- Not posting often here, but I’m ok. Working hard on several things, chief of which is getting my office and Carol’s exchanged, outfitted, and fully functional. This involves furniture, wiring, lighting, and sorting an immense quantity of glarble. I hope to return to regular in-depth posting soon.
- I have a new favorite cheese: cave-aged gruyere, which can be had sometimes at King Soopers, and is lucious with a good dry red wine. Get the oldest cheese you can find, as young gruyere tastes nothing like old gruyere. A year is as young as I buy.
- The asteroid that whacked the dinosaurs must have thrown an immense amount of material into space. How much rock might have made the journey, and how far far did it go? Here’s a good quick take on the topic. It would take a million years or more to get to Gliese 581, but suitably rugged bacterial spores might have survived, and made the origin of life on planets there unnecessary. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- A book I’m not bullish on: Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, which describes how the cause of cholera (infected water) was proven by the persistent John Snow through charting of cholera deaths upon a map of London neighborhood water pumps. Why? The book does not include the actual ghost map named in the title. (So what else is missing or wrong?) Whatever editor let that past should be fired and spend the rest of his/her days stuffing toddler clothes in racks at Wal Mart.
- Could the TRS-80 Mod 100 possibly be 30 years old? Yes indeedy, and it was ubiquitous among tech journalists when I was at PC Tech Journal in ’85-86. Its keycaps made a distinctive sound, and sitting in a significant press conference back then was like sitting under a tin roof in a rainstorm. I yearned for one myself (the keyboard was wonderful for such a small device) but didn’t pull the trigger because the machine did so little other than keystroke capture.
- Toward the end of my tenure at Xerox I saw the Sunrise, which was a more ambitious take on the “lapslab” concept. My department was considering writing an app for it, so I had a loaner for awhile. Even better keyboard than the TRS 100, cassette data storage, modem…but the 3-line display was harder to read. Xerox private-labeled the hardware from another company, and basically killed it with a $1500 price point. (There was a flashier version that cost…$2500!) Xerox abandoned the market in 1984, after sinking what rumor held to be an obscene amount of money into it.
- One machine I did consider was the Exidy Sorcerer, which also had a good keyboard and didn’t cost $3000. Lack of software made me spend the $3000 anyway, on a huge honking S100 system running a 1 MHz 8080.
- One of the big issues between Amazon and the Big Six is an explosion of co-op fees, which according to some reports have increased by 30 times since 2011. The whole “co-op” business has always smelled gamey to me, but it had a purpose in the B&M bookselling world. How it fits into online ebook retailing is less clear, and in my view starts leaning perilously in the direction of bribery.
- Most of us think that reading is in decline. Gallup poll results suggest otherwise. Nor are today’s books worse than those of 40+ years ago. This quote is significant: “The bad [books] of yesteryear have gone out of print while the bad ones of today are alive and being sold in supermarkets.”
- I’m still watching the ASUS Tranformer Prime (their botch of its GPS support has kept me away for the time being) but the Prime has a little (as in cheaper) brother now, and it looks like a decent machine in its own right. Here’s Engadget’s detailed review of theTransformer Pad TF-300.
- Here’s another wonderful gallery from Dark Roasted Blend, this time of high-speed photos of liquids. Some of it is photoshopped, but it’s all startling. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- Santorini is smouldering again. Yes, the volcano that may have made the Minoans extinct and launched the legend of Atlantis (or at least put an older legend on the map) is getting restless. Like the Greeks need that right now.
- Eating meat allowed our hominid ancestors to reproduce more quickly, by accelerating infant brain growth and thus shortening the breastfeeding period. (Breastfeeding naturally inhibits ovulation.) This on top of several other issues.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Beatboxing , which is vocal generation of sounds like drums and synthesized sound effects. I heard of this in an interesting way: There’s a slightly silly commercial for the Honda Pilot that involves a Pilot full of bored tweens beatboxing the rhythm of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” and by chance we had captioning turned on. When the kids started making noises, the captioning read, “Beatboxing.”
- Pete Albrecht sends a link to a map color-coding US gas prices by county. The very abrupt differences between states suggests that gas prices are more a question of state and local taxes than regional differences in demand.
- It was inevitable: A 3D printer that prints chocolate novelties. Now we need a 3D printer that prints spice-cake Easter lambs with ears that stay on.
music
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- For the several people who asked: The odor-free carpet pad that we used in carpeting the lower level here is called Napa Carpet Cushion, from Leggett & Platt.
