2000.09 (Sep)
2000.09.28 (thursday)
Auto Electronics
I am the opposite of excited about this -
drive-by-wire is fucking stupid. I trust hydraulics more than a computer anyday;
plus, if you have a hydraulic leak you at least see shit leaking all over the
place. I haven’t seen any compelling advantages of moving to drive-by-wire.
10:25:45 PM #
Vietnam
For all those people out there who think Bush is an idiot,
check out the poster boy for firearms safety, via his own official website. It’s
possible that the M16 isn’t actually pointed directly at his head, but this
still looks like a position I wouldn’t want to be in. Also, you’ll notice that
there is no clip in the rifle, but there could be a round in the chamber.
10:19:45 PM #
Daniel Distillery
One of the stops on my trip this weekend to the
Chattanooga area. Also on the agenda: the Tennessee Aquarium (with confusing domain
name) and Rock City (below).
9:38:45 PM #
Rock City
info-hub. Don’t bother with the pictures, they’re all huge TIF files, about 4.5
megabytes each. Rock City is cheesy as hell, but I’m going anyway - the
“see seven states” thing is just too good to pass up, and it really is a nice
view. It’s not nearly as much of a rip-off as Ruby Falls, which is super-hyped,
but really the volume of water is about as much as a garden hose puts out.
9:29:45 PM #
AlphaServer SC
Slightly outdated (November 1999) presentation on the
AlphaServer SC, the supercomputer project which will be used in the recently
announced supercomputers for Pittsburgh and the Department of Energy - scaling
to over 100 terraFLOP/s.
12:31:20 PM #
Natural Hazards, and Disasters
Lots of jucy links; I need to mine
this for my stagnating weather resources page.
12:25:50 PM #
2000.09.27 (wednesday)
Observatory (via scripting
news)
The purpose of NASA’s Earth Observatory is to provide a
freely-accessible publication on the Internet where the public can obtain new
satellite imagery and scientific information about our home planet. The focus
is on Earth’s climate and environmental change.
11:45:50 PM #
Daylight Savings Time
Daylight savings time is coming to an end (in
the northern hemisphere) next month - look out for cars!
11:41:50 PM #
Sun Keep Good Time?
Arguments for adjusting Australia’s Daylight
Savings Time plan. I’ve logged it because of the chart showing the time
(relative to noon) at which the sun reaches its zenith - I would guess the shape
of this graph is caused by the analemma.
11:38:50 PM #
Time Info
Mostly concerns Australia, but includes some good
historical DST info, astronomical timekeeping links, and observation dates for
other countries.
11:19:50 PM #
Everything
you wanted to know (and more) about the analemma.
Have you ever seen this figure-8 on a globe and wondered what
it is? It is simply this: if you could record the position of the sun in the
sky at the same time every day, let’s say sometime around noon and subtracting
one hour if you are observing daylight saving time, you would notice that the
sun takes a rather strange path. . . . This figure-8 path that the sun makes
in the sky is called the analemma.
11:07:50 PM #
2000.09.25 (monday)
2000.09.24 (sunday)
Bowl
This cereal bowl supposedly eliminates soggy cereal by using a
slanted bottom to keep the cereal out of the milk until you’re ready to eat it.
It seems fishy, and that hunch was reinforced by this quote on a page with a
“live” photo of the product:
As you can see, the New Angle cereal bowl is a “high quality”
product.
I can see the marketing guys making the international
hand gesture for quotes while writing that.
11:21:43 PM #
This is supposedly a
resource for planning road trips, but it’s got a lot of usability issues. If you
already know exactly what route you’ll be taking, you can find out which exits
have fuel, hotels, restaurants, etc (even Wal-Marts), but their “driving
directions” are useless. You are *forced* to give a street address for both ends
of your trip, so you can’t get directions from eg “Atlanta” to “Birmingham” -
and a query for directions between my house and my parents (Alpharetta, GA to
Memphis, TN) failed with a “route not found” error.
10:09:43 PM #
Map
Nice map of global time zones, with PDF and PostScript
versions suitable for printing.
10:04:43 PM #
2000.09.23 (saturday)
James Bible
Interesting document retrieval experiment - in this
demonstration you can pull any passage from the King James Bible by specifying
it in the URL (e.g. http://bible.conman.org/kj/Genesis.6:9-9:17
).
6:25:33 PM #
Wireless
These guys are offering a pager-sized email device for $100
(after rebate); service is $20-30/month, and it claims to deliver email and
instant messages… sounds pretty good, until you read more.
For $20, you get 400 “messages” per month - but it looks like that is a total
for incoming and outgoing email plus instant messages (for $30, though, you get
1000 weekday messages and 1000 weekend messages, not bad). Since they don’t say
you can use it with your existing email address, I’m guessing that you have to
use theirs - something like 3241251@example.com (a friend of mine
has a two-way pager and that’s what his email looks like). The instant message
feature looks like it only works with other devices on the same network - I was
hoping for a Yahoo Messenger or ICQ client.
