- The rest of Bichonicon was uneventful enough (and I was tired enough) that I decided it wasn’t worth a whole ‘nother entry. Aero won a ribbon on Saturday, but did not win points. Carol and I ate too much fast food. We came home. End of story.
- I did briefly run into St. Louis native Nancy Frier, granddaughter of the man who founded Alox Manufacturing Company, maker of shoelances, kites, marbles, military radar corner reflectors, and lots of other odd bits. She had visited a marble factory in West Virginia and showed me a video of glass marbles being made on a machine very similar to the one Alox had used. It’s a great video, and when she uploads it to YouTube I’ll post a link here.
- And I found two bottles of Diet Green River. The trick is to look in small local grocery stores or local chains, like Garden Fresh Markets or Shop and Save. Have not yet checked the local Butera, but it’s on my list.
- A reader chided me that “All your damn dogs look alike. Post more pictures of Carol.” He’s right about the dogs, I guess, but I have posted quite a few pictures of Carol in my photo gallery. In fact, here’s an almost 40-year run of the two of us together.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know (or at least understand) Until Yesterday Department: “Kukla” is Russian for “doll.” The eponymous little guy on the seminal Kukla, Fran, and Ollie kids’ show had been built as a doll for a friend by puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who liked the doll so much that Tillstrom kept him, and made him the star of the show.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday (And Didn’t Think Were Necessary) Department: A merkin is a wig for women’s genitalia; basically, a pubic toupee. Sheesh. English has a word for everything.
- Here is A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. I think it’s truer than people will admit, especially the Pascal entry. Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.
- Blandishments: Salt-free mustard and ketchup.
- A guy scraped Twitter data for the phrase “just landed in” and mapped the air travel data, hoping to create a new tool for epidemiology. Germs like jet aircraft for various reasons, and this is the first genuine use for the Twitter system that I’ve ever heard of.
- I follow Icecap as part of my ongoing climate research, and it’s interesting for another reason: It consists of a navigation column and three narrow content columns. I’ve never seen another blog with a layout quite like this, and I like it. Narrow is better than wide, especially for small print. Scanability (given that I don’t read every entry) is high.
- Finally, some images speak for themselves. This is one of them. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Still sniffling, still congested, still coughing, and still mostly lying on my back, taking a Zicam every three hours like clockwork. I feel better generally, but the growing pile of Kleenex on the floor next to the bed provides time-trend rather than anecdotal data. This has been worse and tougher to shake than I had hoped.
- The Cassini Saturn probe can actually watch ring disturbances occur, especially those caused by the way-far-in moon Prometheus. Here’s the culprit making tracks in the ring system, courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.
- There is a portable version of Scribus, the only open-source desktop publishing system that I respect. One key principle of degunking Windows PCs is to staythehell away from the Windows Registry, and portable apps, almost by definition, leave no fingerprints there. There’s more here than most people understand, and Wikipedia’s list of portable apps is a very good place to start. (I advise reading the entry talk page.) Here’s another big list.
- Another key principle is to avoid software that insists on launching services all the time, having tray icons, etc. Most of these are commercial packages that are desperately trying to upsell you. Best path here is to avoid commercial software as much as possible, especially trialware and “basic” versions that are invitations to install nagware and are often very hard to get rid of.
- (Next morning.) The nose is drying out (finally) but the cough is still with me. About to head out for some yummy McDonald’s iced coffee, with sugar-free vanilla flavoring, to chase a delectable Sausage McMuffin with Egg. I’m stuffing my pocketses with Kleenex, but after two days of self-enforced isolation, it’s almost within my grasp: The Contrarian Breakfast of Champions!
- (Later.) It’s been a bad season for the Global Warming crowd. Freeman Dyson jumped the Tiber, and now says that the whole thing is a religion. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has admitted under duress that its Antarctic bases have shown a cooling trend since 1980. Another Australian, albeit a hated Tory, penned a pretty good summary of the problems to be found when you study the data and not the dogma. Word seems to be getting out: Only 30% of Americans support cap-and-trade, which has become corrupt even before becoming law. And here’s what one of the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey bill has to say about the dangers of global warming. OMG, if that tundra at the North Pole ever emerges from under the ice, we’re all gonna die!
