Gammatron

2002.01.31 (thursday)

That’s it. I’ve had it. Anyone using absolute pixel sizes for their fonts in their CSS is getting perma-plonked from my list. I suppose that includes most of the radio weblogs using the default templates. Which sucks, because a lot of those are good weblogs, but some of the authors should really know better. While we’re at it, I’m mega-plonking any site that causes my browser to highlight the entire fucking page when I try to select a few words to copy to the clipboard. I don’t know what causes that, and I don’t care.I’ve been twiddling the CSS here for a few days. It’s tempting to go overboard, but it just seems fascist to cram a particular font down someone’s throat - they’ve already figured out what font they like to read and what size works for them. I do set the font for the title banner and the stuff on the right hand side (err, that’s now the top and bottom), but I feel OK about that, since I could have used graphics instead and not been considered an ass. As long as the bulk of the body text is left to my defaults, I’m pretty much OK with it.

Why do drooling mouthbreathers masquerading as designers think that they can choose a font (or size, for that matter) that’s more readable for me than the one I’ve chosen?

– Dan Lyke

I think I’ll probably get rid of the right-hand sidebar, too, as I did on the previous manila incarnation of this weblog (well, I just did). I thought about junking the table layout and using CSS columns [how-to], but it just seems too kludgy. I need to dig around in the radio databases and figure out how to obliterate the font size tags in the calendar.

8:08:31 PM #

I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives (via bump)Flash-based “kung-fu remixer.” Play with the keyboard to get it to do stuff. “H” is my favorite.

6:44:57 PM #

A Fine Fucking Tune TooCluetrain Dork and self-confessed “Wilford Brimley on ‘ludes” lookalike [cite] Doc Searls continues his bad habit of trying to pass himself off as an expert on things he has no experience with [prior example]:

Want a sucky system? Try SBC’s, which is now PPPOE. What’s more silly and annoying than an always-on Internet service that dials up anyway?

Actually, SBC has been awesome; I haven’t had a problem in the two months since I’ve had their service. If he wants a sucky system, he should take a look at the ultra-evil AT&T broadband regime. PPPOE is great, too. I have to authenticate, but the firewall/router appliance takes care of that and I don’t have to tell the phone company every time I want to change a network card out. And SBC’s software may have been hokey, but at least it didn’t install a corporate branded MSIE/OE 5.x and who-knows-what-else spyware cruft all over my system [qv].

Who is this guy, anyway? How did he get to be such an A-List pundit?

 

Haw, I just now realized that Doc linked silly and annoying to an old gammatron entry back on the manila site.

1:47:16 PM #

2002.01.30 (wednesday)

FedEx Express | Tracking | Results DetailMy new Netgear MR314 wireless/router/firewall thingy is finally on the way. I’m totally fed up with the Compaq iPaq CP-2W connection point. Once I get my categories set up (I’m currently trying to pare down a list of about 200 prospective categories) I’ll keep these kinds of entries off the main page.

10:24:02 PM #

Moonrise Over SeattleSweet time-lapse moonrise shows the “large moon on the horizon” is an optical illusion and not an atmospheric phenomenon.

9:50:02 PM #

U.S. Surname DistributionInteresting, but probably not very accurate, given the sources:

The source of this data is the 1850 Census, 1880 Census, 1920 Census, and 1990’s phone books. Note that the Census data is a sampling of 1 in 100 names, so the 1990 data is the most accurate.

5:58:01 PM #

Font Browser Script ThingyThis little windows script (it appears to be an XML-encapsulated VB script, but I don’t know much about windows scripting) will show you all the fonts installed on your machine, with a sample sentence in each font, using MSIE for the output. It chokes on some fonts and just shows the browser’s default.

4:26:31 PM #

Interview: Dustin Diamond (a.k.a. Screech)

The “Mike D. of The Beastie Boys” question? It makes sense, but it’s all coincidence. Mike Diamond and Dustin Diamond is a coincidence. We both play bass, coincidence. We both have similar features, like our noses. Everyone thinks we’re brothers. It is a rumor.

11:41:51 AM #

2002.01.29 (tuesday)

Robot-A-ThonIf for no other reason, check out this site for its excellent classification scheme.

Destined to be the World’s Biggest Collection of Robot Drawings!

