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Odd Lots

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

Odd Lots

Jan 9th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

Odd Lots

Dec 31st, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Here’s a great site on older toy and hobbyist robots; if you’re a collector or just a nostalgist, it’s a must-see. (Maybe some here have never seen my late 70s robot Cosmo Klein.) Alas, the link came from an old email sent by the late George M. Ewing WA8WTE, who suggested it as an Odd Lot. Better late than never.
  • We used to giggle at the name in the mid-60s, but the founder of Blonder-Tongue Labs is still alive, and maintains a site full of interesting tech information about crystal sets and old radios, as well as the firm’s patents and products from long ago. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link; again, set aside more than a year ago and never used.)
  • No tablet here yet (waiting to see what if anything pops up at CES 2012) but I’m tempted to get a Nook Color so I can at least quit reading ebooks on my dinosaur of an X41. My friend Erbo has learned a lot about rooting it and running CyanogenMod, and has much good to say about the combo.
  • If you’re considering that step, consider the peculiar nature of the Android OS itself, which may not exist in precisely the same way that Windows exists. This is still good, but you need to understand it, as it’s a newish thing in the computing universe.
  • I’ll never buy one of these, but I admire the concept: An off-the-shelf smartphone-controlled video-equipped RC helicopter. And I admit: If it weren’t for OWS I wouldn’t have heard of them at all.
  • Henry Law called my attention to the fact that County Down in Northern Ireland is often called “Drumlin Country” because of its landforms. Odd then that “The Star of County Down” is one of my favorite Irish folk songs, and has been since I first heard it circa 2000–which is precisely when I wrote “Drumlin Boiler,” the first tale in the Drumlins Saga.
  • And of course, when the starship Origen is marooned in the Drumlins system, it is the mere handful of collectible print books on board that allow the castaways to gradually re-create a modern society on an alien world. The cheap consumer-grade tablet PCs in every passenger pocket were all dead inside of fifteen years (most far sooner than that) and nobody thought to create printing presses before they were gone. No wonder that the cult of the printed book rises as the age of the printed book fades. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
  • Talk partisan political hatred all the time, and prepare to reap the wind.
  • Can we please add “Google is your friend,” “denier,” and “talking points” to this list? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • And with that, the curtain falls on 2011. May the impact of the curtain give it multiple broken bones, concussions, contusions, internal bleeding, hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and whatever else it might take to keep this year from darkening our doorsteps ever again.

Odd Lots

Dec 23rd, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

Odd Lots

Dec 4th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • The Big Honking Sliding Puzzle Project continues, and today Carol and I are mostly stuffing boxes downstairs. Mover guys coming Tuesday. The carpeting is coming out on Wednesday, and the plastic tarps will go up. Thursday they drill holes in the slab and start pumping gooey stuff underneath to stabilize the soil and raise the slab to where it originally was. We are shopping for new carpeting, and will begin choosing new paint colors tomorrow morning. The lower level will not be back in livable shape until mid-January, but when it is it will be much improved.
  • I do not do walled gardens. I absolutely do not do walled gardens. This gentleman from Harvard Law School has done a good job capturing my unease with vendor-controlled hardware and especially software.
  • Reader Nick DeSmith sends a pointer to a wonderful site on numeric-readout vacuum tubes of various species, from humdrum nixies to one I had never heard of before: A Compactron-based micro-CRT with ten guns. I consider Nixies at least to be steampunk-possible, since there’s no physics involved that wasn’t understood in 1900. Not sure they’ve been used in the steampunk canon so far; if they have, let me know.
  • There were giant beavers during the Pleistocene. There have been talking beavers on TV in the past, though they weren’t all that huge. Now there’s an angry giant beaver. Don’t piss one off unless you’re wearing the right overalls.
  • I’ll meet your giant, jeans-eating beaver and raise you a giant cricket so big it eats carrots! (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
  • If giant beavers or giant crickets aren’t your passion, how about miniature forests of old-growth moss that may be thousands of years old? Such are found in Antactica, and by spotting nuclear test fallout debris along the length of their stalks, we can see how slowly they grow. Think, slow. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • I keep tools and even a wi-fi bridge node in ammo cans. Why not wine?
  • The many faces of Superman. (Thanks once again to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • This has some steampunk resonance, but (oldster that I am; how old were you in 1966?) I keep hearing an endless loop in the back of my head: “Batfan! Batfan! Batfan, Batfan, Batfan. Na na na na na na na na na na Batfan!”

