- Dear Abby: God love ya. Go in peace. –Signed, Appreciative.
- Dear Appreciative: He does. And I did.
- An interesting piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal indicates that magazine publishers are successfully charging much more for their digital editions than their print editions. Lots more–like, twice the price. It may be the upscale “tablet demographic.” We’ll know as tablets work their way down the food chain.
- Many thought that a silent ride would be one of the great advantages of electric vehicles. Alas, no: People want to hear cars coming, so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will eventually force manufacturers to build electronic noise systems into new EVs. The mandated noise makes them sound like internal combustion cars. Better than ice cream trucks, I guess.
- I’ve been testing bottled sangria lately, and after much grueling testing, I declare this one the winner.
- That goofball Kim Dotcom is trying again, and I give him points for balls: He’s opened Mega, a new cloud storage service that might be construed as designed to protect Mega from its customers. As best I can tell, it can work perfectly fine as a file-sharing system, along the same lines as the other bitlockers. It’s distributed, redundant, and entirely outside the United States. An insight: The war on piracy mainly creates better pirates. We’ll see.
- Why do we seem to remember our 20s better than any other period of our lives? First of all, I’m not sure we do. (My clearest memories are of my Coriolis years, from age 37 to age 50.) But if the phenomenon is about the time when we define ourselves, it may simply be that most people define themselves earlier than I did. Or it may all be nonsense.
- Admitting that he used a $5000 metal detector, this guy struck major gold. In eighth grade, I built a $0 metal detector made of parts pried out of dead transistor radios, and my big strike was three chicken bones wrapped in aluminum foil at Illinois Beach State Park. Maybe you really do get what you pay for.
- Of course, if you’re just looking for quarters in the sand, Hammacher Schlemmer’s $60 metal detecting flip-flops may be just the thing. I might have thought of that, but flip-flops barely existed here in 1966.
- Tribal epicosity metafail: Declaring silly little shit an “epic fail” because your tribe disapproves of it.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- From the “…And Then We Win” Department: Lulu is eliminating DRM on ebooks published through the site. (I was notified by email.)
- The Adobe CS2 download link everybody’s talking about (see my entry for January 10, 2013) is still wide-open. If it was indeed a mistake, you’d think they would have fixed it by now. New suggestion: They’re arguing about it. New hope: They’re really going to allow CS2’s general use without charge.
- I didn’t get the art gene from my mother, but I did indeed enjoy the Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. I still have my full drafting set in a drawer somewhere, replete with bow compasses, French curves, triangles, and so on. How many years will it be before nobody under 50 has any idea what those are? (Thanks to Jim Rittenhouse for the link.)
- And while we’re doing peculiar museums, check out this selection of implements from the International Spy Museum. I believe the surplus houses were selling CIA turd transmitters twenty or thirty years ago. Shoulda bought one when I could. As the late, great George M. Ewing would have said: “Forget it, Jeff. Nobody will pick that up.”
- Strange transmitters you want? From Bruce Baker comes a video link that no steampunker will want to miss: The annual fire-up of the only Alexanderson alternator left in the world, station SAQ in Sweden. From the sparks to the swinging meter needles, it’s just like Frankenstein, only it’s real–and sends Morse telegraphy at 100 KHz or so. No vacuum tubes, and I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t have been in operation in 1890.
- Every wonder who was behind Information Unlimited? Here’s the guy.
- Here’s more on how fructose messes with your brain. It’s not just the number of calories. It’s the chemical composition of those calories. Whoever says “a calorie is a calorie” is wrong, and probably has an agenda.
- It’s almost pointless to link to the first video ever made of a giant squid (since we won’t see the whole thing until January 27) but Ars Technica has a background page that’s worth reading. “Hello, beastie!”
- The BMI is worse than worthless. But I told you that years ago.
- Brand fanboys may have low self-esteem. Or they may just be tribalists. Or tribalists may be people with low self-esteem. No matter: Defend no brand but your own. Big Brands can damned well defend themselves.
Odd Lots
- I’ve been playing with the new generation of desktop “all-in-ones” at Best Buy etc. and can’t get my head around the notion of using a touch screen on a desktop–especially a big touch screen. I thought I was just being a grouch, but now I have company.
