- Maybe it’s some of the recent solar storms (the sunspots were not spectacularly high) but I heard both Guyana and the Cayman Islands on 17m the other day–the first time I’ve seen any significant life on that band in several years.
- I have yet to find an Android ebook reader app that will open and render an MS .lit file, of which I have several. No surprise: Having blown an early and promising start in ebook reader software, MS has recently announced that it is withdrawing the app. Reader is actually a nice piece of work, and the first ebook reader program I used regularly. DRMed .lit books are now just noise, and the rest of them will have to be translated by something like Calibre. DRM, especially when it’s abandoned, trains people to locate cracks and become pirates. Way to go, guys.
- SanDisk just announced a thumb drive about the size of its own USB connector cap. 4, 8, or 16GB. I’ve now broken two thumb drives by leaving them plugged into the rear edge of a laptop and then tipping the laptop back. If that’s a common problem, this is definitely the solution.
- What do you do with the Moon once you rope it down? (Watering it would be interesting, though Mars needs it more.)
- This guy thinks like I do. Just ask Carol. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- I recently found a PDF describing the first computer I ever programmed for money. It was a…1 MHz…8080. It cost a boggling number of 1979 dollars, so Xerox ended up using most of the initial production run in-house. The 3200 cast a long shadow: I got so used to sitting in front of it that when I built a computer table later that year for my S100 CP/M system, I made it just high enough that the keyboard was precisely as far off the floor as the 3200’s, a height that I use in computer tables to this day.
- How long did it take you to figure out what this really was? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Russian President Medvedev has taken a liking to ReactOS, a long-running and mostly ignored attempt to create a driver-compatible, win32-friendly (via WINE) open source Windows clone. He’s suggesting that the Russian government fund it. Now if Medvedev can convince Putin, we could have quite a project on our hands.
- I’d never thought much about how you recycle a dead refrigerator. Now I know.
- Begorrah! Zombies are not a new problem. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- And if that machine gun in your hollow leg won’t slow them down, send them into sugar crash.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and generally acknowledged as the inventor of the ebook, has left us. He was only 64.
- That supernova that popped up in M101 about ten days ago keeps getting brighter, and the 8″ scope is out in the garage, collimated and ready to roll. I have never seen a supernova (mostly because I’ve never hunted for the pikers that have appeared in my lifetime) but this is starting to look too good to miss. Brightness should peak in the next few days, and if the clouds would break here for an evening I think it would be reasonably easy to spot.
- White dwarf stars may be able to exceed the Chandrasekahr Limit by spinning rapidly–and as soon as their rotation slows down sufficiently, they collapse and go supernova. Such stars may be more common than we think, and offer a cool SF gimmick for galaxy-level warfare: Subtract a little rotational energy from a super-Chandrasekar white dwarf, and wham! Supernova-on-demand.
- An earlier article from the same site suggests that such spinning white dwarfs may be messing up a long-established luminosity heuristic for measuring the distance to far-off galaxies. If all similar white dwarf stars collapse and blow up at the same mass, their luminosity may be assumed to be about the same. If more massive stars can delay their destruction by absorbing angular momentum along with accreted mass, the metric fails.
- Getting uranium out of groundwater is a good thing–and when you’re done, you still have the uranium. (In my view, uranium is just as useful as clean water.) I energetically wonder if this process can be generalized. If so, then anyone could become The Man Who Ploughed the Sea.
- Damn, I’ll believe it when I see it, and if I actually see it I may not in fact believe it, but Heathkit is going back into the kit business!
- I’ve never seen this before and I doubt you have either: A razor-sharp composite photo of the Moon’s north pole.
- From whence the above: I could do with more science and less Science Guy, but if you don’t visit NASA Goddard’s Flickr photostream regularly, you are missing out bigtime. (Site virgins, prepare to lose an afternoon…)
- T’hell with home theater: If this thing is quiet, it could be a spectacular desktop for office apps. (Alas, I see no published spec on how loud it is or isn’t.)
- If more ties like this were available, I might wear ties more. (Especially the, er, cable tie.)
- Back in 1948, Bell Labs polled their staff to decide on a name for what may be their most potent invention. Also-rans include the solid triode, crystal triode, and (my favorite) the Tom-Swiftish iotatron. That’s just so much cooler than “transistor.”