- Remember Global Cooling? I lived through it. It was scary. The lesson? We knew shit about how climate worked in 1975. And today? We know shit plus 15%. Some humility (and caution) are called for.
- (Still later.) Gosh. I really must be feeling better. The needle has climbed out of “groggy” and is rising rapidly through “puckish” on its way back to “jovial and unprovocative.” Dare I hope to get all the way to “serene”? Not likely; the viruses are surrendering, but I still have 35,000 words to go on the book–and I can’t find any Diet Green River!
Odd Lots
- SRWare Iron was doing a peculiar thing: When I used it to view my junkbox.com main page, the title image was broken. This was not the case using IE, FF, or Opera. Nor was it true of the several other images on that same page, but only that big main one. An intuition led me to look up the name of the image file: junkboxmainbanner.png. I renamed the file “junkboxmain.png” (that is, removing the substring “banner” from the filename) and the image began rendering normally. I guess there’s a downside to adblockers as twitchy as this one.
- From Bruce Baker comes a nice chronological screenshot survey of computer GUIs since the primordial Xerox Alto in 1973, up through Windows Vista and KDE 4. No judgements are passed on the products, and not much history is offered, but it’s unusual to see them all lined up in one place, and one definitely gets a sense for the way it all evolved, and especially for the immeasurable debt that Apple owes Xerox.
- On a tip from Pete Albrecht, I’ve learned that the Progressive Insurance girl Flo and one of the Geico cavemen shared a scene in the short-lived 2007 TV sitcom Cavemen . Here’s a YouTube clip of the scene. This was sheer coincidence; the Progressive ad campaign did not happen for at least a year after that and Stephanie Courtney just happened to get the part. I tried to like the series and failed, but I’ll admit that it had some surreal moments, a few of which we evidently didn’t appreciate at the time. Now, cavemen ate geckos. (Cavemen ate anything they could catch.) Dare we hope…
- Here’s an old article from Popular Mechanics on building your own Geiger counter. Michael Covington reminds me that there was a circuit in Alfred Morgan’s book The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics, though it had a peculiar power supply and didn’t work when I tried to build it in 1966. (I may still have the G-M tube somewhere, but I can’t find it and in truth haven’t seen it in decades.)
- Yet another one, this time from Popular Science, March 1950.
- Todd Johnson suggests using scrounged or surplus fluorescent lamp supplies from computer scanners for homebrew Geiger counters. I’ve got two defunct scanners on the woodpile downstairs, but if you don’t, Todd also sent along a pointer to a surplus source, for only $5.
- Today is Ubuntu 9.04 day. It’s like the Day after Thanksgiving at Marshall Fields up there, so don’t expect much in the line of download performance. I’m going to wait for the dust to settle a little (and maybe for my assembly book to be done) but it will happen here sooner or later. If you want it, look for torrents. And come with a backpack of patience.
- Do you have Linux running on an Intel DQ35 motherboard. If so, be careful.
- Finally, this clever food hack reminds me vaguely of something. I don’t know what. That’s probably just as well.
Odd Lots
- 138,000 words in, out of about 175,000. Maybe a hair under 3,000 words left on this chapter, and then only two more to go. Whew.
- I’m collecting pointers to print magazine articles about building your own Geiger counters. I have a few articles from Popular Electronics and one from Popular Mechanics on Google, and may do a survey article on the topic for Jeff’s Junkbox. The trick with most of the tube-era circuits is those 300V dry batteries. Somewhere in the stacks I’ve stickied a neat hack consisting of a 2N554 pumping square waves into a tube-era output transformer to put out at least 300V at a few mils. That would do it…
- There’s going to be a very nice conjunction of the crescent Moon and crescent Venus just before dawn tomorrow morning. More here. West of Ohio and a line tilting southwest, Venus will actually be occulted by the Moon. Our weather promises to be good here and given that I’ll be up at 6 anyway, what’s another forty minutes?
- Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad (which I mentioned in my January 19, 2009 entry) seems to have some recent quantum leaps toward reality. I’m watching it as an ebook reader, and while I doubt we’ll lay hands on it for only $200, I’d be happy to pay $400 if the implementation is good. E-Ink is just painful in bad light, like you get in most hotel rooms and the corner bed of your RV.
- Suddenly I’m seeing more articles on polywell fusion; here’s the latest, courtesy Frank Glover. Most of the deep theory goes over my head, but people I respect seem to think it will work and can be scaled to useful outputs.
- Cold fusion is hot again too, judging by several major items in the MSM, including 60 Minutes. The Navy’s in on it too. My take: The test of a true scientist vs. a phony scientist is the difference between “We don’t know what’s going on here” and “There is nothing going on here.”
- I guess this may be Fringe Science Day. The Big Face on Mars is so 1980s…have you seen the Big Pac Man Game on Mars? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- Finally, from Bruce Baker comes a link to a life-size status of Jesus in Lego. Nicely done, whether you’re a theist or not–but again, if you don’t glue the pieces together, how do you stop the parish’s munchkins from stealing Jesus’ toes?
Odd Lots
- How about a steampunk Segway? It’s self-balancing as long as its rider is self-balancing, I guess–and certainly burns more calories.
- Or (while you’re pretending to be King Edward VII) a steampunk snowboard? Are there any steampunk types who are my age, or is it all a twentysomething crowd? I recently saw an antique foot-powered dentist’s drill machine circa 1890. Nice ornate cast ironwork and bronze–and made me very glad I’m 120 years away from it.
- If you use Linux, staythehell out of Boston. It’s considered prima facie evidence of criminal activity. Damn, those people need another invasion of the Mooninites. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Ah, the price of increasing popularity: There is now a Mac botnet launching DDoS attacks. (Or…I wonder…could Symantec be about to launch a new Mac security product?)
- Our TV Guide listings stopped working on Comcast basic analog cable a few weeks ago. We thought it was our TV–and the Comcast people were less than helpful–but apparently it’s a consequence of the big move to digital TV. The TV Guide listings data rode in on an analog sidecar to the analog PBS signal, and now that PBS has gone all-digital, there’s no sidecar anymore. (Thanks to Bill Roper for digging this one up–he has a similar problem with his DVR.)
- There is a pizza place in San Diego called Killer Pizza from Mars. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.) Interestingly, my best friend Art and I did some brainstorming about opening a pizza place in Rogers Park called Tranquility Base when we got out of college in recession-year 1974, but nothing came of it. (He would have been the cook. I would have been the waiter; probably the one thing that paid less than fixing Xerox machines.)
- They do things big in Nebraska: The last full week of September sees the Nebraska Junk Jaunt, in which ten midstate counties hold a collective garage sale along a 300-mile route, with 500+ vendors participating, and that’s only the ones they know about. Start early, see them all! (Damn, I’m tempted!)
- Finally, it’s April 17, and we’re in the midst of a blizzard here in Colorado Springs. The carpet cleaners had to postpone the job, and we had to cancel our gym session today. We may get a foot or more between here and Sunday, and peeking out the window I already see 3″ or so. This has been the damndest coldest, longest winter in our six years here. Has Al Gore been sneaking around the Springs somewhere?
Odd Lots
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: “charcuterie,” meaning cured meats like bacon, ham, prosciutto, and the preparation thereof.
- I talked to the realtor who’s handling the listing of the old Heinlein house here in Colorado Springs. What she said astounded me: Heinlein’s 1950 custom house is still in there. They built that ugly thing around it in 1995 or so. Parts of the original structure were removed, but most of it still exists, although it evidently was used as framing more than anything else.