- Apart from N&P’s Fallen Angels, Bob Tucker’s Ice and Iron, and possibly Mackelworth’s Tiltangle, what other SF novels involve an ice age on Earth in the near(ish) future? I have a concept that capitalizes on all my recent paleoclimate research, and I’d like to see if it’s already been done.
- Whoops, found a list just before posting this. I clearly have some reading to do, assuming I can find any of these items. What are your personal favorites?
- Today’s sunspot number is very close to zero. I haven’t seen sunspot activity this low in some time, and here we are supposedly barreling into the Cycle 24 maximum. The sunspot number is going in the wrong direction. 6M DX is evidently not in my immediate future.
- Joe Flamini and Jack Smith are both pretty sure that the mysterious Comco gizmo I presented in my February 6, 2012 entry is an early remote control unit for commercial and public service radio systems, allowing control of a transmitter or repeater through leased phone lines. More on this in a future entry.
- Having read briefly about hydraulic analog computing in a magazine decades ago, I built hydraulic calculators and computers into the technological background for my novel The Cunning Blood. Turns out the Russians did it on a pretty large scale back in the years running up to WWII. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- From the You-Probably-Couldn’t-Do-That-Today Department: The flipside of the Chad Mitchell Trio’s 1963 hit kid/Christmas 45 “The Marvelous Toy” was “The Bonny Streets of Fyve-I-O, about a colonel who shoots one of his own captains for insubordination.
- Tucows (does anybody even remember Tucows?) is launching a contract-free mobile service using Sprint’s network. The rates are interesting, and favor people who want smartphones but just don’t use them much, and data little or not at all.
- The Maker Shed has a $99 Geiger counter kit that allows logging of pulses through a serial port, and detects both beta and gamma radiation.
- A little gruesome maybe, but it’s real: When we lived in California in the late ’80s, there were reports of sneakers washing up on Santa Cruz area beaches…with human feet still inside them. At the time we assumed drug violence, but there’s a less scurrilous if no less ghastly explanation for a phenomenon that’s still happening. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Mmmph. Military combat aircraft should be able to fly in more air than we’re used to, no? Sweden had this problem recently. (I’m guessing that Saab has it too, now.) Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.
- The name of my company, Copperwood Media, LLC, was inspired by a set of traces on an old PCB that just happened to look (a little) like a tree. I had an artist draw me a better copper tree for the logo, way back in 2000. Now Rich Rostrom sends a link to the odd tradition in some parts of the UK of hammering coins into cracks in trees until the notion of “copperwood” takes on a whole new meaning.
- Some very nice steampunk watches and jewelry. “Chronambulator” is a great word, whether or not you’ve got a steampunk gizmo to hang it on. Note also the level-reading absinthe hip-flask. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
Odd Lots
- Very cool: a home-made wire stripper that tells you when you’ve cut the insulation precisely as far as necessary.
- I’ve of two minds about the genre of infographics, but this one appears to capture a pretty complicated business in a fairly small space: That fat does not make you fat. (Thanks to Apostle of Eris on LiveJournal for the link.)
- Jim Strickland showed me something startling when I was up in Denver this past Monday: A cylindrical neodymium magnet slowly tumbling as it drifts down a 2′ length of copper pipe. Drop it at the top, and then watch it (against a reasonably bright floor) as it goes. Videos are on YouTube. No mystery; just physics, courtesy Lenz’s Law.
- Also from Jim is a link to some discussion about why McGraw-Hill seems willing to accept $15 iPad-based secondary-ed ebooks instead of $75-a-pop print textbooks. Most of it comes down to eliminating the resale market, and receiving that $15 from every student who ever uses that book. Expect resistance from many quarters, including this one.
- Those who remember the Steeleye Span song “Seven Hundred Elves” from the 70s may be interested to know that it was only the first part of a much longer and much older poem. (Long forum thread; read it all.)
- Here are some peculiar ways to deliver toothpaste, including Crest-flavored pudding and pie filling. No, I don’t understand that one either, unless it falls under the category of “business development.”
- This certainly sounds like a hoax to me, but whether it’s a hoax or not, it might be seed corn for some interesting fiction. (Thanks to Bishop Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Read the Wiki piece carefully, and you’ll discover that Graham crackers were invented circa 1829 by a preacher who thought that eating them would discourage masturbation. Oh…ditto corn flakes.
- In conclusion, don’t forget to watch The Puppy Bowl later today! (Football? Wazzat?)
