Odd Lots

Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items

Odd Lots

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Ars has the best article I’ve yet seen on the recent ruling in the Apple ebook price fixing trial. Insight: Publishers get less under agency than they do under wholesale, but they’re willing to accept it to keep control of pricing. Book publishing is a freaky business. This may not work out as planned for the publishers.
Also from Ars: Weird search terms that brought readers to the Ars site. I used to publish these too, but I don’t get as many as I once did. Web search has always been a freaky business. I guess the freakiness just wanders around.
The sunspot cycle still struggles. Cycle 24 will be freaky, and weak–even with our modern tendency to count spots that could not be detected a hundred years ago.
Not news, but still freaky if you think about it: The Air Force tried building a flying saucer in 1956. The aliens are still laughing at us.
Actually, the best flying saucers are all triangles. In the greater UFO freakshow, these are by far my favorites.
There’s a quirk in the insurance industry that will allow young people to opt out of the ACA and still get health insurance–while paying much less they would buying traditional health policies under ACA. Life insurance policies often allow for accelerated payouts of benefits while the insured is still alive. My insight: Such a policy would be a way to finesse limited enrollment windows by paying for catastrophic care until enrollment opens again. (Which would be no more than ten months max.) And you thought publishing was a freaky business.
We thought we knew how muscles work. We were wrong. Human biology is always freakier than we thought.
As is washing your hair–in space.
Streaming is the ultimate end of the DRM debate. Music, movies, sure. Could one stream an ebook? Of course. Would people accept such a system, or would they freak out? Well, we thought DRM for serial content was dead, too. (Book publishers have become much more aggressive against piracy lately. More tomorrow.)
And finally, if you want freaky, consider the humble cicada killer, which vomits on its own head to keep from frying in the summer. We had them living under our driveway in Baltimore. I didn’t know what they were and they scared us a little until I called the county ag agent, who said, “They’re cicada killers, but don’t worry. They’re harmless.” I immediately called Carol at work to give her the good news. The receptionist at the clinic wrote down: “Jeff called. The things living under your driveway are psychotic killers, but don’t worry. They’re harmless.”

Odd Lots

Jun 17th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

10 comments

Wow. Dig with a backhoe, and then spray a target with a machine gun. Only $384. Writers should get out and do all kinds of things that aren’t part of everyday life for writers. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas, but I could see myself doing this.
Ok, this is clever. Forgive me if I don’t believe it will work.
Here’s a service that the world needs, but I don’t give it even a year, especially now that Wired has launched it into high visibility. Big Print doesn’t want us too comfortable with the notion of scanning books we own to ebooks.
Here may be one reason why: A consortium of tech book publishers is going after two anonymous Usenet posters who have posted literally hundreds of thousands of books (including several of mine) on alt.binaries.e-book.technical, not once but many times over the past several years. I’ve monitored that group since 2008 or so. It’s astonishing.
Yes, I’m a crank. I hope to be a crank who lasts awhile. Shorting sleep will kill you. There are some excuses (small children at home being the biggie) but I also wonder if college life makes us night people. Most of the morning people I know (Carol and myself included) lived at home during college. (Thanks to Alan Zeichick for the link.)
And though I’m not a necromancer, I know that you’re bound to answer when I propose: Everything’s SCO’s!
Baby armadillos are cute, but I’m not sure I’d hold one, because they can carry leprosy. (Ok, ok…just wash your hands afterwards!)
After all, armadillos are all that’s left of my favorite Pleistocene megacritter, the glyptodont. (Pssst: Mister pinch-hitter, that’s not a good stance to take!)
Paywalled, but read it if you’re a subscriber: Ford is putting buttons back on their dashboard. I’m having some reliability problems with my new knob-less car stereo, and if I return it I may insist on something with a volume control knob at very least. They exist.
And they exist in half-height too. Now I’m wondering if I can get a 2M/440 mobile rig that will fit in the other half of the bay…
I had one of these once. I was called a “young punk” on occasion, by those who had reason to think it was true. So I was a steampunk long before it was cool.
I was a little early for the Lego phenom, and was quite happy to be a Meccano kid. Here’s a great overview site for all the metal constructions sets I’ve ever heard of. (Except for Buildo, which was obscure even in 1960.)
That said, don’t tell Certain Small Girls, but one of these may be under A Certain Christmas Tree this year.
Colorado and Washington State will make this at least possible. But…but…what if your dog is under 21?