- And further relevant to the Heinlein House is a report from elder SF fan Bruce Pelz, who not only visited the house in Colorado Springs in 1963 when the Heinleins were still living there, but he slept in their legendary fallout shelter. (Cool photo there–definitely click through! And thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Needless to say, I haven’t visited the Heinlein fallout shelter (I stood in line to shake the great man’s hand at MidAmericon in 1976, and that was the only time I ever met him) but I frequently visited the 10-foot-deep underground fallout shelter of the late William A. “Bill” Rhodes in Phoenix, which he was using as a cool (literally) computer room until his death in 2006. It was culturally jarring–people of my parents’ generation took fallout shelters for granted, and people of my generation (for the most part) found them appalling.
- CFLs may not be the big environmental win that they’re being touted as, because the power factor of the lamps is very low. Thery’re still a win, but the hype needs to be pruned back a little.
- The whole idea of a CAPTCHA may be flawed, and although there are a number of objections to CAPTCHAS, this article pins down the primary and probably unfixable one: You can pay people to solve them. There are apparently some porn/pirate sites that charge for access in solved CAPTCHAS. And if nothing else works, hire a CAPTCHA-breaking firm in the third world. It looks to me like CAPTCHAs are becoming at best speed-bump hindrances to bots. If I had to guess, I’d say make it slower to establish accounts, and certainly slower for one IP to sequentially attempt a CAPTCHA. Could teergrubing make a comeback?
- For the benefit of those who asked, here is the Web site of the people who did my crowns over this past year. They are artists, especially Dr. Frank Seaman. The 15-month project was actually a collaboration between two independent offices in the same building. Dr. Jeanne Salcetti did the periodontal portion (gingivectomy, tooth extraction, bone graft, and implant) and she was wonderful too. I recommend both of them without hesitation.
Odd Lots
- My Web article on how I designed my workshop has just been aggregated on the Make Blog.
- Here is the best summary of sunspot-less days I’ve yet seen. We may be coming out of a freakish-high period of solar activity; five of the ten most intense solar cycles ever recorded have occurred in the last 50-odd years.
- Even NASA admits that our near-record solar minimum may get even deeper. I guess I don’t need to build that 6M vertical any time soon. (Thanks to Mark Moss for the link.)
- On the other hand, the DX can be had, with some–heh!–effort. In fact, some guys in Germany recently bounced a radio signal off of Venus and heard the echo. They used the same 2.4 GHz radio frequency as Wi-Fi–just with 6 KW of power. No word on antennas or ERP, though the words “big” and “parabolic” come to mind.
- Print-on-demand meets the magazine business with MagCloud. Basically, the magazine is printed when you order it. All pages are in full color, printed using the HP Indigo technology, with a saddle binding. The price is still steep: 20c per page, giving you a 48 page mag for $9.60. Of course, that’s all content and no ads, so it’s not utterly insane when you consider that a lot of modern magazines are lucky to have 48 pages of Real Stuff. The system works like Lulu for the most part, and if you have the need to publish a short, full-color booklet of some kind it might be worth a look. (Thanks to Jim Dodd for the link.)
- Pete Albrecht sent a link to some WWII posters, and the interesting one is about not using broadcast receivers. Few people know that nearly all ordinary radio receivers are also very low-level radio transmitters, courtesy of the local oscillator or oscillators in the frequency conversion stages. It’s possible to detect superhet receivers at considerable distance using a good directional antenna, and this was evidently done during the War. The BBC also used to do this (and may still, for all I know) to enforce receiver licensing rules, by sending a truck around towns listening for local oscillators and logging street addresses. (I learned this from the UK pub Meccano Magazine circa 1962.)
- It’s the not the fat. It’s the high-fructose corn-syrup. Here’s another brick in the edifice of evidence. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- And finally, a food pyramid that I can get behind.
Odd Lots
- Back when I was in college in the early 70s, a woman friend told me, “The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you’re too damned happy!” Maybe this is the answer.
- Numerous people have sent me links to “St. Patrick Drives the Snakes Out of Ireland” cartoons, and while they’re all good (use Google Images and you’ll see them) they’re not the one I remember, which I’m now pretty sure was published in National Lampoon circa 1974.
