours of use I get for my buck.
- By and large, old software (at least pre-2002 or so) doesn’t activate. The benefits of activation flow entirely to the vendor, at least in circumstances where the benefits are not entirely imaginary. Most of the time, they are. Activation delivers nothing but annoyance and occasionally downtime to the end user–and in doing so, trains many otherwise honest users to be pirates.
- Old software is smaller and faster on new machines. Bloat is real, even if it’s not the result of fighting pip wars somewhere. Office 2000 seems almost supersonic on my quadcore, doubly so on my quadcore from my new SSD.
- Old software respects the skills I’ve developed over the years. Most of the changes I’ve seen across major upgrades are gratuitous, and don’t add any value over the old versions. UI changes in particular had better deliver spectacular new value, because while I learn them they slow me way down.
- Tutorial books on old software can be had for almost nothing. I routinely buy books on early-mid 2000’s software for $5 or so…books that had original cover prices in the $40-$50 range. Many of these books are unused remainder copies that are essentially new.
- The argument I hear when I make this point mostly cook down to, Isn’t it eventually obsolete? That depends on what “obsolete” means. Backward compatibility is usually retained, because people rebel when it isn’t. (Windows 8? Are those peasants carrying registered torches and pitchforks?) The only significant thing that Word 2000 doesn’t do is handle docx files. I bought Atlantis to convert any docx files I might need to keep on hand. (Atlantis also creates extremely clean epubs.) Word 2000 is weak on PDF skills, so I bought PDF Xchange Pro to handle that, and as a bonus eliminate any need for the exploit farm we know as Adobe Reader.
I do upgrade software when I see a need. Windows XP eventually replaced Win2K here, even though it activates, because it had certain things I eventually judged useful. I’ve purchased InDesign three times, because I make money laying out books and the new features were useful, but I stopped when Adobe added their uniquely paranoid activation. (Interestingly, I haven’t felt any compelling need to upgrade since V2.0, and I’m interviewing Scribus.) I dumped Dreamweaver when I wanted to move my Web pages to CSS, because Komposer did CSS as well as I needed it to, for free and without activation. It pains me to say it, but with Delphi pricing now up in four figures (and encumbered by activation) I’ve moved all my Pascal programming to Lazarus 1.0.6.
This last issue is important. Open source has changed a great many things. I used to pay for email clients, including Eudora and Poco Mail. Since I discovered Thunderbird, I’ve stayed with Thunderbird. Why? Email is a mature technology. I’m not sure there’s much innovation left to be wrung from it. This is less true of Web browsers, and I now use Chrome most of the time. But man, what’s new in word processing? What? Lemme think for a second… Hang on, it’ll come to me…
This is a key point: The basic mechanisms of computing are mature. There has been time for the slower dev cycles of open source to catch up with commercial software. The action is out on the edges, in speech recognition, automated translation, vertical markets of many kinds, and niche-y mobile apps. We’re still seeing some useful evolution in Web browsers, but there’s damned little in releases of Office past 2000 that I find compelling. Most of the new features are UI tweaks and useless gimmicks.
Old software still has fizz: The best we could want already is!
Odd Lots
- Egad. No, egad squared: A major literary agency has asked to see the full manuscript of Ten Gentle Opportunities. The novel is done, but I still have to format it for submission and write the synopsis and logline. I’m going to be busy for a few days, that is fersure.
- IBM is taking a new slant on fluidic computers, one that operates via charged fluids. The hope is that this will allow better modeling of human brain operation. I’m skeptical, but hey, it’s a species of nanocomputer, and I’m certainly bullish on those. (Thanks to Mike Reith for the link.)
- If anybody reading this has a 3D printer, I’d like to ask: Does the extruded plastic stick to clean copper-clad PCB stock? The obvious idea is to lay down a single-slice pattern in the form of PC pads and then etch the board with the plastic as resist. I don’t see much about this online.
- From Chris Gerrib: How American radio stations got their call signs. One minor refinement: US callsigns beginning with AAA-ALZ and NAA to NZZ are not exclusively military. Amateur radio callsigns have used those prefixes for at least 35 years. (An OTA friend of mine outside Chicago got his Extra and selected AA9J as his call in, I think, 1976.)
- People always seem to be recording meteors on dash cameras. I now have a dash camera. If I put it on my dash, will I see a meteor? Or will I get my money back? (Whoops. Found it in the bushes. All finds final. No refunds.)
- Speaking of dash cameras: The manufacturer of the little sports camera I found in my bushes issued a DMCA takedown notice to a reviewer, on trademark grounds. (The DMCA has nothing to do with trademark abuse.) Hey, GoPro, Barbra is singing. Backtracking about the blunder will not help you. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for alerting me to this.)
- Salads are way more dangerous than hamburgers. Alas, you can’t grill salad until it’s done to the center.
