{"id":2334,"date":"2012-02-28T19:46:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T02:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2334"},"modified":"2012-02-28T19:46:56","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T02:46:56","slug":"odd-lots-184","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2334","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>You can <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/2012\/02\/27\/anodize-titanium-with-common-ingredients\/\" target=\"_blank\">anodize titanium to give it a color finish<\/a> using ordinary household ingredients like Coca Cola and electrons. Lots of electrons. (Alas, I don&#8217;t have enough Coke here to dunk my A-12.)<\/li>\n<li>The more I look at devices like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/02\/27\/asus-outs-lower-end-transformer-pad-300-tablet-with-16gb-of-stor\/\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a>, the more I feel that it represents the future of high-end mobile computing. I also think it will accelerate the evolution of mobile device UIs, which are not in any shape (currently) to be productive in content creation or editing.<\/li>\n<li>This seems just, well, <em>nuts<\/em> to me, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/Backup-Your-Data-on-Usenet-(Ubackup)\" target=\"_blank\">people are using Usenet as a backup mechanism<\/a>. Just bundle your stuff up in an encrypted binary file and post it to any binary group at all. With <a href=\"http:\/\/www.giganews.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/giganews-achieves-world-leading-1300.html\" target=\"_blank\">Giganews now providing 1300 days (!!) of binary retention<\/a>, it could work&#8230;if you encrypt it strongly enough. (I remember the time when binary retention was six or seven <em>days<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<li>Many people have never heard of the &#8220;lineman&#8217;s splice,&#8221; which is way of joining two wires so that the join is in fact stronger than the wire itself. <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/2012\/02\/28\/how-to-splice-wire-to-nasa-standards\/\" target=\"_blank\">Now that NASA has endorsed the splice<\/a>, it may see a renaissance. Only one problem: The drawing in the article is wrong. Can you spot the problem?<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve always been a fan of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2007\/10\/cool-road-rail-vehicles.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;hi-rails,&#8221;<\/a> which are small railroad vehicles used to run around the trackage looking for damage to rails and ties. Today, as often as not, they&#8217;re <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Road-rail_vehicle\" target=\"_blank\">street pickup trucks with added small liftable flanged wheels<\/a>, allowing them to operate on both rail and road. In times past, <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5888196\/these-modified-cars-ferried-crews-along-the-rails-in-style\/gallery\/1\" target=\"_blank\">they were often street sedans with big flanged wheels and even cowcatchers<\/a>. I consider them Dieselpunk, but I&#8217;ve never seen them mentioned in SFF.<\/li>\n<li>Of course, in the Steampunk era (or if your railroad was especially cheap) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=railroad+velocipede&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;prmd=imvns&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=yqZLT76uFoqMsALw4eDqCA&amp;ved=0CEUQsAQ&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=990&amp;sei=z6ZLT4jfJe39sQKr-oHrCA\" target=\"_blank\">you had to pedal around the tracks yourself.<\/a><\/li>\n<li>An answer to a question I myself have never thought to ask: <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5791050\/why-does-it-take-so-much-less-milk-to-lighten-iced-coffee?tag=giz-explains\" target=\"_blank\">Why does it take less milk or cream to lighten iced coffee than hot coffee?<\/a><\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t even tweet with a keyboard yet, but with an Arduino and my trusty straight key, I&#8217;d have a long leg up on <a href=\"https:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/tworsekey\/\" target=\"_blank\">tweeting via Morse code<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>This is not the kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5869753\/once-upon-a-time-we-used-radium-condoms-for-glow-in-the-dark-sex\" target=\"_blank\">glow-in-the-dark<\/a> index you want to be high on, trust me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You can anodize titanium to give it a color finish using ordinary household ingredients like Coca Cola and electrons. Lots of electrons. (Alas, I don&#8217;t have enough Coke here to dunk my A-12.) The more I look at devices like this, the more I feel that it represents the future of high-end mobile computing. I [&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":[21,37,15,44,43,115],"class_list":["post-2334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-electronics","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-history","tag-humor","tag-railroads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334","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=2334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2335,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2334\/revisions\/2335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}