- I misunderstood what my sister said about Crayola crayons in my March 13, 2009 Odd Lots. Crayola (once made by Binney & Smith, now part of the Hallmark empire) manufactures a line of washable crayons, and these are what Gretchen prefers that Katie have, given my elder godchild’s penchant for seeing all the world as her coloring book. The washable crayons have no particular smell to them, but the other day when Gretchen and Bill and the girls and I were in the Mount Prospect Hobby Lobby, Gretchen opened a conventional box of 16 Different Crayola Colors and let me sniff them. Yup. That’s the one. Perhaps some things really are forever.
- I’ve thought that the name of the Sci-Fi Channel has been an embarrassment for 16 years. (Actually, so have most of their house-bred feature-length films.) But now, they’re changing their name to…Syfy. And adding professional wrestling to the lineup. The dork-in-chief over there says that he’s been trying since the 1990s to “…distance the network from science fiction.” Mission accomplished, dood.
- From Baron Waste comes a largish drawn panel by Dusty Abell that somehow represents (as far as I know) every significant SF TV show to come out of the 70s. It’s a good proxy for how much TV you watched at the time, muddied by what you may have seen at cons in the middle of the night in intervening years. I can name perhaps a quarter of the shows represented, so I guess I wasn’t particularly tuned in. (I will admit with some embarrassment that the first whose title came to mind was “The Greatest American Hero.”) And although that little robot golem looks familiar, I can’t place the show that it was on.
- From Pete Albrecht comes a page introducing the Decatron tube, which presents for display a circle of thirty neon-lit points that can be configured to move a group of three around the circle each time a pulse enters the circuit. (Follow the links for more detailed information, especially this one.) The tube “remembers” which group of points is illuminated, and so it can be used to build a decade counter, or a divide-by-10 prescaler for slower mechanical counters. Very slick, and reminds us that technology was perhaps a little more sophisticated in 1954 than we remember–because much of it didn’t sit in the corner of the living room.
- Here’s a new kind of egoscan, at least for technical writers: Search Google Patents for your name. I’ve been cited 27 times in patent filings.
- Rich Rostrom reminded me (after I reported close encounters with numerous tumbleweeds on the plains heading out to Chicago) that tumbleweeds are Eurasian imports that hitched a ride along with shipments of agricultural flaxseed from Europe in the 19th Century. Along with other things that we consider iconically American, tumbleweeds actually came from somewhere else. (I guess that makes us the Ecosphere of Immigrants.)
- I didn’t know that Global Warming™ has made it impossible to build good violins. Um…I still don’t.
Odd Lots
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: Chicanes are small kinks placed along the course of an auto race, to make the race more…interesting. Heh.You race. I’ll watch. (But not anywhere near a chicane.) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for teaching me this one.
- According to my good sister Gretchen, that very distinctive and extremely memorable smell of Crayola crayons was due to the animal tallow (probably beef) used in the waxy crayon base material. This is significant because Katie’s pumpkin-shaped bucket of new crayons has no smell at all. None! I may have to buy a set of “classic crayons” on eBay to smell that smell again. (Or maybe I can con my friends into each sending me one of their dupes. Unlike some people, I wouldn’t care if my set consisted of four Periwinkles, three Thistles, five Cornflowers, and a few scruffy Raw Siennas. Variety can be overrated.)
- And just in case you like the smell of classic crayons so much that you want to smell just like them, here’s Crayon Cologne. (Would using that make me a Person of Color?)
- Other kid smells worth recalling are Play-Doh and freshly sharpened pencils. My mother bought a canned wallpaper cleaner compound once in the 1970s that looked and smelled a great deal like Play-Doh. In sniffing around online, I found in Wikipedia that the Play-Doh compound was originally marketed as…a wallpaper cleaner. And even today, I occasionally pull the casing off my electric pencil sharpener and take a deep whiff.