Odd Lots
- I’m still alive, and still remodeling. Designing two more Elfa buildouts, in fact, before the Container Store’s annual Elfa sale times out on January 31. Getting migraines from craning my neck during ladder work, too, which has made me disinclined to be perky in this space. It won’t be forever; the painting was finished today, finally. But it will be February before the carpeting’s in.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: plectrum, an implement used to pluck the strings of a stringed instrument such as a guitar or harpsichord. Among the many forms of plectra are guitar picks and harpsichord jacks.
- Here’s an intriguing list of major solar flare events, beginning with the Carrington Event in 1859. Is it just me, or has the Sun done a lot of quieting down in the last 100-odd years?
- Why Megaupload? Those guys had four percent of all Internet traffic worldwide, all of it Linux distros and Project Gutenberg mirrors. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah.
- On the other hand, there are a lot of people who were using Megaupload as a cloud server for their own files. And you wonder why I like local storage.
- As I take a break from remodeling to try and get my head around various current IP topics, it occurs to me that the well-covered Megaupload bust is Streisanding the hell out of the bitlocker concept itself. People who had never heard of bitlockers (alias “one-click hosting”) or indexes like FilesTube are doubtless adding lots of new bookmarks today.
- That swoopy one-piece telephone with the dial on the bottom that you used to see in a lot of spy movies and TV shows? The Ericophon.
- Nancy Frier has found a niche printing firm that can actually print from then original plates used in Alox kites, and so new kites using the original Alox designs may well live again. More as it happens.
- This dream is such a common phenomenon that the dream itself must have a name. What is it? (I’ve had it now and then for probably thirty years.)
- Is there a utility that will search a Web page or pages for a list of search terms every X minutes / days / weeks ?
Odd Lots
- Of all the essential elements of science, proving causation is by far the hardest. Correlation only points in a direction that further research should take; it has no value in and of itself. (The title of the article is very hokey, by the way: Science is not failing us. Human ignorance–and corruption–are interfering with the scientific process.)
- Marvelously wrought steampunk playing cards. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
- I went to high school with one of these guys. (Joe Lill.) Very impressive piece of work. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht–another high school colleague–for the link.)
- I got one of these for Christmas from Lee Hart. We’ll soon see if I can still write COSMAC binary machine code in my head, 35 years later. F8 FF A2…
- Carol presented me with Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I will report after I finish it. Pinker’s stuff is always worth reading, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time.
- The Ropers (my sister Gretchen, Bill, and her girls) gave me one of these for Christmas, and having tested it on a few Meccano parts downstairs, I suspect it may turn out to be the best hex nut starter I’ve ever had.
- This is the first waterproof (more or less) tablet I’ve ever seen, and in my preferred 4:3 format to boot. And a MicroSD slot for sideloading! Details are still sparse, but it’s the first CES 2012 announcement that hasn’t made me yawn.
- I bought a Nook Color last week; more in upcoming posts. I heard today that you can now get a Nook Color for $99 or a Nook Simple Touch for free with a one-year subscription to the New York Times or People. I don’t know if this is good for the industry or not, but it may well do wonderful things for the Nook’s market share.
- There are challenges to living in the best Effin town in Ireland. (But nothing like those of a certain town in Austria.) Thanks to G. McDavid for the link.
- I offer this interesting piece as a glimpse into my ongoing research into the drivers of climate. I have long intuited that climate is a chaotic system, and we see evidence of two states in recent geological history. What the attractors are, and whether there are other states are questions of enormous importance, as is the question of how bad a change to the other known state would be. Note well: My tolerance of Climate Madness is now close to zero. Please limit comments to the points made in the article. If you wander into politics or comment angrily your posts will be deleted without hesitation or regret.
Odd Lots
- 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
- 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
- After being in the water for as many as four years, a broken camera turns up on a California beach with the SD card still in it…and still functional, complete with a hundred-odd photos taken before the camera was lost. I marvel first at the durability of these cards in a corrosive medium–and then at how little circuit board there actually is inside the SD card itself. Wow.
- There is an ice cream truck that goes down Alles Street here in Des Plaines, playing a midi riff of a familiar old song–and, periodically, a slightly creepy woman’s voice calling, “Hello!” This is evidently pretty common, but judging by some quick online research, the songs are different for almost every ice cream truck out there. (The “Hello” voice appears to be the same.) The truck came by here late yesterday, shortly before the storm rolled in, and I suddenly recognized the song: a bouncy variation on the old Southern hymn “Holy Manna,” often known as “Brethren We Have Come to Worship.”
