Gammatron

Work in Progress (I refuse to use “Under Construction”) - I’ve tried to put together a brief one page portal for this bluegrass superstar, with chronology, discography, and whatever else I can find. (info-design inspired by Jorn Barger [eg])

10:57:55 PM  #  

Wow - that’s a lot of stuff.

10:20:05 PM  #  

Filling all of your vexillology needs. Highlights: the World Flag Database and the Flags in the News sections.

10:18:32 PM  #  

This is a very interesting meta-search engine. It uses a ton of search engines, and provides very good capsule summaries of pages that it calls “sitesnaps” and offers the ability to refine and foucus searches with “focus words”. It seems a little rough around the edges, but has a lot of potential.

4:56:22 PM  #  

Quickie how-to for exchanging the red LED in your optical mouse with a much cooler blue LED; pretty much just common sense. I’ve got one of the Microsoft mice with the transparent red plastic, so this could make mine glow an eerie purple… kewl.

6:34:52 PM  #  

Requires evil RealPlayer… yuck. There’s a fair amount of content to read, though.

Traditionally, NORAD relied on its extensive radar system to detect Santa when he approached North America. Because Santa tends not to file a flight plan with either Transport Canada or the Federal Aviation Administration, NORAD is required to identify the ‘unknown’ Christmas objects on the radar screen. This usually means that two Canadian jets are deployed in the far North of Canada to verify that the objects are in fact Santa, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph. The pilots are still surprised to this day to see a smiling, jolly little man in red waving to them from an open sleigh in the middle of a snow storm.

5:57:56 PM  #  

Breathtaking ultraviolet image of Aurora on Jupiter.

11:39:03 PM  #  

Virgin Atlantic plans to have cabins with double beds for easy entry into the mile-high club. It seems that any airline that would buy one of these probably already has enough 747-400’s.

11:06:45 PM  #  

Excellent! Coming to Georgia 29 September 20001!

5:29:17 PM  #  

President Clinton has decided not to ban cell phones, GPS receivers and other hand-held electronics from national wilderness areas. The story doesn’t really mention why there was even consideration of this proposal; there’s no real impact on the environment from the use of these devices that I can tell, as long as no cell phone towers are put up.

10:15:34 PM  #  

Lots of very high-quality scans of paper money from just about everywhere, including the Kingdom of Landreth.
10:11:54 PM  #  

Yet another non-territorial micronation; this one claims to have once occupied 80 acres, but doesn’t mention where. At least the have their own domain name; I have a hard time swallowing a micronation with a GeoCities page as their “official internet embassy” [falkenberg].

10:10:31 PM  #  

This site is intended as a supplement to a Bible study class and aims “to affirm, through the physical evidence of ancient coins, that the history described in the Bible is real history, not fiction.” Obviously, the existence of these coins isn’t enough to prove or disprove the validity of the other information in the Bible, but it is a great collection.

9:04:16 PM  #  

It took much digging, but I finally found some docs on building sidebars for Netscape/Mozilla. It turns out that it’s easier than you would think, but there is a little trick you have to know to actually make it work. The sidebar itself is just a regular HTML file, nothing special; to get
it loaded into it own sidebar tab, however, you need a bit of javascript, and you have to set the href target to “_content” or else your links will open in the sidebar rather than the main window. I’ve put together a super-simple demo for putting a mini-gammatron in either your Netscape/Mozilla sidebar or your Internet Explorer search pane. The only difference between the two is that the IE pane sets the href target to “_main” instead of “_content”. Now if I only had something interesting to do with this stuff.

7:47:10 PM  #  

The “Symbolism and Triva” section is mildly interesting, but the “Mutilated Currency” section is a don’t-miss, as are the regulations for obtaining shredded currency from the Treasury for resale.

11:01:57 PM  #  

This site has fuel economy data for most vehicles going back to 1985. There are also some fluff pieces on fuel cells and other technologies that may show up in automobiles in the near future.

2:39:21 PM  #  

It’s much cheaper [$289] than the Empeg [$1199+], but doesn’t look quite as nice. It doesn’t replace your current car stereo, but attaches via RCA inputs to it. On the plus side, it can be trunk-mounted and operated from a wired remote panel, and it takes either 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives.