11:43:02 PM #

In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald (sort-of-via robotwisdom)Before you load that page, take a look at the original photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald taken by Bob Jackson in 1963 (photo is at the bottom of the page) to either refresh your memory or give you some context. I originally logged a ripped-off version of this a while back [28 sep 00].

11:32:12 PM #

The Alfred Jewel (via lay investiture)
11:22:21 PM #

Color Blindness: No Laughing MatterThat may be true, because that page sure is a lot funnier if you aren’t color blind.

11:15:24 PM #

2002.01.28 (monday)

I finally gave up on Kavalier & Clay. It was the best first half of a novel I’ve read in a long time, but took a nosedive and has sat unread on my nightstand for weeks. I’ve got negative desire to finish it, so I finally started on Secrets and Lies, which I think I bought about nine months ago. I bought K&C from amazon, and I guess it will fuck up my recomendations, since it just assumes you like everything you buy. I got S&L from a books-a-million in Hattiesburg, Mississippi while on business, so if I like it amazon will never know.Yes, I know I could manually correct both problems in the amazon “we own every detail of your life” database, but I’m not going to sit there and give them a list of everything I’ve ever bought and then go back and rate every item.

10:30:42 PM #

Proudfully American Logo Museum (via riley dog)Great collection of all those stupid “AMERICA AT WAR” graphics from websites and TV. Can you believe they are still using that crap on Fox? It takes up half the screen, and those stupid fucking news tickers should have been turned off after a month at most, but they’re still going…

10:13:26 PM #

2002.01.27 (sunday)

This post is temporarily offline.

6:02:52 PM #

Sony MEX-HD1 In-Dash MP3/CD Unit (via htp’)This Sony car stereo reads regular audio CDs and stores MP3 files on an internal disk (probably about 10GB). This seems like a pretty cumbersome method to get your drive loaded up - I don’t want to spend a whole day sitting in my garage with a pile of CDs. It will also read MP3s off of CDs, though it isn’t clear if it will store them on the hard disk. I’m in the market for a new car stereo, as mine is pretty messed up (about half the buttons on mine now perform random funcions, e.g. I push the “next track” button and sometimes it starts scanning, sometimes it goes back one track, and sometimes it ejects the disc), but at $1500, I think I’ll pass. I’ll probably go with a Kenwood unit that reads MP3s from CD, but has no internal hard disk.

4:54:46 PM #

Rejected iMac Designs 11:55:47 AM #

Build Your Own RiceBoy Machine (via [H])
10:21:55 AM #

2002.01.26 (saturday)

How to Sing the Blues (via radiouser)

15. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely on a broken down cot. You can’t have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction.

8:04:03 PM #

WTC Victims’ Fund BacklashA lot of this argument could have been avoided if every payment was equal, and no deductions were made for existing life insurance, etc. The government has no business declaring that a exec making $500,000 a year is worth more than a janitor making $30,000. And there should be no conditions on the payout, either; if the airlines want to make lump sum settlements to victims to prevent lawsuits, let them use the $15 billion in bail-out money that was supposed to prevent the massive lay-offs we saw anyway.

11:07:46 AM #

2002.01.25 (friday)

Jeez, Antiques Roadshow is coming to Hot Springs (just down the road from Little Rock) in June and the whole state is going nuts. Someone has even asked the governor to declare an “Antiques Roadshow Month.”
11:57:16 PM #

From Gutenberg to Gone with the WindWide-ranging exhibition at the LBJ library includes rare books (Gutenberg Bible, Ulysses), significant photographs, and some great artwork, including Destroy This Mad Brute.

As a sidenote, an original 1917 lithograph on linen of DTMB recently (18 Nov 01) sold at auction for $4300 [lot 215, bottom] [complete auction catalog].

11:36:20 PM #

Popular ArchivesReplica WWI and WWII posters, about $23 each, 13″x19″. Personal fave: Destroy This Mad Brute

11:21:41 PM #

Geoffrey Nunberg’s PublicationsExcellent essays on linguistics, culture and technology’s effect on both. The short commentaries from NPR’s Fresh Air are a good place to start.

11:10:27 PM #

Atari Artwork (via haddock)Artist’s conception sketches of the arcade of the future, which will contain lots of HAWT CHYXX0rZ and games called “Touch Me.” Cabinet designs are pretty cool, though.