- This slightly confused piece from the BBC raises a crucial issue–what the whole self-esteem movement is doing to our kids–but appears to confuse “self-esteem” with “confidence.” Confidence means “I am well-calibrated.” Self-esteem means “I don’t need to read the dial.”
- Make is going deep on Raspberry Pi. Check out that repurposed Mac Classic.
- One of my domains got on an RBL the other day. Not sure why; it’s off now. But it’s a good time to remind you of the valli.org RBL checker.
- We’ve experienced a very sudden burst in sunspot formation in recent days, which you can see on this startling photo. When I was projecting the transit of Venus on foamcore this past summer, line of sight to the setting sun passed through the approach to O’Hare Field, and I saw four or five of these much quicker transits. It’s nice to see one captured, for those who didn’t get to see them in realtime.
- And while we’re talking sunspots, here’s a good piece on the technical details of how we count sunspots.
- This past Christmas I had my first sip of Goldschlager in 30+ years. Was stronger than I remember it, or maybe I’m just weaker. Moot point: I’m holding out for Ytterbiumschlager.
- Made me wonder how strong booze has to be to be burnable in an alcohol lamp. When absinthe burns, what happens to the wormwood?
- Carol had heard good things about Shasta sodas, particularly their diet ginger ale. I wasn’t sure where they could be found, but they have a “soda finder” that I wish more independent brands would emulate, particularly Green River.
- That said, you can get diet Green River from Wal-Mart, but you have to order a case. I don’t think it’s in their stores.
- Alas, the wonderful retro soda-maker across the street from my alma mater vanished in 1986 and won’t be found again: The Lasser factory building has been converted to half-million dollar lofts. I do remember having a lime rickey or two while at DePaul. I guess I just like seriously green sodas.
- I think they did this in Colorado last fall.
Odd Lots
- I got FreePascal and Lazarus installed on my Raspberry Pi using apt-get. Instructions here. (It’s trivial.) Alas, it’s not the current release, but a chap has posted notes on how to install Subversion on the Pi and recompile Lazarus from source. One caveat: The Pi has just barely enough memory to pull it off, and then only if X isn’t running.
- One interesting thing that I had not heard about and did not expect is that the Raspberry Pi has its own app store.
- There is a Raspberry Pi magazine, MagPi. It’s a free download (either HTML or PDF) and from the couple of issues I looked at might be worth your time if you’re a Pi guy.
- One interesting part of this Pi project is the 3D-printed case. The other is hot-wiring a SATA SSD into a USB hub for additional storage beyond what you can put on an SD card.
- Speaking of which: SSD prices are starting to go through the floor. I just ordered one and am about to see what it can do on my primary machine.
- Ditto e-readers, apparently: The Kobo Mini is now going for just $50. I’m impressed by the fact that they make no attempt to lock users into their reader. Sideloading can be done via USB link; there’s no card slot. How good their store is I have no idea.
- There seems to be evidence that obesity is influenced by gut bacteria. I would take this article a lot less seriously if if weren’t well-established that bacteria cause stomach ulcers. Obviously, it’s not the whole story, and more research is needed. My conviction that calories don’t count remains intact. It’s the kind of calories that matter, since everything depends on how the body processes them. (There are lots of calories in sawdust. Eat 3000 calories worth of sawdust a day and get fat? Try it and see!)
- Robert Lentz has drawn an icon of Albert Einstein. And Prof. Tolkien. Way cool. Now, can we have Origen too?
- The K-Cup coffee maker patents expired this past September. We have a machine and it’s handy, though my #1 favorite coffee isn’t available in a cup. Expect an explosion in K-Cup options come the new year.
- From the Please-Find-a-Proofreader-Right-Freaking-Now Department.
- Wow. They gave an End of the World, and nobody came!
Odd Lots
- Making you fat and diabetic is the least of it: Sugar (especially fructose) sabotages your brain. If it’s your first favorite organ (as it is for me) put your brain at the top of your personal food chain. Be a caveman: Eat more animal fat and less sugar.