For now, I’ll pass, but when you can get one of these that will function as a
regular POP3 client and a real instant message client, I’ll grab one.
5:34:33 PM #
RocketCam [QuickTime]
(See also the less-exciting-than-I-hoped splasdown
video)
A camera mounted to one of space shuttle Discovery’s solid
rocket boosters provides a dramatic view of separation from the external fuel tank and the tumble back to Earth.
3:14:33 PM #
2000.09.22 (friday)
If you ever played Diplomacy, this site will be of interest to you -
lots of resources for playing via email or postal mail, as well as a zine and
more.
6:55:20 PM #
2000.09.21 (thursday)
Man Info
Excellent, comprehensive Pac Man resource. This could have
been a super-boring document, as it is primarily info on the physical components
of the arcade machines, but the author has included a lot of “bonus” info that
makes this a great read for any Pac Man fan.
via mr pants, who says:
it’s one of those really long pages with tons of images and a
gray background. don’t let that trick you into thinking that it’s not cool
though. because it’s cool. oh, it’s cool.
9:55:20 AM #
YEAH!!!!!!
This is (supposedly) Real video of a 1984 Kool-Aid
commercial that includes the Kool-Aid Man saying “Oh yeah!” I haven’t had a
chance to see it yet since I don’t have RealPlaya installed here (and I don’t
plan on doing it because it’s bloatware). If someone could convert the
audio to .wav or something for me I’d appreciate it.
Also potentially interesting: Alan Greenspan
tries to sell you an Apple //c.
9:38:20 AM #
Projects
Useful Alphabet, Dictionary and Calendar. Also: Hangman and
WordMatch.
9:37:20 AM #
2000.09.19 (tuesday)
2000.09.17 (sunday)
Ugh… I think I’m going to be sick. Also available: Mr. T Coloring Book.
Bubble gum fries, complete with candy ketchup!
5:14:20 PM #
Crew wake-up at 19:46 tonight, then undocking from ISS at 23:30-ish. Should be exciting. [Windows Media] - [28.8]
[56] [100] [300]
4:52:35 PM #
I got a couple of the New Hapshire quarters yesterday, which have the state motto “Live Free or Die” [jargon] on them. Bill Shannon long ago registered the vainity plate “UNIX” in New Hampshire, giving birth to a series of novelty plates [pic] distributed by DEC, Bell Labs, and the Open Group [$12]:
10:59:24 AM #
Translations of The Simpsons from Quebec and France compared, with bizzare differences.
8:14:52 AM #
7:54:00 AM #
2000.09.15 (friday)
Excellent discussion of the Space Shuttle’s self-destruct system, prompted by concerns that such a system might have caused the Challenger explosion. [follow-up] From the Risks Digest, January 1986.
10:05:31 PM #
A Macintosh application that lets you spell/grammar check any text in any application. It has a lot of nice additional features like text-to-speech and some handy formatting macros. Damn, I really miss my Mac.
7:30:26 PM #
This comes in handy if you’re ever setting up a xntpd server using a radio or satellite receiver.
7:26:06 PM #
2000.09.14 (thursday)
Get satellite photos of just about any area of earth. For some reason you can’t deep-link directly to particular photos, which really sucks.
10:40:06 PM #
Audio, video, and still images from shuttle missions going back to 1995.
10:34:52 PM #
Nice… a guided tour of the inside of the International Space Station [windows media]. The link is for a 100k stream, so if you’re on a modem you’ll want to hit the “Speed” link at the bottom to ratchet it down a bit.
7:30:11 PM #
Not much now, just a FAQ and the code you’ll need to add a second drive. I’m not the only one waiting until they add a network adapter [rant] as a replacement for the 90’s-esque dialup modem it has now.
7:11:23 PM #
2000.09.13 (wednesday)
![[1k gif]](http://www.att.com/CDA/corporatelogo/images/attlogo_n9050_000110.gif){kind=link}
9:29:37 PM #
9:19:37 PM #
Automobile manufacturers and their electrical components suppliers are planning on going to 42 volts for car electrical systems (up from the current standard of 12 volts) to accomodate a growing list of electric
devices which are coming soon - not just fluff marketing gimmicks like electrically-heated seats, but also replacements for hydraulic systems such as electrically-actuated valves and electrically-assisted power steering.
6:05:44 PM #
- Rock ‘n’ Scroll
An input method for handhelds that lets you physically move the device instead of pushing buttons using ADI’s ADXL202 [info] dual-axis single-chip accelerometer. They demonstrate on the Itsy [info] with a pocket-sized digital photo album and with Doom. - Factoid
A keychain tranceiver, which collects “facts” from other factiods, such as business cards, thermometer or GPS readings, etc. The potential uses are both very cool and somewhat scary:The Factoid project sits in the context of this long-term goal: Remember every piece of information a person encounters during his entire life.