- More kid stuff: Did any of you ever have a Puffer Kite? And if so, did you live in or near Chicago? The Puffer was an inflatable kite, something like a beach toy in the shape of a pork chop, with a grommet for a string. It was patented in 1967 and I had one while I was in college, circa 1973. I’m gathering what little information exists about the Puffer Kite, and it appears to have been a Chicago product, made by the Fredricks Corporation, precise address unknown. I’ve written to a man who may be the heir of the Fredricks operation, and we’ll see what comes of it.
- More than half of the boggling numbers of mortgage forclosures have occurred in only 35 counties across the US, with 25% occurring in only eight counties. (Alas, the crappily written article does not name them.) States like Nebraska, Kansas, and Kentucky (and most other flyover states) had no counties at all where there were over 20 foreclosures per thousand households, and yet people in small towns and rural areas are essentially bailing out big cities with their tax money. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the pointer.)
- One of the most wonderful collection of mad-scientist backgrounder material I’ve seen in quite awhile can be found at Mike’s Electric Stuff. Geissler tubes, Nixie tubes, and (do not miss this one!) what is arguably the world’s first integrated circuit, made in 1926 and providing resistors, capacitors, and three vacuum tubes in a single glass envelope!
- If you like your radios steampunkish, check out Sparkbench, with some of the most beautifully executed homebrew radios I’ve ever seen. More here.
- The longest-lived person on the Duntemann family tree so far is Alvina Duntemann Wille, who lived from 1880 to 1978. She was the daughter of Louis Duntemann, my great-great grandfather’s younger brother, and lived her entire life in Mount Prospect, Illinois, in a house that stood where the Busse Car Wash stands today, right on Prospect at Maple. My great-grandmother Martha Winkelmann Duntemann did all right too, and made it to 96, outliving all four of my grandparents. I hope to do as well.
Odd Lots
- The dairy that delivered milk to our house when I was a kid was indeed Hawthorn Mellody Farms (as verified by the Sister of Eidetic Recall) which was unusual in several ways: They had an amusement park in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a miniature train ride, a petting zoo, Western town, and pony rides, that was a famous destination in the 50s for suburban moms with station wagons full of Boomer kids. They were the first dairy to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons. And before they went bankrupt in 1992, they were one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
- Also relevant to my entry of Febraury 24, 2009: Dunteman’s Dairy evidently existed before 1939. A page out of the 1937 Arlington Heights phone book from Digital Past shows an entry for Dunteman’s Dairy at 830 N. Dunton Avenue in Arlington Heights. The 1936 phone book shows a listing at the same address for “L. Dunteman,” so Lenard may have begun operating the dairy from his back yard (not an uncommon thing to do back then!) in that year. Prior to 1936 his listing shows yet a different address. I’ll have to see what’s at that address today the next time I’m in the area.
- Digital Past is a very good source if you’re doing genealogy research on Chicago’s northwest suburbs; awhile back I found the location and a photo of the headstone of Laura Brommelkamp Dunteman there, after looking in vain for some years. (She was the second wife of Henry Dunteman, founder of R. W. Dunteman Construction, which is still in operation in Chicago’s western burbs.)
- Well, grub is still plug-ugly, but it’s no longer difficult to configure. I’ve been using KGrubEditor for over a month now, and it makes the job a breeze. Highly recommended.
- Where’s my flying car? Well, it may be here: Yet another Skycar concept, but this time it’s more Mad Max than Flash Gordon. Put a big fan on the back of a go-kart, get up some speed, and then release the parawing. Off you go!
- Philip Jose Farmer has left us. Along with Heinlein, Clarke, and Keith Laumer, Farmer was one of the SF writers who inspired me to keep going and make something of myself in fiction. I still consider the Riverworld concept one of the most compelling ideas ever to surface in SF, even though the series wandered toward the end and would have been much better had it been three books (on the outside, four) instead of five.
- I was going to do a whole entry on this, but Cory Doctorow said everything I intended to say about whackjob Roy Blount Jr and the knucklehead Authors’ Guild, who want money from anyone who does text-to-speech. There’s nothing I can add, and as a longtime author who still makes money writing, I think I have a right to strong opinions about this. Let me quote Cory here, and cheer:
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Time and again, the Author’s Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online.