9:46:02 PM  #  

Thourough bios of most US Astronauts, many with photos. Don’t overlook the links to bios of payload specialists and Cosmonauts who have worked on joint missions with NASA.

7:22:33 PM  #  

Comprehensive archive of Apollo missions 11-17; transcripts, crew biographies and pictures, and some audio and video clips. There are some really great gems here, such as the NASA technical memo of Apollo lunar descent and ascent trajectories [8MB pdf].

12:32:19 PM  #  

By John Walker, also responsible for Inconstant Moon [16 May 2000].

12:20:25 PM  #  

Yet Another of John Walker’s excellent pages, this one lets you see the Earth and Moon from various vantage points. He also offers the excellent Home Planet Windows software which does everything this website does as well as providing sky charts, orbits of various solar system objects, and more.

12:17:27 PM  #  

Character profiles, historical background and synopses of the TV show and feature film.

This lasted all of three episodes in the U.S. The Targetmasters and Headmasters were introduced, and we kind of lost track of everything. The series continued in Japan (for several more seasons, surprisingly), but for all intents and purposes on this side of the ocean, the Transformers were dead and we started thinking about girls. Don’t even get us stared on Beast Machines.

8:35:31 PM  #  

Some vague information on NASA plans to establish outposts at the Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun libration points by 2010, and some other vague projects beyond that.

5:37:28 PM  #  

see also: “we don’t need no stinking” -badges

12:40:59 PM  #  

A list of all leap seconds inserted into the UTC time scale (the first being in 1972). Also some more technical information on UT1 and DUT1.

8:49:16 PM  #  

Good basic FAQ covering atomic clocks, leap years and seconds, aspects of UTC, governmental involvement, and implementations of various time-distribution systems.

8:46:44 PM  #  

Over 100,000 photographs from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection documenting the Great Depression through Wolrd War II. It’s pretty hard to navigate through, so you may want to go the popular requests and staff selections.

1:46:27 PM  #  

A searchable mini-dictionary of Yiddish terms and phrases. It has an annoying background image, though.

12:36:26 PM  #  

Interesting music-sharing app. There are two parts, a client that sits in your system tray, and a web interface. You use the website to find music and add it to your download queue, and the client quietly downloads it in the background, with no user interaction. It’s a pain to select specific bitrates, and nearly impossible to piece together a matched set of MP3s for an entire album, but it can resume interrupted downloads and will let you select files for download that aren’t currently online which the client will watch for and snatch when then become available again. A secret bonus of the two-part architecture I’ve found is that you can leave the client running on your home machine then login to the web interface from another computer; any files you select from that location will be waiting for you when you get home.

11:25:10 AM  #  

This eclipse will be visible from all of the contenental United States as well as most of Canada and Mexico [map]. NASA also provides excellent tables [US] [Canada] [Mexico] detailing viewing conditions in most major cities. Be sure to check the animation [116k .gif] showing the motion of the Moon’s shadow.

5:37:14 PM  #  

I finally figured out how to totally get rid of tables, so rendering speed should improve. Even though I got rid of the calendar, Manila still rendered the body of the site in a three-column table, with the 2nd and 3rd columns empty (the calendar goes in the 3rd column by default). This made IE in particular wait until the entire body had been loaded before rendering. By placing a calendar elsewhere on the page, however, Manila does not add the table for placing the calendar in its default position, and by additionally selecting “no” for “Do you want a calendar on your home page?” in the prefs-appearance config, the calendar isn’t rendered. Because of this speed gain, I decided to keep stories on the front page at least long enough to get them into the archives before moving them off.

10:58:55 PM  #  

I’d like to find a web page that takes a URL and delivers the page to you at a specified speed, so you could simulate loading pages at 56k, 33.6 etc. This page seems to be something along those lines, but its hard to tell even after washing it through a translator [qv] and it appears it only works inside those guys’ firewall anyway. They do have links to some other projects that look promising for do-it-yourself projects:

• WANDS: Wide-Area Network Delay Simulator
• ENDE: End-to-end Network Delay Emulator
• WALE: Wide Area Link Emulator

I’ll have to play with these over the weekend.