5:47:23 PM #
2000.09.12 (tuesday)
Nice open source network tools for Windows. Excellent port of tcpdump, and a sweet network analyzer. I haven’t tried the videoconference, since I don’t have a camera.
9:58:52 PM #
A homage to the under-appreciated orange traffic cone [more photo tours].
9:04:45 PM #
G100 Quad Multi-Monitor Graphics Controller
Well, the good news is you can cram four monitors on a single graphics adapter in a single PCI slot. The bad news is that you only get 4MB RAM per monitor, and it uses the Matrox G100 chipset. And it sells for about $700. I guess this would have been pretty cool when the G100 was first announced (about 2 years ago?).
7:46:23 PM #
A distributed effort to calculate Pi. They’ve just concluded their project, which I would have gotten involved in if I hadn’t been looking for prime numbers.
The Quadrillionth Bit of Pi is ‘0′!
7:40:45 PM #
2000.09.11 (monday)
Excellent (longish) theory about TWA 800 - and reveals an intriguing link with Swissair 111:
The two flights that suffered the catastrophe could have originated from two different airports anywhere in the country,9 or, for that matter, anywhere in the world. But as it happens, both planes took off from a single airport, New York’s JFK. The two flights could have taken off on any two days of the week and at any two minutes of the day.10 But as it happens, both took off on a Wednesday at 8:19 PM.
9:57:19 PM #
Good, brief resource for info on Julian Days [in-depth]. VMS starts its calendar from 17 Nov 1858, which is Modified Julian Day 0. Also there is a nice forms-based conversion page.
Astronomers and other people who need to deal with events separated by a large span use the Julian Day to refer to time, rather than a date in a particular calendar. The Julian Day is a number which simply increases by 1 every mean solar day. Because there are no discontinuities in the count, the elapsed time between two events expressed as Julian Day numbers can be found by simple subtraction.
6:03:06 PM #
Bad-ass! This is a suit of armor that looks like something out of Robotech. It was designed to withstand a direct assualt from a grizzly bear (hence the name) for some wacko research project named “Project Grizzly”.
Black Box:
Voice-activated recording device located on the rear-right side of head piece, to record bear sounds or, in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Ursus Mark VI, last words.
5:47:28 PM #
2000.09.10 (sunday)
busting-through-brick-wall sound effects optional. So far, the best I’ve been able to come up with is this abomonation:
10:06:20 PM #
Some fake plastic boobs + anime-style mannequin = wacky fun! (includes real-feel test photos!)
10:06:20 PM #
Awesome - a collection of webpages to get you out of tracking networks (a la DoubleClick) and off of telemarketing lists (both phone and email), and also a form that will generate letters for you to send (snail mail) to the ones that don’t have web-based opt-out.
9:53:22 PM #
An index relating IP network numbers to network names and identities, for class A, B and C networks.
9:50:49 PM #
2000.09.09 (saturday)
FAQ
Precious little information on the Kool-Aid Man. I had to search elsewhere, but turned up these goodies:
- Evolution
of Kool-Aid Man (official site)Amusingly clumsy, KOOL-AID® Man could be summoned by children who clapped their hands together and yelled “Hey, KOOL-AID®!” Within seconds, the ground began to rumble as KOOL-AID® Man burst through the wall shouting his famous line: “Oh Yeah!” In later TV spots he played baseball, drove a go-kart, and even gave break-dancing a try during the ’80s.
- Kool-Aid Man Fan Fiction!
- Kool-Aid
Man for Atari 2600Just look at game players worldwide, and you’ll find that they have two passions. One, of course, is for electronic entertainment via game consoles. The other is for the delicious beverage known as Kool-Aid.
- Kool-Aid Addiction Test
- Kool-Aid Man ATE MY BALLS
- Mr. T vs. The Kool Aid Man
- Kool-Aid Man vs. Michelin Man
10:31:55 PM #
2000.09.07 (thursday)
If you’re not familiar with HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes, they are lanes on local highways that are reserved for cars that have two or more people. You will be fined for driving in them without a passenger in your car. Most big cities have them now. This Q&A was particularly interesting:
Q. If a mother is 8 months pregnant, does the unborn infant count?
A. No. The infant would not count as a passenger until after birth.
11:00:51 PM #
2000.09.06 (wednesday)
A ksh script I wrote to grab current conditions for a given ZIP code from wunderground.com - I’m working on some improvements, but I might as well get it out there now.
6:15:03 PM #
2000.09.04 (monday)
9:31:10 PM #
Although it theoretically suffers from the same drawbacks as every other “best 100 ever” list, especially those compiled by committee, I actually thought this list was pretty comprehensive (it covers everything from Rhapsody in Blue to Smells Like Teen Spirit) and well-balanced.
9:14:06 PM #
Just a picture of the devel system Microsoft is sending out. Looks like a desigener mini-tower, which I guess is all it really is.
8:43:52 PM #