- Eat more fat and less sugar, but do it this way: Trade sugar for sleep. Lack of sleep makes you hungry, and I’m guessing that chronic lack of sleep makes you lots hungrier than you would be if you just admitted that you can’t get by on six hours or possibly even seven. Cavemen slept when it got dark. Dark is your friend. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- While we’re talking Inconvenient Health Truths, consider: The downside of demonizing salt is that people have begun to show symptoms of iodine deficiency. (I myself am…unlikely…to ever have that problem.)
- Instagram walked back from the cliff and withdrew its mind-boggling policies on commercial use of user photos without permission or complication. The Internet firestorm was one reason, I’m sure…but I’m also guessing that someone in their legal department got the message through that the firm would be sued into subatomic particles if it went ahead.
- I wasn’t aware that a sack of potatoes stands in well for a human being in Wi-Fi tests on networking in crowded spaces like aircraft cabins. I do wonder what happened to the potatoes.
- “Thorium” is my answer to the question of how to best reduce CO2 in our atmosphere. We need base load; wind and solar are necessary but not sufficient.
- There are at least five planets orbiting SF favorite Tau Ceti, and one may be in the star’s habitable zone. What the article does not mention is that the habitable planet is considerable closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, and at a distance closer than Venus is probably tidally locked on its star. That’s not a dealbreaker, but tidal locking certainly makes the journey from slime to sublime a lot less likely.
- My ongoing (and slow-going) project of rewriting Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal continues, and there’s a new and expanded PDF up on my FTP site. 9 MB. 180 pages done out of about 350 or 400 planned. Not all 800 pages of the original book will be included, because some of it is now mostly useless, and some will be kicked upstream to a Lazarus book that I’m planning.
- FreePascal contains a clean-room clone of Borland’s TurboVision, which I actually named way back in 1989. (Its original name was TOORTL: Turbo Object-Orietnted Runtime Library.) I’m going to recompile my Mortgage Vision application in FPC with FreeVision and see if it still works. That is, if I can find the source…
- We’re getting our Mayans, Aztecs, and Oreos mixed up. Actually, I read the oreoglyphics on the cookie and it said that the world will end in 1947.
- Furthermore, it’s a lot tougher to dunk a Mesoamerican stone calendar in your coffee.
Odd Lots
- 32 years ago today, Darkel’s Lucky Guess–known to more than a few of you as Mr. Byte–came into our world, and eight weeks later Carol and I took home our very first bichon puppy. Although not show quality, Mr. Byte was a spectacular dog, and even seventeen years after his passing we miss him terribly.
- A study at Michigan State shows a strong correlation between use of multiple forms of media at once–e.g, watching TV while surfing the Web–and depression. We don’t know if multitasking causes depression, or if depressed people multitask to distract themselves, but simply establishing the correlation is a good first step.
- Now this is nothing less than brilliant: an app that examines a design destined for 3D printing and lets you know whether it will print well, or at all. 3D typos cost money, and it’s not always obvious looking at a design where a typo lies, or how serious it might be.
- Oh, and there’s a browser-based CAD system that was created with 3D printing in mind: TinkerCAD. Have not used it and generally don’t like browser-based software (what if I develop skills with it and then it goes away?) but it’s a niche that had to be filled.
- Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has just signed the state constitutional amendment legalizing marijuana. As long as you’re not in a public place, using it is now legal under state law–which is, pardon the expression, mind-blowing.
- Only slightly less mind-blowing was the savaging that Rolling Stone gave Obama for not jerking the leash on the DEA. Wow.
- If the elderly–who have nothing if not life experience–are peculiarly vulnerable to scammers, it may be due to the failing of a region of the brain that acts as a “crook detector.” I agree: smug, smirky mouths are not the signs of integrity. Nor is the desire to run for office.
- Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a search site for locally grown food and farmers’ markets. We buy local when it’s possible (though we don’t make a fetish of it) and things like this can only make it more possible.
- Line up the cover spines on Wired‘s 20th year, and read the secret code.
- Lazarus 1.0.4 is out. It’s a bug-fix release, but bug fixes are good to have. I’ve already been messing with it, and I’m starting to think the product has really quite sincerely arrived. Get it here. Many components and demos available here.