- Hmmm. It seems that Yale scientists may be offering me the choice between being a bald head and a fat head. I may stay where I am.
- But, Miles, it’s full of… marshmallows !
Odd Lots
- Wired has a nice piece on the 1859 Carrington Event; basically, the strongest solar storm in the last 500 years, assuming ice core data is a reliable proxy for storm strength. Early landline telegraph operators actually disconnected their batteries and passed traffic solely on power induced in the lines by solar activity. Whew. Now that’s QRP!
- Alas, even with sunspot numbers hovering at 120, I’m not hearing much DX out here. I’m not even hearing the East Coast. So much for Cycle 24.
- There’s a difference between “loving reading” and “loving reading what the literary class loves to read.” We can teach the first. By teaching the second, we may teach a good many students to stop reading completely. (Thanks to Rev. Sharon Hart for the link.)
- Here be the history of Godwin’s Law.
- From the September 1922 issue of Popular Science comes a crystal radio in a corn-cob pipe, shown in one of the geekiest Roaring Twenties radio geek photos ever taken. I doubt this would work (well) but I suppose it had to be tried. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- This radio geek photo shows a set that would certainly work (schematic here) but I’m not sure he would have been let on an airliner even in 1936.
- By 1949, radio geek photos were in serious decline, but 15-year-old Hope Lange gave it a damned good try.
- By sheer coincidence, the cover of that very same issue of Popular Science cited above for the corn-cob radio shows a drawing of a “monocopter,” an unlikely but at least physically possible device modeled on maple tree seeds, which I mentioned in Odd Lots back on July 28. This should be easy to model; has anybody ever seen it done?
- Maybe I’ve been writing SF for so long that this article sounds a little obvious to me, but some of the points do need to be borne in mind by writers new to the field, particularly #3. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- This was Big News in Germany. Those people need to get out more.
- I’m not sure what it is either, but if you’re going to cite its name as PIGORASS, you’d really better expand the acronym.
Odd Lots
- Does anybody here use true peer-to-peer chat? I don’t use chat much, and when I do it’s with a very small number of people, typically one-to-one. By peer-to-peer I mean via direct connect from one IP to another, without intermediation at the server level, as with things like Trillian, Skype, Jabber, etc. I know that WASTE does this, though I’ve never tried it. What else might work? I don’t want to mount a new server if I can avoid it.
- New research suggests that low-salt diets increase insulin resistance–and thus propel otherwise healthy people toward diabetes. (Via Fat Head.)
- More on Amazon’s rumored Android tablet. Print Replica (as I discussed in yesterday’s entry) has almost nothing to do with it.
- Note well: Sony’s new tablet is not really sideload-able, since the device cannot render content directly from an inserted SD card. You have to copy all material from the card to internal storage. Also, the weird cross-section makes it almost inescapably a landscape machine. No thanks.
- Interesting short piece on the other Delphi–as in, Oracle of.
- For those who asked: The 400W power supply I just bought for my Core 2 Quad is the Antec Neo Eco 400C. So far…love it!
- Having sold out all the TouchPads there were at fire-sale prices, HP now intends to…make some more. Something flaky here: Lose a little money on each sale, and make it up in volume? Doesn’t add up…unless it was a slick and risky attempt to build a demand base.
- Didn’t know this before: Setting a .jpg to quality setting 7 in Photoshop degrades the image’s quality. Stay at 6–or bump to 8.
- How about Han Solo Carbonite Slab ice cubes? Brilliant gimmick, though I wonder (given that the product is marked as “unavailable”) if they’re really out of stock or just didn’t close the deal with Lucasfilm.
Odd Lots
- Antique Electronic Supply in Tempe, Arizona, has created a new DBA for their tube audio amplifier business: Amplified Parts. The tube stuff still predominates but it’s hardly “antique” and has definitely gone upscale. They rate their power tubes like fine wine: “This Russian tube [6L6GC] has tight lows, straightforward body, and smooth highs. In overdrive, it offers a tight and frosted crunchy bite.”
- My Taos Toolbox 2011 colleague Alan Smale just won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History at the 2011 Worldcon in Reno. We workshopped an expansion of the winning story, “A Clash of Eagles” and it was terrific. I’m guessing this will make it perhaps a little easier to sell the novel-length work. Bravo, Alan!