- And pertinent to the above: I only recognized the melody because Lorie Line played it in a medley with “The Lord of the Dance” on her Heritage Collection Volume 1 CD. She plays it fast, much faster than I’ve ever heard the majestic old hymn itself played in church. (The song is not credited by name on the CD, but it’s there–and the CD is very much worth having.)
- Damned if these don’t look like drumlins. On Mars. (The other kind of drumlins–and yes, I am very familiar with them. More on the naming of alien artifacts in an upcoming entry.)
- I’ll come back to this issue once I’m home and decompressed a little, but Glenn Reynolds posted a case history of a man who had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (also called NASH in some circles, for Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis) eventually ascribed to eating/drinking fructose. Depending on your genetics and how much you consume, fructose can send you all the way to cirrhosis and death. This article (linked to by Reynolds) is a must-read. This one is worthwhile as well. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for alerting me to the post.)
- And while we’re slogging through the Carb Wars, well, fake fat makes you fat. (More and more research indicates that real fat does not.) And let’s not forget that little issue of “anal leakage,” gurrkh. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Xoom, meet SD slot. SD slot, meet Xoom. You guys have been traveling together for over a year. It’s time to shake hands. In Europe . The problem in the US has to do with the “Google Experience.” Somebody at Google is holding back card slot support, and thus (I’m guessing) a great many sales, including one to me. I smell rentseeking somewhere.
- On the other hand, if all you want is an Android ebook reader, this might be worth a look. $99? Who cares if it’s only Froyo? (Forgive me if I’m skeptical that it’ll ever see retailer shelves at that price.)
- The creator of this device calls it “technofetishism,” and it is. That doesn’t keep it from being amazing, and killer cool. (Thanks to Bill WB4WTN for the link.)
- Finally: How To Make a Mask With Photoshop. I always wondered if that would work.
How Music Really Oughta Work
I just got back from Big Family Easter In Chicago, where it rained eight out of the ten days we were there. So I’m drying out, catching my breath, tinkering with the outline of Ten Gentle Opportunities, and trying to iron out a long list of wrinkles in several ebook projects. I’m crosseyed from poking at details, so I’ll take ten minutes out for a slightly tangled story. This may start to sound like an episode of James Burke’s Connections after awhile, but bear with me.
Marci Braun (scroll down a little) is a popular country/western DJ on Chicago’s big country station US99.5. She’s also Carol’s sister’s husband’s cousin’s daughter, and we’ve seen her here and there at family gatherings on Carol’s side since she was a pre-teen. The first time we took Dash to Chicago (he was nine weeks old at the time) he was a big hit at our nephew Matt’s college graduation party, and he bonded with Marci in a country hemidemisemiquaver. So I listen to her when I know she’ll be on the air, and she has a lot to do with my growing affection for country music. Oh, and the fact that pop music is now completely incoherent, lacking warmth, melody, harmony, and just about everything else that I value. Several of my friends among the Educated Elite grumble at me for listening to country music (“It’s so, so, well, Republican!“) but I just tell them that if they can bring back close harmony and clever lyrics to pop music, I’ll jump. In the meantime, I listen to country and classical. Draw whatever conclusions you wish. (No points for the obvious one that I take great pleasure in annoying the Educated Elite.)
Anyway. A week ago Monday night, while I was driving from our condo in Des Plaines to Crystal Lake after not seeing Carol for three days, I punched the 99.5 button on the car radio, and Marci was there. (Actually, odds are that she was a digital audio file at that moment, but that’s just how the radio business works.) She ran a commercial, and then introduced a song: Darius Rucker’s “This.” Great raving upbeat piece, celebrating a life that turned out very well somehow, in spite of all the mistakes we make and the bad luck that comes as a side dish to life’s main course, generally right there beside the lima beans.
Brilliant lyric, which you can read here. The gist:
I don’t really know how I got here
But I’m sure glad that I did;
And it’s crazy to think that one little thing
Could’ve changed all of it.Maybe it didn’t turn out like I planned–
Maybe that’s why I’m such, such a lucky man!For every stoplight I didn’t make;
Every chance I did or I didn’t take;
All the nights I went too far;
All the girls that broke my heart;
All the doors that I had to close;
All the things I knew but I didn’t know
Thank God for all I missed
Cause it led me here to
This.