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a story about how a Medieval copyist’s cat peed on his manuscript. The scribe drew a peeing cat on the damaged section, with an appropriate curse in Latin.
- And we think we have a junk DNA problem: Amoeba proteus has 290 billion (yes, billion) base pairs in its genome, as compared to homo sap’s piddling 2.9 billion.
- The reason all of us baby boomers didn’t die as grade schoolers may be that none of us lived in rich-guy gonzo-modern homes like these. (Why did I think that these houses were designed to ernhance estate tax revenues?)
Odd Lots
- I’m a day late and a shamrock short, but I want to endorse an obscure but wonderful animated film with connections to St. Patrick’s Day: The Secret of Kells . It’s a fantasy about the creation of the Book of Kells, drawn in the style of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.
- Granted that I’d prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, the notion of writing your memoirs for the sake of documentation rather than publication is catching on. I have 67,000 words so far. It’s good practice in writing, and may prove useful against the future possibility that I myself can’t remember what I did in high school.
- Earth is passing through a significant CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) and the aurora have been excursing as far south as Colorado. I had bad weather last night but I’ll check again tonight.
- Chicago’s quirky habit of dying the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day has its roots in detecting illegal sewage dumps into the river. Having grown up at a time when falling into the Chicago River was sometimes fatal, I boggled during a recent visit, when I looked down into the river and saw bottom.
- Our new pope has only one lung. This is less important than it would seem to the uninformed.
- Irrespective of the number of his lungs, is Pope Francis I more liberal than his predecessors? The question is tricky because “liberal” often means completely opposite things to North Americans as it does to Latin Americans.
- A 12-year-old girl is selling kits of Lego bricks that can be assembled into a case for Raspberry Pi computer boards. If ever the phrase “You go, girl!” applies, it would be here. I’d actually like to see a custom case with properly sized gaps and mounting holes for the Pi inside and Lego bumps on the outside, and I suspect at some point the product will appear.
- It’s possible to have too much gold…if you’re a Cray.
- While Carol was raking up the season’s dead leaves, pine needles, and other plant debris from our front “yard” (we have no grass, only gardens) the other day, she found one of these lodged in one of our bushes. It had evidently been there for some time, but within its air-tight case was pratically mint. Still not entirely sure what it can do…nor what to do with it.
Odd Lots
- My four-year-old niece Julie is working on a pair of roller skates…built from the Lego set we gave her for Christmas. Somewhere her engineer grandfather is smiling.
- Stay up too late and damage your genes. You cannot win by shorting sleep. Somebody, somewhere may be able to survive on five hours a night. It almost certainly isn’t you. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
- We have just lost Jan Howard Finder. No details available yet. I only met him once, but he bought my story “Marlowe” for his anthology Alien Encounters in 1982. 74 is too young for a man of his energy and high spirits. (Thanks also to Mike Bentley for letting me know.)
- Here’s an interesting story about a major publisher (unnamed) who won’t sell an indie bookstore more than 200 copies of a book at a time, even if the store buys them on a nonreturnable basis and pays cash. Happy ending: The indie bookseller drove down to Target, bought 300 copies of the book at 45% discount, and pulled off the author signing, no thanks to the idiot publisher. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Refining certain rare earth metals from their ores is about to become easier and cheaper. Alas, ytterbium is not on the list. Bummer.
- As much as we support Girl Scouts, I must warn that their Samoas coconut cookie contain sorbitol, to which some people (me included) are sensitive. I don’t think this was always the case. Be careful. (Their Savannah Smiles are just as good, and do not contain sorbitol.)
- If the PadFone 2 is too big for you (see yesterday’s Contra) ASUS announced the FonePad, a…7″…smartphone. The notion of holding a thing like that up to your face doesn’t bother me at all, but I’m just weird.
- Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio may buy the bricks-n-mortar retail arm of the company, but does not want the Nook division. This could be trouble…I’m just not sure which side the trouble is on.
- Discovered an interesting new wine: Middle Sister Rebel Red. Dry but in-your-face fruit-forward, almost no oak (a big plus for me) and very spicy in a wonderfully peculiar way. Highly recommended.
- We could see a comet hit Mars in 2014. Just our luck that it might happen on the hemisphere of the planet that we can’t see.
- Oh what a feeling, to drive a…
- Here’s a nice summary of the current state of the Sun. Something truly odd is going on: We’re getting very close to the predicted solar maximum, and yet yesterday’s sunspot number was…25. It should be more like 250. I built a steerable 10M dipole for this?
- While perusing solar activity graphs such as the above, I discovered that IPCC climate science chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri has admitted that there’s been no global warming for seventeen years. I guess Dr. Pachauri has joined the Deniers Club. Then again, because he isn’t a climate scientist, I guess there’s really no reason to believe anything he says.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Rageaholic , someone who simply cannot resist expressing anger, either in person or online, especially in comments sections or discussion forums.
