hardware

Daywander

As I circle the concluding chapters of Ten Gentle Opportunies like a ravening vulture (do vultures raven? If so, what do ravens do?) I discovered this morning while reading email with an iced coffee in hand that Phil Foglio posted a rave of my novel The Cunning Blood, both on the Girl Genius Facebook page and his LiveJournal. (Thanks abundant to Alice Bentley for the tipoff.) Nothing motivates this particular vulture to abandon patience and kill something like a review of what has been (and still is–barely) my only completed full-length novel.

Now I have to kill this thing before it kills me.

(Note that there are other reasons for my slowdown the last couple of weeks, reasons that kept me from attending MileHiCon this weekend. Carol had to take a flight to Chicago on very short notice; more as things become clearer.)

Need. More. Coffee. I’m trying something peculiar here: The new-ish International Delights iced-coffee-in-a-milk-carton product. It’s outside the envelope for me because it’s got sugar in it, so I really bought it as a dessert. The mocha flavor is disappointing. It tastes almost exactly like the chocolate milk I used to drink at the Lane Tech lunchroom. Good if you like that sort of thing, but I want a brew that reminds me less of the clueless nerd I was in high school.

I also need to research the named ingredient “corn syrup.” Is that a new euphemism for HFCS? I know the corn industry is squirming so hard the worms in the gully are worried, but from earlier research I know that corn syrup is mostly glucose/destrose, which while still sugar isn’t as malevolent as HFCS seems to be.

Flying back from Hawaii I attempted to watch a rip of an episode from the original Outer Limits series on my Transformer Prime, and discovered something interesting: The throughput from the MicroSD card slot is insufficient to render the video on the Transformer’s display. It’s not exactly pixellation, but more like the sort of herringbone interference my ham radio signal used to put on broadcast TV. Regardless, it made watching the video impossible. Then, when I simply copied the .avi file to internal storage, it played perfectly. I know from previous experience that mp3 files play fine from MicroSD, and ebooks are not an problem at all.

Separate but still important issue: The Transformer Prime did not have the audio signal to drown out jet engine noise on our long flight. So even once I copied the episode to internal storage, I couldn’t make out the dialog half the time. That was the only video I brought, so more research is necessary. Video rips are peculiar things, and I certainly need better headphones.

I’ve broken a lot of light bulbs in my sixty years, but this recent casualty from the lamp over the stove was remarkable:

Broken Lightbulb.jpg

Secret? The touch of a rag wet with cold water. Yes, the bulb was off , but had been on all morning until five seconds previous. Duhhh. Light bulbs are not made of Pyrex.

Odd Lots

Oct 14th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

No, I’m not done yet. I’m almost a month behind schedule. If I were done, you would have heard the yell all the way over there, no matter where “there” is.
One very practical contrarian habit of mine is eating dinner at 5 PM. Carol and I never have to worry about getting into restaurants. I don’t care if it’s uncool. It allows me to get to sleep by 9:30.
Bill Cherepy sent word that Bicycle is now offering steampunk playing cards, in case you’re partial to poker by the stoker.
Oh, and a zombie deck, too. Of course.
A visually impaired person in our church reads The Book of Common Prayer (basically, the Episcopal Church’s missal) on her iPad. The Episcopal Church publishes a large-print edition, but the magic here is that she can make the print as large as she needs to. It’s part of a free app called Wayfarer, and is available in the iTunes store.
Toshiba is about to release their Excite 13 tablet, with a 13.3″ display. Much bitching has ensued. My view: It’s not a smartphone, nor an ebook reader. It’s half a laptop (as is the Toshiba Thrive) and there are uses for half a laptop. As my tenure with the Asus Transformer Prime and its docking keyboard have shown, keyboards are nice to have on media-consumption devices, but it’s good to be able to undock them when you don’t need them.
Sometimes, the world is your neon bulb.
I still have a tin of Penguin Peppermints. However, it looks like the in thing now is Energy Gummy Bears.
Or maybe Candy Lego.
My suggested general term for this sort of scamtrolling might be teergrubing. The idea is to waste as much of a scammer’s time as possible. This is not new, but the examples cited in the article are very funny.
Here’s lookin’ at you, squid.