Odd Lots

Nov 29th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • You’re getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned–I’ll try and explain tomorrow, if I don’t run out of Aleve.
  • Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C’mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
  • Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, it’s going to be called the Droid XYboard to distance itself from the Xoom brand, which was done in because Somebody Didn’t Want It To Have a Card Slot. (Don’t know who. Have suspicions.)
  • Charlie Stross makes a good case that DRM on ebooks (as required by the Big Six) is a stick handed to Amazon with which to pummel the Big Six. Read the piece, follow the links (make sure you know what a “monopsony” is) and then read the comments.
  • Schumann resonance waves can apparently be detected from space. This is surprising, as my earlier readings suggested that they only exist by virtue of a sort of immaterial waveguide formed by layers in the Earth’s atmosphere–the same waveguide effect that allows hams like me to bounce signals around the world.
  • Femtotech? I postulated a “femtoscope” in my novel The Cunning Blood, but it was used to plot quantum pair creation and did not rely on exotic matter. I’m not sure such things are possible, or could be done in any environment where we could live or even work through proxies. But as with a lot of things (especially LENR) I would hugely enjoy being wrong.
  • I torrented down the brand-new Linux Mint 12 Lisa the other day, and like its predecessor it will not detect the video hardware correctly on my 2009-era Core 2 Quad with NVidia 630i integrated graphics. Somewhat surprisingly, it will install on an older Dell GX620 USFF with (as best I can tell) no video problems. Not sure if I like GNOME 3, though. MATE, a GNOME 2 fork, has promise.
  • I may have made this point once before, but hard steampunk authors should have the Lindsay Books catalog on hand, or at least have the site bookmarked. These are books explaining how to actually do steampunk technology, often in the form of reprints of original Victorian-era reference texts. Thermite, brass, steam engines, and loads of other goodies just as great-great grandpa learned them. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the noodge.)
  • One of my German friends told me that plagiarism in German doctoral theses is so widespread that it’s spawned a crowdsourced mechanism for detecting it. That’s the abbreviated English-language version; if you have a reasonable amount of German, go to the richer, fuller main page.
  • Very spooky time-lapse video of a little-known physical phenomenon. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • I originally thought this was a hoax. On the other hand, I have a Tim Bird and I love it. It’s hard to believe that such things actually work as well as they do.
  • Sometimes you wear what you eat–or at least a reasonable facsimile.

Odd Lots

Nov 24th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it–and to those who don’t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I’ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that.
  • From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: seedbox, 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.
  • Also pertinent to yesterday’s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender’s remorse, and basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. Apparently the DRM wasn’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’m researching it.
  • We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85. 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.
  • Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun’s Electric Sheep.
  • Debsnews now has a wine channel. It’s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: WalMart’s new $3 wine line) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.
  • Anybody who’s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate this gadget. Everybody else, move along.
  • Many people are sending me links to stories about canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA. This is not new news. However, I didn’t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.
  • Maybe the new Spam Singles packaging is the answer. No can!
  • Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. You can now see him from space. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. It’s been there since 2006, and consists of 87,000 colored tile “pixels.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • Make describes a steam-powered bristlebot. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.
  • There may be another reason (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone’s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)
  • If you’ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at the staff credits page, you’re missing out on people you haven’t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)