- Related to that: Larry Gellman of HuffPo describes anger addiction in terms of rage against the Other, which is basically my longstanding definition of tribalism: Tribalism is the reflexive demonization of the Other. There can be many overlapping tribes, each with its own Others.
- And, of course, anger’s nonobvious implication: Whatever or whomever makes you angry owns you.
Score! The Phone-Inside-A-Tablet Concept, Now From ASUS
I don’t know where my ideas come from, so don’t ask. However, I do get ideas. Most of them come to nothing. Every now and again, however, I score.
Back at Clarion in 1973, I wrote an otherwise dorky novelette entitled “But Will They Come When You Do Call For Them?” in which I predicted something very like the World-Wide Web. It was over twenty years later that I realized I’d been scooped by H. G. Wells, who published his idea of the World Brain in 1937. (I’d never heard of the World Brain until I read about it on…the Web.) Hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, get scooped by the best.
In 1993, I got an idea for something I called The All Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything. It came out of the Information Superhighway fever (remember that?) and did not postulate HTTP, which was a new and obscure protocol at the time I was doing my research. Functionally, however, it was Wikipedia, or at least Wikipedia minus its idiotic Not Notable fetish.
Jim Strickland told me that I came very close to describing Second Life three years before it went live, with my “RAD Mars” concept piece in the final issue of Visual Developer. I think there were other stabs at that concept abroad at the time, so I don’t consider it as big a score. Still, it’s a score.
Which brings us to a news item I ran across this morning while I was scanning the World Brain. (Or the Universal Data Engineering Project, as I had more humbly named it in 1973.) ASUS has unveiled the Padfone 2, a smartphone that plugs into a 10″ “dumb” tablet. Pull that animation around–it’s very cool. The PadFone 2 is the newest rev of a product announced last spring that I missed somehow. (2012 was the second-worst year of my life. I missed a lot.) Here’s another detailed description from Engadget. The ASUS PadFone product line is the first real-world stab at a concept I described here on Contra back in 2008. That was in the thick of the netbook era, post-Kindle but pre-iPad, and the notion of a general-purpose touchscreen tablet was still obscure. What I wanted was a dockable display into which my smartphone plugged, with storage and network communications on the smartphone. And dayum if that isn’t more or less precisely what ASUS offers in the PadFone.
So forgive me if I sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. This may be the most accurate technology prediction I’ve ever made, and I made it almost five years ago.
Back in 2008 I considered patenting the idea, but only briefly. A patent would have cost me $10,000 and more time than I had to spare right then. Worse, I consider the idea only half a notch more than obvious, and when people patent the obvious it makes my blood boil.
I am a big fan of ASUS, and I own a much-loved and much-used Transformer Prime. I wish them no ill, but guys, put that patent application down. I thought of it five years ago.
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.
Odd Lots
- The 64GB Microsoft Surface Pro tablet has only 23GB of open storage. Yukkh.
- Given that I do most of my reading curled up in a monster cushy chair, I’ve begun to wonder if a tablet with a 12″ display (or perhaps even larger) with a charger dock on the adjacent end table would be useful. Such things exist, but not in great numbers and not cheap. Technical PDFs are often uncomfortable reading even on my 10″ Transformer Prime.
- Here’s yet another reason I’m not bullish on the Cloud: If all you have is the Cloud, everything has to include a rain dance. I ruled out Eye-Fi when it first came out for this reason, but the absurdity of requiring global connection to make a local connection needs to be aired every so often.
- Short summary of Bowl of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven: Ringworld with an engine, and nowhere to go. It’s the first Larry Niven book I can recall that I genuinely hated. Save your money.
- Here’s a result of vintage calculators (well, if not “result,” what’s the proper collective?) and a pointer to what would be a stunning steampunk model, if it hadn’t been designed in 1788.
- Early heads-up for what may be a really brilliant thing: Pulp-O-Mizer, which is a sort of image generator that spits out convincing Deco/Diesel magazine or book covers. Thanks to Jim Rittenhouse for putting me on to it. I’ll have more to say when I take it for a spin myself.
- I don’t know from personal experience if this is true; I don’t drink enough, nor late enough, to be a good test case. However, I’ve been told by several in my inner circle that too much booze too late at night makes for very bad sleep.
- There are a lot more Steampunk R2D2s out there than I would have guessed. I like the one with the monocle.
- It’s as easy as fishin’? I’ll stick with bluegills. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The big movie studios are evidently creating fake YouTube accounts with fake users uploading supposedly pirated movie trailers promoting new films. For the sake of plausible deniability, they’re sending YouTube takedown notices on the trailers. And you wonder why I see maybe three movies a year.
- This may not be a viable business model.
- In times long past, men used to wear high heels. (More recently, I remember seeing guys in platforms when I was in college.) Why? To stay on their horses. Or maybe to avoid being mistaken for Neanderthals. We may never know.