Odd Lots

Jun 9th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Well. Amazon (finally) pulled my name off Garth Williams’ book Baby Farm Animals. Years of polite complaints didn’t do it. Making fun of them in the comments did. Thanks to my friends Eric, Steve, and Dave for working the magic. Poor Garth can rest in peace now without having to learn x86 assembly language.
Erik Klemetti has a good overview of the 1783-84 Laki eruption in Iceland, which caused a sulfuric haze that Benjamin Franklin said reduced the intensity of the sunlight so much that a magnifying glass could not concentrate it sufficiently to ignite paper.
Here’s a good if technical discussion about what’s wrong with X and why Wayland almost can’t help but be better.
Yet another force pushing print magazines into the torn-off-cover return racks of history: People are checking Facebook on their smartphones while waiting their turn in supermarket checkout lines. Good-bye to starting a story in People and then tossing the mag in the cart to finish at home.
I don’t always agree with Stallman. But this time I sure as hell do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Bruce Eckel pokes holes in a couple of recent SF films. I hate to think of what he might have said about Independence Day. (Thanks to Jason Bucata for the link.)
I’m not sure that Beowulfing boxfuls of Raspberry Pi boards makes sense, but it can be done.
As can using a Raspberry Pi to take video through a telescope.
There will be another perigee moon on June 23. It’s not especially close as such things go; for a really close perigee moon, consider January 14, 1930, when our lesser light was only 356,397 km away. It won’t be that close again until 2257. Nice page on the topic here.
And the sunspot count of our greater light was down to 27 this morning. This sure doesn’t look like a sunspot maximum to me.
Tor has been publishing DRM-free ebooks for a year now, and reports that piracy has not increased as a result. They’re mostly mum on how they measure piracy rates, but it’s encouraging that a major print player would even do the experiment.
Nice reminder that nobody died at Fukushima, and according to the UN it’s unlikely that many will even get sick. Nuclear is not the demon that Certain Parties insist it is.

Odd Lots

May 30th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

IDC says that desktop PC sales will drop by 7.6% in 2013. This may well be due to what I call the Silverware Effect: PCs are pretty damned good, aren’t getting better very quickly, and people are keeping them way longer than they used to. Good ones can be had dirt-cheap. (And the dirt-cheap ones don’t have Windows 8 sticking to their boots!) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
And a leaked screen shot seems to indicate that Microsoft heeded the technopeasants with torches and pitchforks: With Windows 8.1, the Start button is back!
A day later, Ars published a much more detailed look at Windows 8.1.
While some people still struggle to get their Raspberry Pi keyboards to stop stuttering, other people are writing brand-new operating systems for it. I know one of those guys, and if he wants to announce here, I’ll applaud!
The Siberian Times reports that a frozen mammoth carcass yielded a surprise: Blood. The other surprise in this story is that there’s an English-language publication called the Siberian Times.
A third surprise was how much cool stuff is published in the Siberian Times.
That all the commenters in the Siberian Times appear to be Americans somehow comes as no surprise.
In 2008, NOAA predicted that the Cycle 24 sunpost maximum would take place in May 2013. A quick look at my watch suggests that it’s over. So does a quick look at the sunspot graphs. After the second hump, it’s all over but the plunging.
As much as people scream when anyone says so, talent trumps practice. 10,000 hours will make you better if you have talent, but it won’t make you better without the natural gifts to excel in your chosen field. Choose the wrong field, and all the practice you might attempt won’t make you great.
Moore’s Law seems to be stalling, on NAND flash memory, at least.
Twenty home technologies that were way ahead of their time. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
The husband of a local rising star in bichon grooming is a comics artist. And he is beyond amazing.
One of the few things I miss about California is the Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale. Ars has a photo tour that makes it look precisely the way I remember it looking in 1989. (I guess that makes it a “comfort junk shop.”)
I haven’t laughed out lout at PVP in a long time, but today’s strip did it.
Physicists have created quantum entanglement between two photons that don’t exist at the same time. If my head didn’t hurt before, it hurts now. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
We thought we knew what organism caused the mid-19th century potato famine in Ireland, but we were wrong.