Odd Lots

Nov 16th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

Odd Lots

Nov 6th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Odd Lots

Oct 25th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments
  • Here’s yet another brick in the structure I’ve been seeing in psychological research suggesting that beyond a certain (reasonable) point, the more confident you are, the less competent you are.
  • The Japanese word I heard at MileHi Con but could not spell (and thus not find) is yaoi (boys’ love) which is evidently fiction targeted at women which portrays homoerotic/homoromantic relationships between good-looking young men. (Thanks to Erbo and Eric the Fruit Bat for clarifying this. I just had no clue.)
  • And while we’re identifying obscure pop culture icons and references, I’ve seen this guy somewhere. Who/what is he?
  • NASA’s new-technology space-based atomic clock has eight pins, and relies on high vacuum. George O. Smith would approve. (Thanks to Larry Nelson for the pointer.)
  • Switch to a “mechanical keyboard”? I never stopped using them to begin with. Modern “mush” keyboards were created solely to be cheap and are mostly useless. (I love it when I’m right–and thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • How many people lived on Earth when you were born? For me, it was 2,556,061,949.
  • The 99c MP3 of the Month Award here goes to Sam Spence for “Classic Battle,” which was evidently commissioned by the NFL as incidental music for football games. Dayum. Why doesn’t baseball get music like that?
  • Music, heh. Ever hear a piece of music that immediately made you head for the exits? Maybe that’s the whole idea. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
  • I’ve found a good home for my old Ampro CP/M system, and will be shipping it out shortly. Thanks for all the suggestions and reminiscences.

Odd Lots

Oct 16th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments
  • Jim Strickland and I will be attending MileHiCon in Denver this weekend. Anybody else listening gonna be there?
  • I’m on a panel about robots, and here’s a megatrivia question for you: What was the first film depiction of a robot that was not a mechanical man; i.e., not things on two legs like Robbie, Gort, or Tobor the Great? The oldest one I can think of is the 1954 Gog. (Writeup.) This was a rare form factor back then (because humanoid robots were actors in robot suits) and the only other one from the Fifties I can recall is the 1957 Kronos.
  • Pertinent to that question: There was a serious and reasonably big-budget Japanese SF movie in the early 60s (not a let’s-stomp-on-Tokyo thing) depicting a spaceship with a small robot named Omega that ran on tracks. The other vehicles on the starship were also given Greek letters as names. Can anybody remember what that film was? All I get on Google for “Omega the Robot” are Sonic the Hedgehog references.
  • Having flown the X-37B into space twice, Boeing is now officially looking into doubling the size of the vehicle and making it a sort of people-only space shuttle. Alas, it would probably kill all hope for anything like the sexy li’l X-38–but I’ll take what we can get.
  • Red tide algae glows blue after dark, if you shake it up enough. Pete Albrecht has seen this, and it’s real; nay, surreal.
  • Boston Dynamics’ uncanny and brilliant Big Dog quadriped robot now has a big brother, AlphaDog. Watch both videos; the second is a demo of Big Dog doing stuff I wouldn’t have imagined a robot doing when I was in high school. BTW, that tube sticking out of Alpha Dog’s front panel isn’t artillery…yet.
  • These guys will sell you a 144-core CPU–and then make you program it in FORTH. Not x86; each core is an 18-bit F18A processor executing the colorForth instruction set. FORTH ties my head in knots and yes, I’ve tried it–on the CDP1802 processor, no less. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
  • Gotta love Google Books. I recently found a Popular Science article I had read in 1967 summarizing various rotary engines under discussion at that time. Nobody answered the obvious question: How do you machine a piston in the shape of a piece of kielbasa?
  • A short 1963 book on rotary engines by Felix Wankel himself can be found here. (Multiple PDFs; not an easy read.) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for spotting it.
  • From Henry Law comes a pointer to the most boggling piece of amateur rocketry I’ve ever seen. High power? Heh. One doesn’t get to 121,000 feet on vinegar and baking soda.
  • You don’t have to speak or read German to appreciate this photo tour of Vienna’s sewers. Why do they get such cool sewers in Europe? (I’ve seen a few Stateside, and they just…stink.)
  • Sure, and while you’re at it, grab his beach towel.
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