- Even though HP announced yesterday that they were killing their cloud-centered TouchPad tablet, Carol and I saw an expensive commercial for the device on The Weather Channel this morning. Cloud? Did you guys say “cloud”? (No wonder they got the ad…)
- If you haven’t seen it yet, definitely take a look at Stellarium, a free planetarium program available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s one of the best I’ve ever tried, more polished (if not as deep) as the venerable Cartes du Ciel, which is remarkable in part by being a Lazarus app.
- David Stafford sends word that an elaborate steampunk loft apartment has gone up for sale in Manhattan. The price? A “mere” $1,750,000.
- This is killer cool as binoculars go, but would they capture anything at night? (Somehow I doubt it.)
- Bill Higgins writes to tell us that Catholic University has placed a scan of the 1964 Treasure Chest comics series “Pettigrew for President” online, for free download. I blogged about this years ago, but the comic was not available for download then.
- Nick Kim does Cowboys and Heavy Metals. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Fellow carnivore Jim Tubman and I share an appreciation for The Periodic Table of Meat. Most of it, anyway. (No thanks on Meat 75. Oh, and 95.)
- Back from meat to metals again: Given that it’s the cornerstone material required to build the Hilbert Drive as used in many of my SF yarns, I was a little surprised that ytterbium is so cheap.
- Did you ever wonder about the physics of coffee rings? Wonder no more.
- From the Please-Give-Those-Guys-Something-To-Do Department: New taxpayer-funded NASA research tells us that unless we take prompt and serious action against global warming, aliens may invade and wipe us out. UPDATE: This turns out not to be entirely true: The chap who co-wrote the paper works for NASA but he did it on his own time and there was no public funding involved. The Guardian has corrected the piece.
Odd Lots
- The IBM PC turns 30 today. I had a dual-floppy 5150 and loved it. Hard to believe it came home almost thirty years ago.
- The number of retractions of dead-wrong and perhaps fraudulent scientific papers is surging, rising fifteen-fold in the last ten years. So what’s a citizen scientist to do? Probably not buy into just anything that might be in a peer-reviewed paper. (Maybe we need more peers. Or better ones.)
- Good example: There’s little or no evidence that salt causes hypertension, but that doesn’t stop certain scientists and many government functionaries from insisting that it does. (If salt did cause hypertension, I’d be…dead.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-I-Played-Scrabble-With-An-Expert Department: ort, which is a fancy but short word for leftover food scraps. As in, “Yesterday at 12:15 the junior-high lunchroom became an ort cloud…”
- The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight just before dawn, but a nearly full moon will drown out many or most of the fainter traces. Hey, get up early and plop into a deck chair for a while. Assuming a clear sky, you’re almost guaranteed to see something. And there’s always next year. (Carol and I have been watching them as weather allows since 1969.)
- This is still extremely new, but it has promise: an AbiWord plug-in that exports epub files from within AbiWord. (I haven’t tested it yet.)
- Ditto for Open Office Writer. (Haven’t tested it either, but thanks to Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Are you the kind of reader who reads the ending in the bookstore before buying the book? (I used to be.) Apparently spoilers don’t spoil the fun of reading novels as much as most people assume.
- Who doesn’t like control panels? Here’s a wonderful album of panels from every sort of machine, from the Space Shuttle to the 1966 TV series Batmobile. Don’t miss Part 2. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the links.)
- Wow. You used to be able to buy dynamite at the hardware store…at least if you were a farmer.
- Scott Adams thinks that boredom lies behind a lot of creativity. As we become less bored, we grow less creative. He may be right. But…how do we solve the Boredom Shortage? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I like butter. I like it a lot. But maybe not this much. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Don’t just have your survivors give you a 21-gun salute. Be the 21-gun salute!
Odd Lots
- I guess I didn’t look hard enough last week: Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a site devoted to balloon molecules, using the same balloons that balloon artists twist into weiner dogs. The gallery contains lots of examples, from simple tetrahedra through Fullerenes and DNA, so don’t miss it!
- A neuroscientist calls BS on the Singularity. (Ok, the dialect of Singularitanism spoken in the vicinity of Ray Kurzweil.) What He Said.
- Using a laser sintering process (admittedly, on bigger parts than we’re used to seeing) some guys at the University of Southampton have created a 3-D printed UAV with a 6′ wingspan. 3-D printing sidesteps some of the difficulties of manufacturing certain shapes, including elliptical wings. (Thanks to Aaron Spriggs and half a dozen other people for the link.)