Odd Lots

Aug 21st, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

Here’s more evidence that you should never, but never use Adobe Reader, especially on Linux. I haven’t used it for a couple of years, and if a machine comes into my care with that bugfarm on it I uninstall it immediately. I tried the free version of Tracker Software’s PDF XChange, then bought the pro version, and I’ve been using it ever since. Highly recommended.
No matter what PDF reader you use, make very sure that you disable Javascript in the reader. JS is probably the second most dangerous thing in the software world right now, after unbounded string functions. Fortunately, you can turn JS off a lot easier than you can spot software that still uses unbounded string functions.
Having hand-made countless hookup wire jumpers for breadboard work in my life (or at least since 1975, when I first got a push-down breadboard together) I was pleased to see a brilliant hack in Make: soak the glue off a block of ordinary desk stapler staples with acetone, and they make perfect (if short) jumpers.
From the same trip through the Make Blog comes a goofy and rather literal “third hand” for inspection, soldering, etc. If one of those came to, um, hand, I might even try it, though I think I’d stop short of the nail polish.
I’ve seen a fair number of Wi-Fi ad hoc networks come and go since I got into Wi-Fi in 1999, and all of them were far more trouble than they were worth. Byzantium looks better on a number of counts, and I wonder if any readers have tried it.
I used to burn these in my wood sto ve, and now we’re told that the entire global economy rests on them. It probably does. Alas, they’re mostly not made of wood anymore.
Also from Slate: Kids who passed the marshmallow test not only did better in nearly all aspects of life, but they weigh less at age 45. Their super-power may be simple impulse control, or it may be more than that: I’ve long suspected that some people are simply addicted to wanting. If it isn’t the marshmallows it’ll be something else.
From Tom Roderick comes word that we’ve finally gotten a maser to work at room temperature.
There is a new PDF-based magazine devoted to the Raspberry Pi board. Considering that it’s ad-free and they’re not charging for it, I think it’s pretty well done.

Odd Lots

Aug 9th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

For readers who are in the Colorado Springs area: All Breeds Rescue is hosting the 14th annual Romp in the Park this Saturday, August 11, at Norris Penrose Event Center. The event runs from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM. Carol will be working it, and I should be there midafternoon with QBit.
The Curiosity rover has a trick I didn’t hear about until after it landed: Its treads imprint a Morse code pattern in the sand or soft soil it crosses. The pattern spells JPL. Now that’s DX!
From Ernie Marek comes a link to DRB’s very visual article on Project Orion, including a sketch of Niven/Pournelle’s Michael spacecraft from Footfall. I would have called it OBB, for “Old Boom-Boom.”
Weird clouds are a minor interest of mine, and here’s a compendium from Wired that I missed when it first appeared in 2009.
New Zealand’s Tongariro volcano just erupted–and it was a complete surprise. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog on Wired before, but it’s well worth following if you have any interest at all in volcanic phenomena. Erik has a helluva constituency: The comments occasionally contain better insights and links than the blog itself!
Memories sometimes just appear out of nowhere, and the other day I remembered these. My next thought was, Nah, you imagined that! But they did exist, and when I was 13 or 14 they were first-run and I used them.
Ballotpedia has a fascinating listing of the net worth of congresspeople and senators. First insight: We are ruled by multimillionares. I am not disturbed that some of our representatives are multimillionares. I am disturbed that virtually all of them are. Second insight: Compare the net worth of Democratic vs. Republican senators. Things are not what you’d expect.
From the Hardware WTF File: The ASUS Transformer Prime’s otherwise excellent keyboard dock does not have a delete key. Shift-Backspace is as close as it gets.
And on the outside chance that you too have a Transformer Prime keyboard dock, here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts.
Newsweek will probably cease print publication later this year. A lot of people have never forgotten their mean-spirited and idiotic 2009 cover story, “The Case for Killing Granny,” and I personally cannot wait to see that thing rot in its grave.
David Plotz does not like August. Me, I could do without March.