If you like feel-good music, go buy that song, which will cost you the same as a small Diet Coke at McDonalds, and will stay with you a lot longer. Just as the song began I was coming out of the Union Pacific underpass on Northwest Highway just west of Des Plaines, and there was a freight train heading by overhead. At the song’s inspiration, I was reflecting on how much I like my life. I’ve gotten almost everything I’ve ever wanted, granting that some of it took awhile. I found my soulmate at 17, and my life’s work at 33. That may have been optimal: Had I not met Carol that early I would probably have lost her to someone else, because at 16 she didn’t know yet how hot she really was. (And anyone who knew me when I was 17 will recall how hot I wasn’t.) If I hadn’t worked at technical pursuits before I discovered that I was an editor and a tech writer, well, I might have tried to make a living on SF (ha!) or given up on writing entirely. Everything just seemed to flow, one small success from another, with equal parts luck and hard work to drive the machinery. I had it: Dogs, houses, sunsets, tube sockets, saints up and down the family tree, everything. (I even had a pickup truck once.)
Luck. Trains. Whew. In 1977 I was driving home from my mom’s house along Devon avenue, and I raced a train to a crossing. I made it by two car lengths. Why? I don’t know. It was by several orders of magnitude the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, and if my dad’s anemic, beat-to-hell ’74 AMC wagon had been just a little bit out of tune, I would have died in 1977. I had been married to Carol for less than a year, and had not yet completed wire-wrapping my first computer. I was just getting out of first gear. Damn, I’d barely gotten out of park.
Stupidity comes in smaller containers as well. I told my broker to buy $5,000 worth of Microsoft stock a month after they went public in 1986. She offered me a limited partnership instead, and I took it rather than chewing her ass to go back and do what I told her. But compared to being splatted by a General Electric U23B, hey, small potatoes.
Like I said, great song. I got home to Colorado, fired up Firefox, found the song among Amazon’s DRM-free 99c MP3s, and ninety seconds later it was playing. It’s not tied to a particular player or DRM technology, so there’s no reason to think I won’t be playing it twenty years from now. Certainly we’ll play it at our 40th wedding anniverary party in 2016, where I will wear my expensive cowboy hat and dare y’all to dance.
That’s how music ought to work: You hear a song somewhere that you’d like to hear again, so you find it online, pay for it quickly and easily, download it, and keep it forever. I remember 45s and LP vinyl. (Hell, I remember 78s.) I remember 8″ reel-to-reel. I remember 8-tracks and cassettes and CDs. I remember my Diamond Rio. I still have an iPod. Maybe we had to pass through all that to get where we are today, and maybe it might have turned out differently had some engineer been brighter or Sony not as dumb as they always turn out to be. Doesn’t matter. The message hasn’t gotten out to every last corner of the world, but as long as Amazon’s system or something like it exists, music is where it needs to be.
Play it again. Play it forever. We’ve arrived.
Odd Lots
- A 20-year study does suggest that personality affects longevity, though interpreting the results sounds tricky. The question arises whether personality can be changed, and if not, well, longevity is (as I’ve long suspected) almost entirely in the genes. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I had never heard of Kindle novelist Amanda Hocking until a week or two ago, but she’s obviously doing something right. What I think she may be doing right is accruing fans, as Kevin Kelly suggested back in 2008. Get to 1000 fans, and you can make a living. (She clearly has more than 1000 fans.)
- A Wi-Fi only Xoom will go on sale at the end of March at a $599 price point. I’m still waiting for them to make the SD card slot work, but it’s nice to see some flexibility in other areas.
- A 128GB SDXC card was inevitable (and still expensive–though check back in an hour or so) but I wonder what devices can actually use it. Most of the “barrier” issues are with Windows; Linux does not differentiate between SDHC and SDXC cards as long as they have compatible filesystems.
- It’s not blogs that have debased American politics. It’s email–email sent to you by your aunt, who tells you to forward it to everyone in your address book. We laugh, but new research suggests that the strategy works.
- Digging around in the shop the other night I found an envelope of crystal pairs for my old Standard 2M HT, which I bought in 1976. That was a great radio, built like a brick, and I’m looking to get another one. I’m watching eBay, but if you have one in the pile somewhere you might part with, I’m interested.
- OMG! There are still potato chips fried in lard! Glorioski!
- We’re finally starting to admit it: Fruit will make you fat. I ration fruit to three or four servings a week. Fruit is candy and almost entirely sugar, much of it fructose, which basically goes straight to your gut.
- And while we’re talking food, consider: If a dozen eggs cost about $2 where you live (as they do here, sometimes cheaper) that means that two eggs plus a little butter to fry them in will set you back about 35 cents. That’s cheap calories, and good ones.
- While listening to the 1968 Association song “Six Man Band” the other day, a line in the lyrics caught my attention: “We’ve got the seventeen jewels that dictate the rules…” How many people under the age of 25 or so have any idea what this refers to?