Odd Lots

May 25th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Yes, I’ve been away from Contra for longer than I’d like, and the Odd Lots have been piling up. Some of that away was necessary for my sanity, and was spent by the pool at a resort in Phoenix, where Carol and I discussed things like the wonder of a single-celled organism that is 10 cm long. The secret appears to be evolving superior organelles. Bandersnatchi, anyone?
While I was gone, someone released a new OS for the Raspberry Pi: The Pidora Remix. It’s basically Fedora for the Pi. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll flip another SD card out of the drawer soonest and burn an image. Man, you have to run like hell just to stay in one place in this business.
The Raspberry Pi’s main competition, the BeagleBone, now has a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 version that ships with a Linux 3.8 kernel. BeagleBone Black supports the Linux Device Tree, which does a lot to decouple hardware details from the kernel. Looks terrific–now all it needs is an installed base.
I noticed a system resource draw-down when I had iTunes installed on my old and now electrocuted quadcore. The software took a lot of cycles and memory, even when it didn’t appear to be doing anything. The discussion has come up on Slashdot. (The poster also mentioned Rainmeter, which I tried once and found…ok.) I try to run a lean system here, and I frown on things that want services, tray icons, and 15% of my cycles all the damned time. (The Dell Dock does precisely that. For showing a row of icons. Sheesh.)
Amazon is setting up a new markeplace for short fiction, with a twist: It offers to share revenues on fan fiction with the authors of the original items. It’s unclear how many authors will accept that, but I would, like a shot. (I guess all I’d need are some fans.) In truth, Jim Strickland and I talked in detail some years back about opening up the Drumlins World to all authors who’d care to tell a story there, without even asking for money.
Clinical depression may be linked to sleep cycles, which appear to have a genetic basis. How to fix this is unclear, but I’ll testify that depression in the wake of losing Coriolis laid waste to my sleep habits for a couple of years. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
The Man Who Ploughed the Sea may soon be mining it…for uranium. I’d cut to the chase and just mine it for gold, so I can buy more ytterbium for my Hilbert Drive. Alas, there’s less gold in the oceans than we thought (1 part per trillion) and not much more ytterbium (1.5 parts per trillion) so maybe I should just extract the uranium (3 parts per billion) and make yellow pigments to sell on Etsy.
I’m not sure I buy this, but it’s an interesting speculation: That the Younger Dryas cold snap was triggered by a smallish asteroid that crashed…in Lake Michigan. Click through for the maps if nothing else. My favorite Great Lake is deeper and more complex than I thought.
Save the apostrophe’s! (From a fate worse than dearth…)
And save us, furthermore, from new Microsoft technology that counts people in the room watching your TV. Because having more than one person watching a TV show or movie rental is…is…stealing!
3-D printing is still in the stone age (and the Old Stone Age at that) but if we don’t allow berserk patent law to strangle the kid in its crib, wonderful things will happen once 3-D printers are no longer CNC glue guns. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
I’m starting to think that 3-D printers like that will soon make one-off repro of small plastic parts like the ones at the center of kites practical. I guess the challenge is somehow getting the precise shape of the part into a file. If I weren’t trying so hard to be a novelist I would probably have a 3-D printer already. For the moment I’m glad I didn’t jump as soon as I otherwise might have.
Speaking of CNC…and guns: Plastic guns are dumb, dangerous, ineffective, and basically a stunt that seems designed (probably in Autocad) to make politicians say stupid things and make enemies. The real issue is cheap, portable CNC machines capable of cutting metal. That horse is out of the barn and beyond the horizon.

