{"id":2205,"date":"2011-11-29T21:05:52","date_gmt":"2011-11-30T04:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2205"},"modified":"2011-11-29T21:05:52","modified_gmt":"2011-11-30T04:05:52","slug":"odd-lots-175","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2205","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>You&#8217;re getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned&#8211;I&#8217;ll try and explain tomorrow, if I don&#8217;t run out of Aleve.<\/li>\n<li>Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.artima.com\/weblogs\/viewpost.jsp?thread=338317\" target=\"_blank\">the damned thing will not render .mobi files<\/a>. C&#8217;mon, Amazon. I mean, come <em>on<\/em>. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geek.com\/articles\/gadgets\/leaked-xoom-2-will-be-called-the-motorola-droid-xyboard-20111121\/\" target=\"_blank\">it&#8217;s going to be called the Droid XYboard<\/a> to distance itself from the Xoom brand, which was done in because Somebody Didn&#8217;t Want It To Have a Card Slot. (Don&#8217;t know who. Have suspicions.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.antipope.org\/charlie\/blog-static\/2011\/11\/cutting-their-own-throats.html\" target=\"_blank\">Charlie Stross makes a good case<\/a> that DRM on ebooks (as required by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fictionmatters.com\/2010\/03\/05\/who-are-\u201cthe-big-six\u201d\/\" target=\"_blank\">Big Six<\/a>) is a stick handed to Amazon with which to pummel the Big Six. Read the piece, follow the links (make sure you know what a &#8220;monopsony&#8221; is) and then read the comments.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission_pages\/sunearth\/news\/lightning-waves.html\" target=\"_blank\">Schumann resonance waves can apparently be detected from space<\/a>. This is surprising, as my earlier readings suggested that they only exist by virtue of a sort of immaterial waveguide formed by layers in the Earth&#8217;s atmosphere&#8211;the same waveguide effect that allows hams like me to bounce signals around the world.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/hplusmagazine.com\/2011\/01\/10\/theres-plenty-more-room-bottom-beyond-nanotech-femtotech\/\" target=\"_blank\">Femtotech?<\/a> I postulated a &#8220;femtoscope&#8221; in my novel <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cunning-Blood-Jeff-Duntemann\/dp\/0975915622\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1322504062&amp;sr=8-1\" target=\"_blank\">The Cunning Blood<\/a><\/em>, but it was used to plot quantum pair creation and did not rely on exotic matter. I&#8217;m not sure such things are possible, or could be done in any environment where we could live or even work through proxies. But as with a lot of things (especially LENR) I would hugely enjoy being wrong.<\/li>\n<li>I torrented down the brand-new <a href=\"http:\/\/linuxmint.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Linux Mint 12 Lisa<\/a> the other day, and like its predecessor it will not detect the video hardware correctly on my 2009-era Core 2 Quad with NVidia 630i integrated graphics. Somewhat surprisingly, it will install on an older Dell GX620 USFF with (as best I can tell) no video problems. Not sure if I like GNOME 3, though. <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/Perberos\/Mate-Desktop-Environment\" target=\"_blank\">MATE<\/a>, a GNOME 2 fork, has promise.<\/li>\n<li>I may have made this point once before, but hard steampunk authors should have the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lindsaybks.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lindsay Books<\/a> catalog on hand, or at least have the site bookmarked. These are books explaining how to actually <em>do<\/em> steampunk technology, often in the form of reprints of original Victorian-era reference texts. Thermite, brass, steam engines, and loads of other goodies just as great-great grandpa learned them. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the noodge.)<\/li>\n<li>One of my German friends told me that plagiarism in German doctoral theses is so widespread that it&#8217;s spawned <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/VroniPlag_Wiki\" target=\"_blank\">a crowdsourced mechanism for detecting it<\/a>. That&#8217;s the abbreviated English-language version; if you have a reasonable amount of German, go to <a href=\"http:\/\/de.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/VroniPlag\" target=\"_blank\">the richer, fuller main page<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-B0iU19JdG8&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\">Very spooky time-lapse video of a little-known physical phenomenon<\/a>. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=offwmDXZq0s&amp;feature=player_embedded\" target=\"_blank\">I originally thought this was a hoax<\/a>. On the other hand, I have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Schylling-NTN-Tim-Bird\/dp\/B000ELORZO\" target=\"_blank\">a Tim Bird<\/a> and I love it. It&#8217;s hard to believe that such things actually work as well as they do.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes you wear what you eat&#8211;or at least <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ilovebacon.com\/fresh-bacon\/nice-scarf.html\" target=\"_blank\">a reasonable facsimile<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;re getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned&#8211;I&#8217;ll try and explain tomorrow, if I don&#8217;t run out of Aleve. Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C&#8217;mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.) Xoom 2, [&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":[17,37,15,43,59,16,54,110,58],"class_list":["post-2205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-linux","tag-publishing","tag-science","tag-tablets","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205","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=2205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}