Odd Lots

Jul 15th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

I didn’t know this until the other day: The instrumental riff in ELP’s “Touch and Go” is not ultimately from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Variations on Greensleeves.” It’s a far older folk melody called “Lovely Joan,” and the song is about a girl who, when asked by some aristocratic lout to hand over her virginity in exchange for a ring and a roll in the hay, keeps her virginity and steals his horse instead. Much better deal.
Here’s a tool to see if your email was on one of the 400,000 accounts recently leaked from Yahoo.
One of the big downsides of the ASUS Transformer Prime is that the micro SD card pops out of its slot very easily. I found mine on the cushion of my reading chair the other day, and have no least clue how I managed that, apart from sitting there and looking at some weather maps. I’m evidently not the only one with this problem.
I haven’t been over to The Consumerist in some time, but when I tried to go there the other day, Google marked it as an attack site. There’s not much to go by in Google’s details page, but it looks like an ad vector. This is why I use AdBlock Plus. (I went there from Linux and nothing bad happened.) UPDATE: They fixed the problem. Lesson: Nobody’s immune. Use AdBlock Plus.
Be sure to watch for auroras tonight, as far south as (I hope!) Colorado. Look east just before dawn and you’ll catch Jupiter, Venus, and maybe the crescent Moon.
A ride-em Iron Trilobyte! Yee-hah!
From the Utterly Obscure But Brilliant Music Department: Hunt down “The Last Farewell” by the New Christy Minstrels, from their ambum Ramblin’ (1964.) Bone-chilling harmony on the ancient melody “O Waly, Waly.”
From the Found Quotes Department: “It is all but impossible to sit quietly by while someone is throwing salad plates.” –James Thurber

Odd Lots

Jul 8th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I hit a milestone the other day: 40,000 words on Ten Gentle Opportunities, which is at least halfway there and maybe (if I’m willing to settle for a 75,000 word story) more than halfway.
One of my readers sent a link to a page describing how to install the Insight debugger under Linux Mint. As my ASM freak friends will recall, I no sooner described Insight in Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition than Debian pulled it out of their distribution. Supposedly this method will also work for newer versions of Ubuntu. I need to test the repository under both distros, and will report when I do.
There’s a new nova in Sagittarius. (Is that redundant?) Mag 7.8–which is easy to see with binoculars, if you can separate it from the stellar mosh pit in which it appeared. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
Michael Covington sent a Google Ngram for the words “whosever” and “whoever’s” indicating that “whosever” has been on the run for a couple of centuries. It became the minority player about 1920 and has been down in the mud since about 1960.
Ok, I agree: This is the most brilliant kitchen gadget since the salad spinner. Or before.
I used to do this a lot, though I haven’t done it since 1977: pull the guts out of a photocopier. This guy’s blog, by the way, is news to me but should be on every techie’s blogroll. (Thanks to Jack Smith K8ZOA for the link.)
Haven’t heard much about software radio recently. Ars Technica just had a nice overview piece on it. The hardware keeps getting better, but all the promised weirdness (including new types of pirate radio) hasn’t happened yet. My theory: Wi-Fi is just a better weirdness magnet.
Foxconn is releasing a fanless nano-PC toward the end of summer, and I like the looks of it, at least if it’s got something better than an Atom in it. Roughly 7.5″ X 5.25″ X 1.5″. No optical drive. 5-in-1 card reader on the front panel. Under $300.
Talk about nutty brilliance for film promotion: RC drones in the shape of superhero-style flying people to hype the film Chronicle, which is evidently about…flying people. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
To inflate a Buckyball, just use a laser.
This sweet merlot (scroll down) was lots better than I thought it would be, especially for a hot summer evening’s barbecue. May be hard to find outside Colorado. No least hint of concord grape, for you mutant-blueberry purists. About $15.
Yet another sign that we may be winning the Fat Wars: Fat-free dressing is bad for you.
Still yet another sign may be that the grocery store near our condo outside Chicago carries a sort of spreadable lard called “smalec.” This is the best-kept secret in the food world; it took me ten minutes to even find a picture of it. It was brought here by Polish immigrants and is no less healthy than butter, though I have no clue as to its taste.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, well, the latest home hazard is swallowing loose bristles from your grill brush. My brush is at least five years old and failing. Looking for another technique. (Again, thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.)
This sure sounds like a hoax, but there could be a zombie apocalypse theme park in Detroit’s future. The concept suggests that time’s about up for the zombie craze, so I’d better get my novel (which contains dancing zombies) shambling on to completion before the whole thing caves in.

