Odd Lots
- Somebody over at USA Today seems to think that Colorado is just a little too high… (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
- Not new news, but startling: They’re still digging up live, century-old ordnance in France and Belgium. I suspect they’ll still be digging it up a century from now.
- Here’s an overview of how to write custom components for the Lazarus Component Library (LCL). Doesn’t have anything on Ray Konopka’s book, alas.
- How much of each chemical element is there in the Earth’s crust? Among other revelations, there’s 150% as much ytterbium as uranium. In fact, there’s more ytterbium on Earth than tin.
- There is a small circuit-board add-on that snaps onto a Raspberry Pi and provides a tube audio amp. (Thanks to Rick Hellewell for the link.)
- Going further back in Unlikely Time reveals a plethora of Steampunk Raspberry Pi cases.
- In truth, my experience shows that you can search for images of “steampunk [whatever]” and find it. Oftentimes a lot of it. Try steampunk Geiger counters.
- Ya blink and ya miss it: Sandisk now has a 512GB SD card.
- Note well: There are also fakes. Amazon keeps taking them down, and they keep coming back. (Read the single comment.)
- Baron Waste sends a link to a marvelous gallery of high-res photos of mechanical calculator innards. One of the inspirations for The Cunning Blood was the insight that my Selectric typewriter contained no electronics at all, and could be run from a windmill or a water wheel.
- From the I-Am-Not-Making-This-Up Department: Wikipedia has a list of sexually active popes; it’s incomplete. Who knew?
- A guy at a Russian Renaissance Faire hurled a spear at a drone–and hit it. That is capital-B badassery in my book. Me, I would have used a Wrist Rocket–but I’m neither medieval nor Russian.
- Not all of us are fooled: If you have to signal it, it’s not virtue.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: hardware · history · humor · lazarus · media · pascal · programming · science
"
It’s not just the land that has unexplored ordnance. Every year ships from NATO get together and do an exercise to look for and destroy old mines in the Baltic Sea. There are somewhere from 50-100k of them still out there from WW1 and WW2.
The people at USA Today are high. That’s not Colorado they highlighted in the map.
Oh, I guess that was what you were pointing out as “too high.” 🙂
Yup. Subtlety has its benefits, but also its costs.
And newspapers, well, they’re doomed.
A few years ago, an American Civil War collector was grinding rust off a recently discovered artillery shell when it exploded and killed him.
Also. in 1993, builders in the District of Columbia discovered a lot of buried junk from the Army’s WW I poison gas project. It’s still being cleaned up.
Nicely put. Consider it stolen.
I write all this stuff to be stolen. Steal away!
Not relevant to your Odd Lots list, but this seems to fit better here than elsewhere: when will your RasPi book be available for purchase? I need to set up two or three Pis for various servers here, and am perfectly willing to shell out the lordly sum for your book as a how-to if it’ll be out soon-ish.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking the end of the summer. That said, it’s a computer architecture book for high schoolers (British ones, in truth) and doesn’t have anything about setting up RPis as servers. I wrote about half the book a couple of years ago, and after thinking the project was dead, the publisher popped up a month or so ago and said, “Surprise! We’re still here!”
I’ll certainly announce it here when it’s available, but my portion is finished and I suspect the schedule depends almost entirely on my as-yet-unknown co-author. (He exists. I just don’t know his name.)
Got it. Doesn’t sound like it’ll be useful for me (what with my BS being in computer engineering) but it could be good for my daughter. (Eight years old and she’s already designed and assembled projects for Arduinos and has written the sketches with suggestions but no real assistance.)
In the photos of mechanical calcluators, they overlooked the Curta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loI1Kwed8Pk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnTb26WHx2Q