- Here’s a gallery of home-brew tube projects that’s one of the best I’ve seen. Take special note of the homebrew coil winder (design by Gingery) that made many of the designs possible. Here’s another link for the same writer.
- There is a NaNoWriMo alternate held in August. I think it really needs to be held in March (which I’ve considered the worst month of the year for decades) but nobody asked me.
- There was once a special phonograph record technology designed for use under car dashboards. It failed epically. I couldn’t stop vinyl records from skipping at home; one wonders what it would take to suppress skipping in a car on crappy Chicago streets. RCA created a different under-dash machine that played standard 45s, but by 1962 they’d all faded out with tailfins, waiting for the impending Age of 8-Track.
- Back in the day we sometimes Scotch-taped pennies on the tonearms of cheap record players to minimize skipping, and later wondered why the records started sounding crappy after awhile. (I think the term was “three-penny record.” I had more than my share.)
- Oh, dear. There may be an emerging film/fiction subsubgenre called “Fantastic Catholicism.”
- Here’s a nice short piece on some new research on airborne dust and its effect on atmospheric carbon levels. We’re finally getting a little hard data on the subject.
- “Wipe that grin off your face, Herr Luther.” (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
Odd Lots
- A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I’ll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you’ve seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.
- More photos from the workshop: Christie Yant has established a single page linking to all four of her Flickr albums from Taos Toolbox 2011.
- Several people sent me invites to Google+, and I established an account several days ago. (I already had a Google account, so it was no big deal.) Google being insanely paranoid about how real your name is, look for me as…Jeff Duntemann.
- In the wake of Tuesday night’s epic natural gas leak here, I discovered that the ethyl mercaptan molecule resembles a balloon animal weiner dog with its hindquarters on upside down. Hey, I wonder if a balloon artist has ever done balloon hydrocarbons? (Google comes up empty.)
- Motorola is finally rolling out an Android upgrade that enables use of the Xoom’s SD slot. Guys, why was that so hard?
- Only a handful of people ever make it to 114 years old. And, weirdly, that’s when virtually all of the oldest of the oldest of the old actually die.
- Here’s a photo of the largest cannon ever built. No points for guessing who built it.
- And while you’re browsing Gizmodo’s Monster Machines category, don’t miss the largest Diesel engine in the world. Your flip-flops got paddled across the pond by something very like that.
- This SSD might well make that seven-year-old PC a little bouncier…but I still recommend maxing out RAM to 4 GB, cleaning the registry, and getting rid of crapware. I’m less convinced than some people that hard drive speeds are a serious bottleneck when your registry looks like an empty lot in a war zone.
- QBit, who on beach walks favors dead fish but will gladly settle for seaweed, has refused to answer the question: Why do dogs roll in stinky stuff?
- I doubt that this would ever work, irrespective of its cool halfway-to-dieselpunk looks. It does make me wonder what other cool stuff might have been drowned out in the racket coming from WWI. (Thanks to Gary Kato for the link.)
- And I know damned well that this wouldn’t work, but it goes all the way to full-bore, balls-out dieselpunk fantasy. (Thanks again to Gary Kato.)
- Perhaps you’ve seen the Dyson Fan on TV ads. Here’s how they work.
- The site is in German, and is well-known in Europe for high-end licorice. Pete Albrecht assures me that the name of the company really does translate as “Bearshit Pharmacy.” Wow.
Odd Lots
- Freedom matters, and in honor of Independence Day here’s an eye-opening report on the “state of freedom” in the fifty American states. I knew a lot of this from my research nine years ago, when Carol and I decided to leave Arizona, but it’s nice to see it all in one free (in the other sense) document.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: draisine, a human-powered device for moving over railroad rails. This is evidently a European term; over here these are called handcars or inspection speeders or rail cycles or a number of other things. Definitely note the hot-pink draisine-built-for-two on the Wikipedia page. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for dropping the word to me.)