Antistatic SATA Drive Boxes

Jun 30th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Well, one out of two ain’t bad: I didn’t get a headcold on our trip back from Chicago, but I did pick up an eye infection. (Carol got it too; such things are highly communicable. As the old Brel/Shuman song goes, “We will kiss with our eyes…”) I’m not going to be doing much reading or computing today (nor perhaps tomorrow) but the antibiotics we got at urgent care are on the job and I hope to return to ordinary life on Monday. One quick entry in the meantime and I’m going to go put a cold rag on my face again.

In the huge bin of held mail we picked up today was a box containing something I ordered before we left: A trio of antistatic plastic boxes sized precisely to hold a 3.5″ SATA hard drive. The idea is to use the SATA slots on the top of my new tower case quad core to handle backup. Take a drive out of its box, drop it in the slot on top of the case, do backups, then yank it and put it back in its box. SATA is faster than USB, and the SATA electrical interface is hot-swappable. It’s a natural.

The fit is just snug enough so that the drive will not spill out of the box accidentally while I’m handling it. There is a little block of conductive foam on the lid to keep the drive from rattling around when the lid is closed. The latch is firm but doesn’t take a pliers to open. (Ok, I do have strong thumbs.) I bought three boxes in three colors for $9.24, from Amazon. It’s interesting to me that although the three boxes appear to be physically identical, the three colors are sold at different prices–even when they come from the same dealer. The boxes looked like they might have held a MM paperback, but not quite. I’m sure I’ll find other uses for them as time goes on; I’m good that way.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Thermaltake V9 SATA Toaster Case

May 30th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

7 comments

V9 Case Top Dock.jpg

After I fried my 2009-era Antec quad core tower machine, I had my favorite local box shop put me together a new quad core, this time in an interesting case: the Thermaltake V9 BlacX. Like virtually all cases you buy on the parts market these days, it’s a gamer case, complete with lots of fans and the obligatory plexi window on the side so (I presume) your friends can admire your junk. The fans are there to cool ranks of screaming graphics cards. If you’re using integrated graphics, as I am, you can probably turn most of them off. With just the front panel fan going, the inside of the case here runs at 75-77 degrees F (I measured it with a Radio Shack probe digital thermometer) which is hardly molten death.

I bought the V9 for a very particular reason: It has a double SATA toaster dock built right into the top panel. I’ve been using an Ineo USB toaster dock for some time, and like it a great deal. As with any gadget of its class, it needs its own wall wart, and there’s the inevitable data cable. The notion of having a toaster dock like that right on the machine means that I can lose a wall wart and a data cable from the ratsnest. The V9 case provides two.

The Gigabyte mobo I’m using has six SATA ports. Four of them are SATA 2.0 ports, capable of data transfer rates up to 3 Gbps, and two are SATA 3.0 ports, which can go as fast as 6 Gbps. (The choke point is most likely the drives you’re using, not the ports themselves.) The two 6 Gbs ports go to the internal drives. Two of the 3 Gbps ports go to the twin toaster docks on the top panel. Another 3 Gbps port goes to the optical drive. That still leaves me with a spare SATA 2.0 port, and the V9 even leaves me an empty bay in the front panel if I ever want to put a second sled slot in it.

Each of the two docks are almost identical to the Ineo dock, in that they can accept either 2.5″ SATA laptop drives or standard 3.5″ SATA drives. The dock ports do not use USB connectivity, as I initially suspected. There is no electrical or logical difference between drives plugged into the top dock ports and drives mounted internally and connected to SATA ports of similar speed.

SATA drives are hot-swappable, which means that yanking them out of a SATA connector with power on will not physically damage them. However, the OS needs to manage removability, and I haven’t poked at that aspect yet. From what I’ve read, there is a TreatAsInternalPort registry key governing whether a given SATA channel is removable or not. I believe that making a SATA port removable cuts down its throughput some. (Further research may be needed.) For the moment I’m happy to plug drives into the dock while powered down. When XP boots up, it sees them as though they were internal drives, which (electrically) they are. I’ll play around with the removability bit as time allows.

The case is too new to judge, really. I have a quiet Antec power supply in it, and the front fan makes barely a whisper. It has all the external ports I need. Key here isn’t functionality so much as survival in daily use. The Antec 900’s USB ports started to die after only a year or so in service. Check with me again after the V9 has lived for three or four years in my new downstairs office with the Wimhurst carpeting. USB ports may be the least of my worries.