10:53:55 PM  #  

HDCD (High Definition Compatible Digital) is a new standard which purports to increase digital audio quality and remove all of the drawbacks to digital music that some audiophiles have complained about, while maintaining backward-compatibility with existing standard CD players. I’m sure that better results could be achieved with HDCD equipment, but I’m pretty doubtful of the claims that HDCD sounds better than standard CD even on conventional equipment.

9:56:02 PM  #  

No, not the band, the disease. This is a bizzare flash-based military propaganda site intended to convince troops of the safety of the anthrax vaccine.

9:49:56 PM  #  

These guys make software that collects data from weather station equipment such as that made by
Davis (below). They support a wide variety of hardware and the software has some great web report generators [eg].

5:51:53 PM  #  

Manufacturer of personal weather station equipment. The Vantage Pro model [qv] includes rain collector, temperature and humidity sensors and anemometer for $495.

5:48:07 PM  #  

Excellent one-page portal outlining the evolution of Chuck Taylor’s Converse All-Star sneakers.

9:16:18 PM  #  

Give it a word, it returns a list of associated phrases.

8:45:15 PM  #  

Lots of info for the amateur seismologist; software, homebrew seismograph plans, and tons of general earthquake info.

5:28:58 PM  #  

Pushing the envelope of the US Postal Service:

Wrapped brick. Wrapped in brown paper; posted in street corner box with same amount of postage as was strapped to unwrapped brick. Extreme weight for size made package seem suspicious. Notice of attempted delivery received, 16 days. Upon pickup at station, our mailing specialist received a plastic bag containing broken and pulverized remnants of brick. Inside was a small piece of paper with a number code on it. Our research indicates that this was some type of US Drug Enforcement Agency release slip. The clerk made our mailing specialist sign a form for receipt.

5:26:56 PM  #  

I must find this machine…

9:21:20 PM  #  

A little jamming device to mess up cell phones, intended for installation in movie theaters, restaurants, etc. I suppose. I can’t imagine that the FCC would approve anything like this.

8:25:20 PM  #  

Edison’s wax cylinder recordings have been digitized and converted to mp3 format. These recordings are very staticy and it is hard to hear the sound without turning your speakers up. There is also a good bit of noise (other than the static) in these files, and it really sounds awful. mp3.com also makes you give them some info before you can get the files, but a bogus email address and ZIP code worked fine.

8:20:20 PM  #  

Papers on the development of the SIGSALY digital voice encryption system during World War II.

8:36:52 PM  #  

How do people come up with this stuff?

7:25:03 PM  #  

IBM Research continues the quest to make every physical object known to man a metaphor for some computer concept. I particularly like their “weed” and “flying dutchman” metaphors; most of the others I’ve seen before.

7:21:53 PM  #  

Well reasoned arguments against most currently-proposed electronic voting systems. Lots of good links and supporting evidence.

12:17:44 PM  #  

Someone has finally come up with a $90 solution to the biggest problem facing DeLorean owners.

This adjustable double drinkholder was designed with the idea of keeping the interior of the DeLorean in the same style and design as originally planned.

11:33:45 AM  #  

Ugh! Who would paint their DeLorean??

11:05:45 AM  #  

A dangerous how-to guide for replacing the green LEDs on Nokia 3200, 5100, 6100, and 8200 series phones. They look pretty awesome with the blue LEDs, but I wouldn’t try it with my phone.

11:00:45 AM  #  

My personal favorites are #10, the “Mr. Sparkle” commercial [4F18] and one that didn’t make the list, the moment when Milhouse first starts up the video game “Bonestorm” [3F07].

10:54:47 PM  #  

Excellent writeup of the innovations in supercomputing made by the University of Kentucky with their new Beowulf cluster. Overall performance is nothing earthshattering, but the price/performance ratio is absolutely mind-blowing.

The nicest thing about these two new technologies is that we implemented them by creating tools that anyone can use to build and program their own supercomputers. So, when you saw the stories about KLAT2’s record price/performance, you were only seeing the result of the first application of these tools.

10:51:03 PM  #  

Wireless
ISP Adds Toilet Finder

Um, ok, whatever… I think this is the secret signal to the employees to start looking for another job.

The service is described as a wireless guide to public restrooms in 12 large U.S. cities.

12:02:46 AM  #