- Although I’m sure that everyone in the civilized galaxy has seen the cartoon, I wasn’t aware that “thagomizer” is now paleobiological jargon. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Here’s a list of somebody’s picks as the ten best hard SF books of all time. I agree with about 50% of the picks, though Robinson’s Mars trilogy was so slow and padded-out that I could barely finish it. (I have not yet read the Egan book cited.) I sense as well that Somebody Doesn’t Like Heinlein’s Politics. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Despite a 500-fold increase in cell phone use in the last 20 years, malignant brain tumor diagnosis is down in that timeframe. This interests me, as three people I knew died of brain tumors (the largest cancer cluster in my circle of acquaintance) and it makes me wonder. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I had just a couple of comic books back in the early Sixties, and one of the most intriguing was an extra-long number from DC called Secret Origins that had the backstory for five or six of the most famous DC superheroes. Oddly, what I remember most clearly was the backstory for Green Lantern, especially the little blue guys on the Planet Without Consonants and (most intriguing of all) a power ring with a flaw that prevented it from working against anything yellow. Trouble is, if you remove the flaw, the ring loses its power completely. Now that’s cool–alas, in what may be the canonical Green Lantern for Dummies page, the yellow gotcha isn’t stated clearly and I wonder if it was just abandoned back in the 1960s.
- Forgot to aggregate this back in January: One of the most bizarre articles I’ve ever read on any major site in recent years. This totally, completely, utterly certain guy is angry at other guys for being totally, completely, and utterly certain–and that about something totally, completely, and utterly trivial. My take: We “know” nothing at all with certainty, and the more certain you are that you’re right, the more certain the rest of us should be that you’re wrong. Nyah-nyah!
- And another Odd Lot that has lain around for some time: Polish troops trained a young bear to carry ammo during the Battle of Monte Cassino. My father was at that battle, working a radio station on the back of a truck, but he never mentioned seeing the bear. The bear is said to never have dropped any munitions, which I’m sure was a good thing for the bear, and possibly my father as well.
- Here’s a bogglingly weird Dickensian artifact that I’d never heard of before: A key gun. It’s a gun built into the key to a (large) prison cell lock. I’m sure if it had worked better I would have seen it before now.
Odd Lots
- Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created the very good Sigil epub editor while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master’s, a good job, and…a life. (How dare he? ) In a recent blog post, he’s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case to him as to why they should be trusted to carry on the work. He doesn’t know me; I’m just spreading the word, because I use Sigil and I want it to continue to evolve.
- We have the same problem with the Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML editor; poor Fabien “Kaz” Cazenave has a new job and very little time to devote to the product. I like Kompozer but it has some rough spots, and I hope someone will take over and keep the wheels turning.
- In the meantime, I’ve installed and am testing BlueGriffon, and so far I like what I see. The editor incorporates the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 4, so if it looks good in BlueGriffon it’ll look good in Firefox. It has HTML5 and CSS3 capability, and an interesting business model: The editor is free, and the developer sells various add-ons. That doesn’t bother me at all; the whole suite of 9 add-ons can currently be had for $35 Euros, or about $50US. If BlueGriffon performs well on my existing Web documents, I’d pay that like a shot, even if I don’t use the add-ons.
- As brilliant as the original Turbo Pascal was, it wasn’t alone. From Andrew Stuart comes a link to the deep history of Nick Gammon’s G-Pascal, an enviable piece of assembly-coding work that put a potent Pascal compiler for the Commodore 64 in…16K. If you used G-Pascal back in the 80s, this is a must-see, especially the links at the end, to the sorts of ads and programming newsletters that were the lifeblood of personal programming in the early 80s.
- I don’t know if you’ve ever needed an 18″ USB A-B cable, but I did, and after a great deal of looking around, I finally found them at Other World Computing. It’s mostly a Mac shop, but has the short A-B cables for both USB 2 and USB 3. The cable connects the USB hub on my Dell 20″ monitor to the GX620 USFF machine mounted immediately behind it, and keeps cable clutter down behind the monitor.
- Little things sometimes matter: The Toshiba Thrive has a full-sized SD card slot. Not micro. This means that I can use the SD cards I already have. A mini-USB adapter will also allow me to use my existing thumb drives. Ports and card slots have been the deal-killer so far on tablet after tablet. This one (though it won’t be in stores until July) still has an edge. (Bill Roper reminded me that I needed to post about this.)
- From Smithsonian comes a long and detailed article on what amounts to beer archaeology. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
- For those who asked: Simple Simon’s formal name (from my entry for June 26) is Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor, and yes, the acronym was highly deliberate. His robotic factory is the Automated Reprographic Fabrication Facility, and (as you’ll learn in the novel) the project had always been a dog.
- WUTZ 4 DINR?