So far: highly recommended.

Odd Lots

May 22nd, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

In the wake of the recent eclipse, the best photo I’ve seen: One ring to woo them all!
Although we missed seeing the thin crescent Venus on Sunday night, I saw it again last night (Monday) and through a 12mm Plossl it was spectacular. Probably the thinnest crescent I’ve seen in 25 years. You can discern the “horns” of the crescent easily in good binoculars. It’s quite close to the Sun now and getting closer all the time, but if you can catch it immediately after sunset you’ll have a good chance for the next several days.
And if you’re into crescents (I have a drawer full; whoops, wrong category) tonight just after sunset you’ll be able to see a very thin crescent moon right beside that very thin crescent Venus. Go get some lemon crescent cookies from Maggiano’s, pour some iced tea, and watch the crescents set in the west. Life is good.
Time to admit it: I pulled the trigger (finally) and bought an ASUS Transformer Prime TF201 tablet, plus its brilliant keyboard/battery/port extender/charging dock. I’m still studying it and testing it, and will report in detail later on.
Cell phones are not the same UI challenge as tablets, and there’s a site listing tablet-friendly apps for Android. I’ve been cruising it a lot the last few days. Some good stuff in there.
TV numbers are imploding across the board. The NYT is muttering something about “nonlinear viewing,” but I think NPR has it right: People are getting wise to the fact that they’re paying $150 a month for overripe weasel manure. What all those people are doing instead is obscure. Dare we hope…books?
Maker Jeri Ellsworth rocks. And what makes her rock is the wonderful gizmo she rocks on.
As this article suggests, I had forgotten about ReRAM, thinking it was yet another oddity that would never escape the labs into real products. I guess being 10,000 times faster than Flash memory got somebody’s attention, along with the fact that CPUs based on the technology are possible, if still perhaps a ways off.
Why are so many of the world’s collection of leaning towers in Italy?
Here’s a good illustration of why I rarely take “medical studies” seriously anymore.
Everything else has been built out of Lego. Why not the Nine Circles of Hell? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)

Odd Lots

May 16th, 2012

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Don’t forget the annular solar eclipse that will touch the Southwestern US this Sunday, May 20.
From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Ignorosphere, the region from about 120,000 feet altitude to the lowest stable orbit. (It’s a flip term for the mesosphere.) It’s too high for winged aircraft or balloons, and not empty enough for orbiting spacecraft. Sampling it is difficult (one-shot sounding rockets are all we have in terms of tools) and we know less about it than any other region of near space.
After a long conversation on the subject with mobile developer David Beers the other day, I stumbled on an article that drives home the problematic nature of Android app development: There are actually four thousand different Androids. (Maybe more.)
I’m seeing more and more videos in, um, bad taste being posted to my friends’ Facebook feeds by something called Socialcam. The suggestion is that those who post have actually viewed the videos, but that’s not true. Socialcam reserves the right to post stuff to your Facebook feed that you have not viewed and have no knowledge of. Tear that damned thing out by the roots.
This certainly makes me wish that I liked corn more than I do.
An interesting study here adds fuel to the fire over suggestions that keeping a consistent sleep schedule helps you lose weight. I.e., don’t try to “make up” lost sleep on the weekends. Doesn’t work. I’ve been saying this for years, based on a lecture series I took at the Mayo Clinic: Getting five hours of sleep a night will make you fat and kill you before your time. People get angry at me for suggesting that they be in bed, lights-out, between 9:30 and 10 PM if they have to get up at six to get to school or work, but that’s probably what it takes. A handful of people may be able to get by on five or six hours a night. The usual human-traits bell curve suggests that you are almost certainly not one of them.
If you remember a speculation I made some time back about dogs and human origins, well here’s another: That dogs helped us drive the Neanderthals to extinction. I’m dubious. My sense is that their lack of dogs allowed the Neanderthals to drive themselves to extinction via dawn raids. Dogs made dawn raids difficult, and so we failed to wipe our own species out. (I haven’t seen any evidence yet that Neanderthals kept dogs, but of course I’m still looking.)
If you don’t know what a “zoetrope” is, go look it up before you behold the pizzoetrope, which is essentially an edible animation created by spinning a pizza. Sounds loopy (as it were) but it works.