{"id":2196,"date":"2011-11-24T07:53:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-24T14:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2196"},"modified":"2011-11-24T08:14:36","modified_gmt":"2011-11-24T15:14:36","slug":"odd-lots-174","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2196","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it&#8211;and to those who don&#8217;t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I&#8217;ll simply offer <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=117\" target=\"_blank\">the one I wrote in 2008<\/a>. I may not ever do better than that.<\/li>\n<li>From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Seedbox\" target=\"_blank\">seedbox<\/a><\/em>, a remote and generally headless system on a high-bandwidth Internet connection, used exclusively to seed torrents in defiance of ISP speed-throttling of BitTorrent users.<\/li>\n<li>Also pertinent to yesterday&#8217;s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender&#8217;s remorse, and <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2011\/11\/22\/penguin-fights-amazon-by-cutti.html\" target=\"_blank\">basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon&#8217;s Kindle lending program<\/a>. Apparently the DRM wasn&#8217;t DRM-y enough, and Penguin (through the Overdrive technology) locked its titles out. Precisely what the technical issues are is still unclear, but I&#8217;m researching it.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2011\/nov\/23\/anne-mccaffrey-pern-dies-85?newsfeed=true\" target=\"_blank\">We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85<\/a>. She died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on November 21. She was the first woman to earn a Hugo or a Nebula award, and did a great deal to drag SF out of the locker room to which the pulps had led it.<\/li>\n<li>Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2011\/11\/16\/sparkfuns-electric-sheep-for-the-android-obsessed-tinkerer-in-you\/\" target=\"_blank\">Electric Sheep<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/debsnews.com\/wine\" target=\"_blank\">Debsnews now has a wine channel<\/a>. It&#8217;s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: <a href=\"http:\/\/debsnews.com\/wine\/H5Uyykx9e4wdLiLI\" target=\"_blank\">WalMart&#8217;s new $3 wine line<\/a>) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.<\/li>\n<li>Anybody who&#8217;s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5861661\/baggy-rack-means-the-end-of-spilt-salsa\" target=\"_blank\">this gadget<\/a>. Everybody else, move along.<\/li>\n<li>Many people are sending me links to stories about <a href=\"http:\/\/latimesblogs.latimes.com\/money_co\/2011\/11\/new-study-found-bpa-in-popular-canned-food-products.html\" target=\"_blank\">canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.consumerreports.org\/cro\/magazine-archive\/december-2009\/food\/bpa\/overview\/bisphenol-a-ov.htm\" target=\"_blank\">This is not new news<\/a>. However, I didn&#8217;t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe the new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/SPAM-Single-Classic-3-Ounce-Pouches\/dp\/B000FIZW00\/\" target=\"_blank\">Spam Singles packaging<\/a> is the answer. No can!<\/li>\n<li>Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.offbeatearth.com\/fried-chicken-in-space\/\" target=\"_blank\">You can now see him from space<\/a>. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/story\/0,2933,229308,00.html\" target=\"_blank\">It&#8217;s been there since 2006<\/a>, and consists of 87,000 colored tile &#8220;pixels.&#8221; (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/archive\/2011\/11\/gift-singularity-steam-powered-boilerbot.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Make<\/em> describes a steam-powered bristlebot<\/a>. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.<\/li>\n<li>There may be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/health\/article-2064703\/Daily-stress-leading-rise-sleep-texting-expert-claims.html\" target=\"_blank\">another reason<\/a> (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone&#8217;s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cartalk.com\/content\/staff-credits\" target=\"_blank\">the staff credits page<\/a>, you&#8217;re missing out on people you haven&#8217;t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it&#8211;and to those who don&#8217;t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I&#8217;ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that. From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[71,37,39,43,108,18,13],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-eulogies","tag-food","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-piracy","tag-sf","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2204,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions\/2204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}