Odd Lots

May 12th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I don’t think I’ve announced it broadly yet, but I am now agented, for both fiction and nonfiction. Either is a first for me, and it may make any number of things better on the writing side.
This isn’t glaciation, obviously, but having been researching the coming Ice Age for a year or so now in the service of a Neanderthals novel, I was riveted: A calf-deep wave of ice fragments advances across the land like a cross between Jack Frost and The Blob.
One way to solve the Raspberry Pi stuttering keyboard problem is to use a wireless keyboard/mouse set. The one I have (the Logitech MK520) works beautifully. Stutter gone. (The high road, of course, is to power everything, including the RPi itself, from a wireless hub.)
Microsoft has offered B&N $1B for the entire Nook business, including the readers and all facets of the B&N store. This says a lot less about Microsoft than it says about B&N–none of it good.
Here’s an inside look at a dedicated bitcoin mining machine. Now, could the same box mount a brute force attack against password hashes?
A bunch of do-it-yourself Muppets present ten reasons why time travel is no good.
I’ve discovered a spectacular new cheese: Uniekaas Black Label 3-year-old gouda. (Scroll down.) Bears about as much resemblance to the gouda I knew as a Porsche does to a Trabant. Pair it with any dry red; I’ve had it with Middle Sister Rebel Red and Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel. Actually, it pairs well with Real Sangria. Or, for that matter, whole milk. Sheesh, even dead air. We get it at Whole Foods. Try it.
Still another voice calling for an end to team sports in schools. Team sports are how we teach high schoolers that alpha males can do whatever they want to the people below them on their ill-begotten ladders.
Want another reason? The most highly paid state employees in nearly all states are…college sports coaches. And we all know how “college” college sports are.
Watch out, Colorado. Here come the pot machines.

Odd Lots

May 4th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

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.

Odd Lots

Apr 30th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

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.

Odd Lots

Apr 24th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Yes, I am now writing a Raspberry Pi programming book. Details to come.
While I do, I’ll be scoping out my next novel. Hard SF, oboy yes. One possibility is something I call Fire Drill, about what happens when you’re mining the moon for nickel-iron and you hit gold. The other, hmmm, let me give you a hint: “Well, hello, Mr. Sangruse! How nice of you to drop in. Please stay awhile. My name is Oscar, and I am a…beautiful…thing.”
This is why I am very careful about “liking” things on Facebook, particularly memes and idiotic quizzes like “What word for ‘moron’ has two ‘o’s?” It’s all about helping somebody else make money. No thanks. (But yes thanks to Marty Coady for the link.)
And here’s another item about “like farming.” If I don’t share that photo you’ve posted, it’s not just because I think that Facebook memes make you look like an idiot. (Most of them do.) It’s because you’ve basically sold yourself to someone you don’t even know. (Thanks to Julian Bucknall for the link.)
From the Governments-Are-Idiots-Squared Department: The city of Provo Utah is going to sell its fiber-to-the-home network to Google…except that nobody kept any records of where the fiber is buried.
Cripes, guys. I don’t want to run out of energy, and neither do you. If you’re going to crap on nuclear power, you’re gonna be stuck with hydrocarbons. And they won’t run out anywhere near as soon as you think. Live with it.
From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: churnalism, the practice of publishing press releases verbatim.
Steampunk short ribs, all the way around! (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
From the same site: Like Mr. Bigweld said, see a need, fill a need!
Multiple long-term studies seem to indicate that the way to live a long life is to be conscientious and organized. Well, one of out two ain’t bad.
Southerners may be no fatter than northerners. They just don’t seem as inclined to lie about it.
Some dads build their kids playhouses. Some of these playhouses look like spaceships. Shades of the Silvercup Rocket. The bigger kids dream, the better their smaller dreams will come true. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
Yet another reason that Woodrow Wilson was the most evil president the Republic has ever had.