Odd Lots
- Juggling, thing-throwing robots are a major theme of my newly completed novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s a good bet they’ll be deployed in Disney theme parks eventually. I’m not sure why, but I find this very depressing.
- I read this when it first appeared ten years ago and I still think it’s true: DRM does not and cannot do what it’s supposed to do. This from Microsoft, heh. I sure wish they’d quit trying.
- Here’s a good quick survey of Linux window managers, starting out by explaining the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment. (We don’t have this problem in the Windows world.)
- Smilodons and bear dogs somehow managed to coexist. What I don’t understand is how I lived sixty years without ever hearing the term “bear dog.”
- I dunno. This reminds me a little of Cold Fusion: We all want it desperately, but it just seems so damned unlikely. (Thanks nonetheless to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Facebook enforces a sort of least-common-denominator social behavior on people, and is thus stressful. In other words, everybody’s got a hot button, and if you have enough friends people will get pissed at you no matter what you say. The people who don’t care are probably the only ones who should be on Facebook.
- Not space-efficient, but very cool in its way: the Moebius clothes hanger. (Big question: If you buy two will they breed in the closet?)
- This is the heaviest thing that Amazon will ship for free. It weighs a ton. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- If you still have a Commodore 64 (or something like it) try this one-line BASIC program. Amazing.
- Yes, except that if I drink as much as I want, I wouldn’t sleep. (I barely sleep without drinking it at all.)
- Everything you didn’t really want to know about Gangnam Style and didn’t feel like asking. The funniest thing about the video is that it doesn’t go anywhere near the ritzy Gangnam area that it’s named for, though I would expect only Koreans to get that part.
- Oh–and the name of the dance that PSY and his gang are doing is (as best I can tell) “the invisible horse dance.” It’s a natural at weddings. Watch out, chicken dance–your days are numbered.
Odd Lots, Thanksgiving Edition
- Some brilliant if loopy stuff came out of the 70s, and one of the most brilliant is the episode of WKRP in Cinncinnati where they shoved live turkeys out of a helicopter and were surprised when the turkeys soon hit terminal velocity and went splat. (No turkeys were harmed–nor even shown–in that episode.) Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.
- There are in fact turkeys that fly. Carol and I bought a heritage turkey of the sort that can and probably did fly, if not very far nor fast. Although it’s still thawing as I write this, the theory is that the meat will be darker and juicier coming from muscles that are actually used in the bird’s daily life. We’ll know soon.
- I often eat eggs two meals a day, and don’t quail at eating eggs at all three meals. Which made me wonder if you could get turkey eggs somewhere, and what they’re like. They’re a little bigger (about 25%) and considerably pointier–and almost unavailable. Why? They’re lots more valuable as turkeys than as eggs. As so often, Cecil Adams has the last word.
- Leave it to The Wall Street Journal to highlight a conflict I would not have imagined on my own: the issue of putting Marshmallow Fluff in the sweet potatoes. People have evidently come to blows over this.
- I was astonished to learn (from the above article) that Marshmallow Fluff has existed since 1920. I’ve tasted it exactly once (as best I remember) when my poor mother attempted to use it in gingerbread house roof frosting circa 1960. The frosting softened the hard gingerbread slabs and the roof caved in.
- The obvious question to arise after you cease boggling over putting Marshmallow Fluff in the sweet potatoes: Is there a marshmallow-flavored liqueur? Yup. Smirnoff has it. And a bald woman in their product advertising, egad. Like a marshmallow, get it?
- If that doesn’t seem odd, well, consider other weird cordials from around the world, including cannabis liqueur, smoked salmon flavored vodka, and (yukkh!) baby mice wine.
- No, I didn’t find a turkey-flavored liqueur. However–and I am not making this up–Jones Soda sells (among other things, including Green Bean Casserole soda) Turkey & Gravy soda. How does it taste? Do not fail to read the description in the article.
- I failed to find turkey-flavored vodka, but I did run across a recipe for 100-proof vodka-flavored turkey. Hic.
- We’re long past Marshmallow Peeps season, but here’s an entrepreneurial idea: sell pre-staled Peeps. It takes a year or so to get them stale enough to pass muster with aficionados, but I have it on good authority that they don’t get moldy. Don’t ask why; you don’t want to know. Twinkies were not outliers in this regard.
