{"id":3665,"date":"2016-03-15T16:32:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T22:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3665"},"modified":"2016-03-15T16:36:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T22:36:36","slug":"odd-lots-293","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3665","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src= \"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/SP4_Mug_500_Wide.jpg\" alt=\"SP4 Mug 500 Wide.jpg\" height=\"507\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Lee &#8220;ArtRaccoon&#8221; Madison has posted <a href= \"http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/artraccoonsstudioshop\/13354730\" target= \"_blank\">a new page on Cafe Press with all kinds of Sad Puppies 4 swag<\/a>, featuring Isaac, Ray, Frank, and robot puppy Robert. Shown above is the 15 oz. coffee mug. Mugs also come in 12 and 20 oz. sizes.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re not familiar with Sad Puppies 4, <a href= \"http:\/\/sadpuppies4.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s the main site<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>And if you missed my summary of the Sad Puppies phenomenon last year, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3432\" target= \"_blank\">take a look<\/a>. It&#8217;s part of an ongoing series that began <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3361\" target= \"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Rick Hellewell informed me that <a href= \"https:\/\/www.pine64.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">the $15 Pine64 single-board computer<\/a> is shipping and <a href= \"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/3044166\/hardware\/the-15-pine-64-a-raspberry-pi-3-competitor-finally-ships.html\" target=\"_blank\">getting some attention<\/a>. It sports a 1.2 Ghz quad-core ARM A53 as part of <a href= \"http:\/\/www.allwinnertech.com\/plus\/view.php?aid=527\" target= \"_blank\">the Allwinner A64 SoC<\/a>, plus a 500 MHz <a href= \"http:\/\/www.arm.com\/products\/multimedia\/mali-gpu\/ultra-low-power\/mali-400.php\" target=\"_blank\">Mali-400 GPU<\/a> that can do 4K video. The $15 version has 512MB of RAM; the $19 version has 1 GB, and the $29 version has 2 GB RAM. The $15 version is shipping (though, as I expected, it&#8217;s out of stock) and the two more powerful boards should be shipping by May.<\/li>\n<li>Indie authors take note: <a href= \"https:\/\/davidgaughran.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/11\/amazon-takes-aim-at-scammers-but-hits-authors\/\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon has begun pulling Kindle ebooks that have the TOC at the end of the book<\/a>, and demanding that it be placed up front. Authors have been putting the TOC in the back recently so that there is more &#8220;real&#8221; content in the 10% preview, but, alas, scammers are also putting TOCs in the back to game KU by encouraging readers to immediately click to the end of the book to see what&#8217;s in it. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.walterjonwilliams.net\/2016\/03\/amazon-may-they-choke-on-my-vomit\/\" target=\"_blank\">Walter Jon Williams got stung<\/a>, as I assume were many others.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Duntemann-quote-shirts-improves-black\/dp\/B0154SKW1E\" target=\"_blank\">Some T-shirt firm on Amazon has begun selling T-shirts with my most famous quote on it<\/a>: &#8220;A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you <em>think<\/em>.&#8221; Alas, they didn&#8217;t cite me by name, and the underscore between the two sentences suggests it&#8217;s some sort of data-driven product bot.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve always been in the &#8220;rare Earth&#8221; camp, and intuit that Earthlike planets are rare. (<a href= \"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe\/dp\/0387952896\/\" target=\"_blank\">There&#8217;s a book about this<\/a>.) I&#8217;m not sure I ever imagined them <a href= \"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/d-brief\/2016\/02\/22\/earth-is-a-1-in-700-quintillion-kind-of-place\/\" target=\"_blank\">as quite <em>this<\/em> rare<\/a>, though.<\/li>\n<li>Not all cheap ham radio transceivers come from Baofeng. (See <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3353\" target= \"_blank\">my entry for February 14, 2015<\/a>.) <a href= \"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/LEIXEN-VV-898-136-174-400-470MHz-Transceiver\/dp\/B00LS8AJRW\/\" target=\"_blank\">I stumbled on a dual-band $69 mobile rig from Leixen that has promise<\/a>, and can be programmed with <a href= \"http:\/\/chirp.danplanet.com\/projects\/chirp\/wiki\/Home\" target= \"_blank\">CHIRP<\/a>. What I&#8217;d really like (but don&#8217;t seriously expect to find) is a small, cheap rig that includes 50-54 MHz.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/sploid.gizmodo.com\/how-far-back-in-time-could-you-travel-and-still-underst-1764826914\" target=\"_blank\">How far back could you travel in time and still understand English?<\/a> I would do better on Middle English than most, but on Old English I would be almost completely hopeless.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/flashbak.com\/the-modernist-1969-palm-springs-dream-home-where-time-stood-still-56154\/\" target=\"_blank\">You can have the ugliest house in America<\/a> (practice your un-seeing exercises, folks!) for the trifling price of $850,000. Carol and I would set it up as a sort of culturally or decoratively haunted B&amp;B, and make a fortune from people daring one another to spend a night in it.<\/li>\n<li>This is by no means news, but I&#8217;m amazed how many people are unaware of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dslreports.com\/speedtest\" target= \"_blank\">my favorite broadband speed tester<\/a>. Make sure you test it using a browser with only one tab open, and ideally shut down any other machines on the same broadband line.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/trending\/2016\/02\/18\/fda-your-parmesan-cheese-might-be-wood-pulp\/\" target=\"_blank\">A portion of the cheese you put in your omelette may be wood pulp<\/a>, which is used as an anticaking agent in packaged shredded cheese. I started reading labels closely, and discovered <a href= \"http:\/\/www.shopwell.com\/kroger-finely-shredded-cheese-all-natural-parmesan\/cheese-shredded\/p\/1111058381\" target=\"_blank\">a house brand of shredded Parmesan at the local Kroger chain, Fry&#8217;s<\/a>, that doesn&#8217;t contain wood pulp. It does, however, contain calcium sulfate. Is that a win? I&#8217;m sure I don&#8217;t know. After all, sodium ferrocyanide is used as an <a href= \"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anticaking_agent\" target= \"_blank\">anticaking agent<\/a>, as is a lot of other scary sounding stuff.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lee &#8220;ArtRaccoon&#8221; Madison has posted a new page on Cafe Press with all kinds of Sad Puppies 4 swag, featuring Isaac, Ray, Frank, and robot puppy Robert. Shown above is the 15 oz. coffee mug. Mugs also come in 12 and 20 oz. sizes. If you&#8217;re not familiar with Sad Puppies 4, here&#8217;s the main [&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":[15,141,14],"class_list":["post-3665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-sad-puppies","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665","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=3665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3666,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3665\/revisions\/3666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}