Gammatron

2000.01.31 (monday)

The U.S. Army has patented a Positive-Operator-Valued-Measure Receiver For Quantum Cryptography.
10:29:23 PM #

Kurt Vonnegut in critical condition after a fire in his home. 9:29:23 PM #

Linux World interview with Jon Johansen, one of the authors of DeCSS.
8:29:23 PM #

2000.01.29 (saturday)

Someone has applied for a trademark for the word “email”. (via flutterby)
7:34:23 PM #

BattleBots: robot gladitorial combat on pay-per-view tonight. This is the kind of behavior that will cause the robots to rise up and destroy humanity.
6:14:56 PM #

2000.01.28 (friday)

New York City provides psychic training to welfare recipients. (via drudge) 9:34:23 AM #

California woman sues DoubleClick over privacy (Reuters): you can opt out of their tracking if you want to, but it’s not widely-known that this is possible.
8:34:23 AM #

The new one dollar coin has been spotted in rural Alabama. The grandmother of a friend got one in change at a Wal-Mart.
7:34:23 AM #

The U.S. Mint’s reported sightings map (currently broken) reports a Massachusets quarter has been sighted in Alabama, even though they aren’t supposed to be released until February 6th. 6:34:23 AM #

2000.01.27 (thursday)

The best nation-wide weather radar summary I’ve seen. Also available in a very nice java applet.
10:34:23 PM #

404 Research Lab (via Robot Wisdom temporarily at the backup site)
9:34:23 PM #

Radio Frequencies used by North American Railroads
8:37:59 PM #

Regis Philbin: I would have guessed that was a pseudonymn. Also, it’s interesting to see how often he plays “himself” in movies and on TV.
8:34:23 AM #

Mars Polar Lander may not be dead after all. (Reuters)
7:38:19 AM #

Another article on the last ditch effort to find Mars Polar Lander. 6:38:19 AM #

2000.01.26 (wednesday)

I returned from vacation to find that my power had been knocked out by the ice storm here in Atlanta. I still don’t have power at home, but I should by this evening (although the power company said that yesterday). No updates until I get all this straightened out - I still haven’t had a chance to catch up on email. :(
7:34:23 PM #

2000.01.11 (tuesday)

I’ll be on vacation from today until the 24th. No updates today, I’ve been too busy getting ready to surf.
7:34:23 AM #

2000.01.10 (monday)

BIG.MONEY.NOW!!!!
12:34:23 PM #

Scary thought: AOL owns Bugs Bunny.
11:34:23 AM #

HOLY CRAP! glTron is the coolest thing I’ve seen in years - if you’re a fan of the movie and video game (and who isn’t?), you’ll love it too. This is a OpenGL adaptation of the classic video game, so you’ll need a 3D graphics card. 10:34:23 AM #

US Treasury: Fractional Currency. Not many people know that the US issued paper money in denominations smaller than one dollar from 1862-1876.
8:34:23 AM #

The Great Seal of the United States: good background on that mysterious symbol on the back of the dollar bill.
7:34:23 AM #

There will be a total lunar eclipse 20 January 2000. Get exact times for your location from the US Navy’s Lunar Eclipse Computer.
6:34:23 AM #

AOL to merge with Time Warner?!?!?! (Reuters) I guess AOL finally figured out how to get access to homes through cable lines.

AOL shareholders will hold 55 percent of the merged company, while Time Warner shareholders will hold 45 percent, even though AOL’s market capitalization prior to the deal was nearly twice the value of Time Warner’s.

5:34:23 AM #

2000.01.08 (saturday)

The FCC is pushing for a cable digital TV standard soon. The cable companies, of course, want complete control (via HTP’):

…talks between cable operators and TV makers are stalled on the question of a physical connection between a cable line and a digital TV. TV makers want an RF coax input to their digital TVs, allowing them to decode inside the DTV a digital cable signal and process it at will.

Cable operators, they say, prefer to decrypt and process any digital
signal in their own digital set top boxes and send a copy protected
signal over a 1394 connection to DTVs. But that could wrest away
from TV makers the ability to control special graphics effects such as picture-in-picture, he claimed “A lot of the functionality of the TV would be lost,” said Tanner. “The TV becomes a monitor.”

10:34:08 AM #

Nvidia is planning on integrating audio into their graphics chipsets.
9:34:08 AM #

Some photos of various CD-Rs taken with a electron microscope.
8:26:26 AM #

2000.01.07 (friday)

Secure deletion of data from magnetic and solid-state memory:

One avenue of attack is the recovery of supposedly erased data from magnetic media or random-access memory. This paper covers some of the methods available to recover erased data and presents schemes to make this recovery significantly more difficult.

11:34:08 AM #

The top 5 Technologies of the Century: I won’t bother critiquing the first four, but #5 is too bad to pass up - I didn’t know that “the breakup of AT&T” was a “technology”.
10:34:08 AM #

RFC for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol - the probable successor to SSL. This is a pretty comprehensive draft - I’ll have to go over it in more detail tomorrow.
9:34:08 AM #

Finally: a MP3 player that reads ISO9660 CDs 8:34:08 AM #

Leading quote from this week’s Need to Know:

“Too bad Linus didn’t choose a starving kid as the mascot.”
- “Anonymous Coward” on the pro-penguin charity Slashdot effect
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/06/0915249.shtml

7:04:28 AM #

Excellent interview with Stephen Hawking:

In the next 100 years, or even in the next 20, we may discover a complete theory of the basic laws of the universe…, but there will be no limit to the complexity of the biological or electronic systems we can build under these laws.