- As for Thanksgiving itself, the holiday and the state of mind, I will simply refer you to what I said in 2008. It’s all still true–and since then Jackie has lost a good deal of weight and become ours. Be thankful. Live mindfully. Appreciate those you love and who love you. And thanks to everybody who takes a detour out of their busy online lives to read me here!
Odd Lots
- From the Some-Things-Just-Sound-Right Department: “Glitzenstein” is German for “rhinestone.” It suggests an ironic horror novel in which a mad plastic surgeon stitches together an unreasonable facimile of Liberace from pieces of washed-up Vegas lounge singers.
- From the Words-I-Never-Heard-Before-But-Won-A-Word-Of-The-Year-Contest Department: “Omnishambles,” which basically means, “big mess.”
- Jonathan O’Neal found a much better link to the “impersonating marijuana” cartoon from Kliban that I cited in my November 13th entry.
- Bill Cherepy sent word of a $29.95 steampunk thumb drive that appeaars to be mass-produced and not a hand-made work of art.
- And while sniffing around the same site, I came upon a steampunk telescope ring. Oh–and a slightly less compact steampunk wrist monocular.
- Good paper on historical solar activity by Dr. Leif Svalgaard. If you want to work all continents on a Sixer, you might have to wait awhile. (I’m hoping to get some traction on my G28 this max–if we actually have a max.)
- We forget sometimes how diverse old telephones were–because we (mostly) had to get them from the phone company. The others we mostly saw in spy movies.
- There is bubble-gum flavored vodka. Fair enough. Now, is there a wintergreen-flavored cordial of some kind? Or lavender?
- Carol’s sister chills room-temperature box sangria by throwing a few spoonfuls of frozen blueberries into it. Granted, you have to let the glass sit for a few minutes, but it’s way easier than slicing oranges.
- Some may argue that allowing radioisotopes to perform music isn’t exactly music, or if it is, we can definitely call it very heavy metal.
- Just what I want in my Thanksgiving wine.
Odd Lots
- Jim Strickland sent word that Lindsay’s Technical Books is shutting down next year, not for financial reasons but simply because Lindsay is retiring. Their last print catalog has been sent. Order the stuff you’ve been procrastinating about for years–I will be. (Recommendation: Radio for the Millions.) Tip for those who haven’t heard of him before: Lots of steampunk-pertinent do-it-yourself there.
- Amazon can wipe any Kindle it wants to, anytime, without telling you. We’ve known this since the 1989 dustup over the rights to Orwell’s 1984. It’s still a risk, and you can trigger it by trying to sneak around region restrictions. Now, Ars Technica explains how to keep what you’ve bought by removing the DRM. I object to region restrictions in digital content because it makes piracy a safer way to acquire content. Don’t train your customers to be pirates. When are we going to learn?
- I knew this, but not in detail: Kodak had a working digital camera prototype in 1975, and it used a casette tape to store photos–which took 23 seconds per photo. Here’s more on the device from the man who invented it.
- If that sort of thing intrigues you, here’s the motherlode.
- In case you’ve never actually seen it (I hadn’t) here’s where you can stream the video of Doug Engelbart’s prophetic (to put it mildly) Mother of All Demos, during which he showed how a mouse could be used to help with various computer tasks like word processing.
- I bought the original Microsoft Mouse in 1983 and still have it. It still works. It had better, as I paid $200 for it.
- The placebo effect may be genetic–which is a far less significant question than how the hell it works to begin with.
- The first mirror for this telescope has now been completed. The finished telescope will have seven of them. I struggled to grind, polish, and figure a ten-inch mirror when I was 15. This helps me put the whole thing in perspective. Wow.
- Slate seems to think that humans would win fights with Neanderthals. Having seen a number of skeletal and muscle reconstructions of those gnarly guys, I tend to doubt it. Why, then, did they go extinct if we didn’t kill them? My guess: They killed each other. Why do I think that? I read human history and anthropology.
- You can now buy a brand-new, reinforced and factory rustproofed body for a 1940 Ford Coupe…from Ford. If they made an AWD minivan I’d already have one. Here’s hoping.
