{"id":1075,"date":"2010-01-13T00:00:54","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T04:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1075"},"modified":"2010-01-13T00:00:54","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T04:00:54","slug":"odd-lots-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1075","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>We take digital clocks for granted, but <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/archive\/2010\/01\/digital_clock_with_no_ics.html\">this project may give you some perspective<\/a> on just how difficult a challenge a digital clock really is. Absent integrated circuits, it takes over 1200 discrete electronic components to make a 6-digit digital clock. And you can get a kit.<\/li>\n<li>Maybe RCA&#8217;s engineers are having a little fun with us. It&#8217;s hard to tell sometimes, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ohgizmo.com\/2010\/01\/09\/ces2010-rca-airnergy-charger-harvests-electricity-from-wifi\/\">I<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ohgizmo.com\/2010\/01\/09\/ces2010-rca-airnergy-charger-harvests-electricity-from-wifi\/\">still don&#8217;t understand how this thing is not a hoax<\/a>. I maybe know a little bit about both RF power physics (37 years in ham radio) and Wi-Fi. If there&#8217;s a place in the world with enough Wi-Fi hotspots to make that little box generate useful power, please tell me where, so I can be sure never to go anywhere near it.<\/li>\n<li>Several people have noticed that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Jeff-Duntemann\/e\/B000AP9EGQ\/ref=sr_tc_2_0\">my author bio photo on Amazon has been replaced by someone else&#8217;s<\/a>. Most oddly, the photo is of my old friend Jon Shemitz of Santa Cruz, who&#8217;s done some very good books on Kylix and .NET 2.0. I&#8217;ve been trying to get Amazon&#8217;s attention for a couple of weeks now, no luck yet.<\/li>\n<li>Classmates.com did it again: They sent me an email asking whether I&#8217;d like to reconnect with a girl from my high school class. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=976\">As I&#8217;ve said before<\/a>, Lane Tech High was all-male until several years after I graduated, so there was no Teresa Mazzerelli in my class&#8211;nor does she appear in the alumni directory. One I could call a database error. Two I call fraud. <em>Don&#8217;t give these guys your money<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Malt is my favorite ice cream flavor, but it&#8217;s very hard to come by. Several companies have offered it in the last ten or twelve years, including Meadow Gold and Boulder, but the flavor has always vanished after a few months. <a href=\"http:\/\/tinkeringwithdinner.blogspot.com\/2009\/07\/marshmallow-chocolate-malt-ice-cream.html\">I guess I may just have to make my own<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2010\/01\/12\/sprint-hooking-up-with-walmart-for-wimax-buildout\/\">Sprint may be partnering with Wal-Mart<\/a> to put WiMax nodes on top of every single Wal-Mart in the country. This is not the first time I&#8217;ve heard this, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/october2005.htm#10-18-2005\">and have reported on it before<\/a>, but having had some experience with something a little like WiMax, I think it could be a huge moneymaker for Wal-Mart if they don&#8217;t let the control freaks at Sprint ruin it.<\/li>\n<li>From the Words-I-Hadn&#8217;t-Heard-In-Thirty-Years-Until-Yesterday Department: <em>bildungsroman<\/em>, a coming-of-age novel. Why, then, does it suggest erecting a shrine to the Emperor out of cow pies?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We take digital clocks for granted, but this project may give you some perspective on just how difficult a challenge a digital clock really is. Absent integrated circuits, it takes over 1200 discrete electronic components to make a 6-digit digital clock. And you can get a kit. Maybe RCA&#8217;s engineers are having a little fun [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[21,37,43,91,92],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-electronics","tag-food","tag-humor","tag-scams","tag-wi-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}