6:48:38 AM #

Casio has introduced three new wrist data devices. It looks like a bunch of hype to me; the mp3 watch doesn’t have expandable memory, and having a cord from one’s wrist to headphones seems like a recipie for entanglement. The camera watch also suffers from a fixed amount of memory and only has 120×120 resolution. The devices are interesting, but there are better alternatives for $100.
6:34:08 AM #

2000.01.06 (thursday)

From the CNN archives: Swiss Scientists Warn of Robot Armageddon: from way back in February 1998. Join us or Die! 11:42:26 PM #

The Nine Planets: a Multimedia Tour of the Solar System - a comprehensive reference guide. Excellent resource for all astronomers, from beginner to professional.
9:12:51 PM #

Mars Polar Lander Update: now they’re saying it probably landed in a crater… that would be a lot better than “human f*ckup,” but then again, it could just be a coverup.
9:03:27 PM #

The Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks is something I’ve subconciously been “searching for” all my life.
8:41:06 PM #

Shonen Knife Freaks: great fansite for the best band in Osaka.
6:55:44 PM #

Please don’t ask me how I came across Goth Babe of the Week. Google can lead to strange places… 6:48:09 PM #

 

6:28:06 PM #

2000.01.05 (wednesday)

More gadgets: Hello Kitty Sega Dreamcast
10:41:22 AM #

An attempt at a scientific explanation of why the moon appears larger at the horizion.
8:34:29 AM #

Mind Uploading: digitize your brain, for insertion into a robot host! You will find the organic mind inferior.
6:24:29 AM #

2000.01.04 (tuesday)

Voyager Project Home Page: amazingly, both Voyager 1 & 2 are still functioning and returning data. The “latest weekly status report” has not been updated since August, however. Some of the science reports are as recent as October 1999. 10:11:37 PM #

Phases of the Moon: moon phase tables for 1990-2005. Pretty dry stuff.
6:46:51 PM #

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! The unofficial Small Wonder home page has a webring!
5:22:23 PM #

A do-it-yourself costume for your cat. I’d love to hear from anyone who actually manages to get their cat into this. 4:48:39 PM #

Freaky Franks: build your own hot dog. Tartar Control gel and Fruit Stripe gum on mine, please.
4:03:35 PM #

Reproductive Progress: a full service company specializing in Cattle Reproduction. I think I found this while searching for photos of chicken embryos. Their methods of collecting semen from bulls are interesting:

• Artificial Vagina - more natural for the bull and usually gives more and better quality semen, but there are more requirements for this method.
• Rectal Massage - requires chute to hold bull; less natural for bull, usually less semen produced, and less quality, but allows rapid collection, even in bulls which can’t mount.
• Electro Ejaculator - also requires bull be in a chute, and the chute must be strong enough to hold the bull, as the bull may show more stress than with the other methods. This method can also be used for bulls which can not mount a teaser animal.

3:59:03 PM #

2000.01.03 (monday)

Drool: Digital Photography Review has a comprehensive review of the Nikon D1. This is the ultimate digital camera; true SLR, compatibility with all existing Nikon lenses, and all of the features of the F5 35mm camera. Oh yeah, its $5,550. 4:25:33 PM #

Sony’s new Discam: half camcorder, half digital still camera. It uses MiniDiscs for media, which means it can hold about 4500 still images on one disc. Cons: it can only get 20 minutes of video on a disc, and it doesn’t appear to be capable of more than 640×480 resolution. Also no price is listed yet.
4:00:07 PM #

Vague info on a new digital camera/MP3 player. Also limited to 640×480, but the price is right at $99. And it can use CompactFlash or an IBM microdrive (though I’ve heard the microdrives suck batteries down like crazy).
3:33:33 PM #

Some kind of strange RCA audio-on-demand thingy: looks like its just informational, rather than music content (for now), but still interesting. $250 plus undisclosed “subscription” fees. 3:04:22 PM #

Sony Mavica FD-88: still too damned expensive. For $800-1000, I could get one hell of a 35mm camera outfit plus a film scanner. Saving the cash on processing would be nice, though.
2:55:11 PM #

HP PhotoSmart Photo Scanner: scans 35mm negatives at 2400dpi - nice. Also scans prints at 300dpi. $299.
2:50:51 PM #

2000.01.02 (sunday)

Eric Raymond almost understands the DVD case:

A few weeks ago, some Linux hackers in Norway cracked the encryption scheme used for DVD media.

Nope, they were actually Windows programmers. Nice try, though.

The high prices and license fees the DVD monopoly can charge would collapse if anybody with a PC and speakers no longer needed a dedicated DVD player or licensed software.

You still need a DVD drive to read the disks.
Regardless, his main points are right on - CSS provides no copy protection whatsoever. It only serves to prevent legal fair use.
2:14:52 PM #

Finally, some good press for the Open Directory Project 12:10:05 PM #

Sew your eyes shut with dental floss - new fad for the millennium? (CNN)
10:40:51 AM #

I finally got my railroad photos back online. The page design sucks, I know, but I didn’t do the design - not that I would have done much better.
9:02:25 AM #

The dotcomguy: yet another “only contact with the outside world through the net” experiment. So far, its pretty boring. This guy actually had his name legally changed to “dotcomguy”.
8:30:05 AM #

2000.01.01 (saturday)

Tom’s Hardware has a great article on AMD’s new Super Bypass feature in their 750 chipset.
5:21:13 PM #

Cardhouse predicted it on Friday afternoon: Gambia hit by computer bug (Yahoo)
2:55:51 PM #

What a way to start the year off: Louisana man arrested after buzzing Havana (CNN) 1:40:25 PM #

Now available - Windows 99 - the beer.
12:37:25 PM #