10:45:57 PM #

Light Up Circuit Board [similar]Do you want blue LEDs for your Nokia 51xx? Scared of surface-mount soldering? Just replace the entire PCB. I can’t tell, but it looks like this would require very little soldering, if any, and even then it would be much easier than the tiny surface-mount LEDs. It is also unclear if this works with the 5165 (a slightly updated 5160). The closest thing I’ve seen for the 8260 is this half-assed multi-colored obnoxious thing that definitely requires soldering and looks like crap.

8:10:27 PM #

Fake Mouse Click (via aaronland)Javascript tomfoolery makes links activate by merely hovering over them. It’s only a matter of time before pr0n pop-ups start using this.

12:54:06 PM #

2002.01.24 (thursday)

FireWheel (via [H])It’s not in English, but pictures are universal. A milled lucite wheel and a quick LED hack makes for a neat mouse mod.

10:54:56 PM #

American Concentration CampsBeautiful panorama photo collages of WWII Japanese-American internment camps. With audio commentary (in shockwave format). See also: Canadian Concentration Camps.

9:45:13 PM #

Propaganda (via heathen)Quickie primer on techniques, with a small realvideo gallery.

9:25:12 PM #

Chinese Propaganda PostersHuge, impressive collection. It’s been around for a long time (at least since 1998) and is continuously updated, with some posters only a few months old (such as the Beijing Olympics 2008 Posters).

9:19:06 PM #

German Propaganda ArchiveNazi and East German propaganda, including speeches, pamphlets, essays, and, of course, tons of posters.

8:53:47 PM #

Posters from World War IIInteresting variety of styles used in American propaganda. I really dig the WARNING! and Dali-esque Reaper.

8:40:00 PM #

Cathode CornerThis guy builds and sells nixie tube clocks, which are nice but not particularly unique (well, relatively); his Scope Clock, however, is very impressive, drawing the time on an oscilloscope cathode ray tube.

8:23:01 PM #

My ComputerOld (1998) but still valid essay on absurd pronoun abuse.

It’s just a sophisticated version of the
“kick me” game, where the object is to make the driver a party to
the message. I don’t know who came up with this idea, but I’ll give
you odds the word “ownership” came into the conversation somewhere.

8:17:09 PM #

2002.01.23 (wednesday)

VrrrmHomebrew riceboy on a shoestring budget. A coffee can, a two-liter bottle, some cardboard and a little spraypaint and you’re set.

11:44:38 PM #

WHICH NUMBER 2 PENCIL ARE YOU? TAKE THE FREE QUIZ TO FIND OUT!
11:30:54 PM #

Active XcavatorInteresting applet lists all ActiveX controls installed on your machine and lets you delete them. This would be nicer if you could somehow filter the output and only display controls you have downloaded, as there are tons of them that come with the system by default (and you obviously don’t want to delete those). Also available as a standalone application [cognitronix].

11:09:14 PM #

Black-Scholes TheoryOption-pricing theory that forms the basis for the formula used to value the options granted to execs in the list below.

3:43:31 PM #

100 Highest-Paid ExecutivesLots of the money here is made up of stock option grants; I’m not too sure how the vaule of such grants is calculated, but there must be some standard formula. It couldn’t be just the strike price times the number of options, could it? That would seem to over-inflate the real value, but then again, that may be the point. These lists aren’t put together for the benefit of those listed; I’m pretty sure no one would think that the fact that Ken Lay made $21 million last year makes him look good.

3:33:21 PM #

Condiment Packet Museum (via rre)
11:59:51 AM #

A spam report I sent to exodus.net via spamcop got “quarantined” by their cussbuster; does this mean it is more or less likely to actually be looked at by a human being? 12:43:10 AM #

GPSy Digital Map SupportComprehensive catalog of digital maps available on the Internet, presumably for use with GPS software. It isn’t as cool as it sounds, though; many links are to proprietary map vendors, and some are to guys who have big stashes of public domain maps but want to “trade” them, like they were bootleg tapes or something. Get a clue, guys; if everyone just puts everything they have online we can build a complete database pretty quickly instead of coodinating between a bunch of wannabe gatekeepers.

12:33:45 AM #

2002.01.22 (tuesday)

RadioExpressLittle bookmarklet thingy to speed up your blogging, inspired by ManilaExpress and the blogger bookmarklet.

8:18:23 PM #

Weblog Search, Maybe?Ah, sweet! This mini-script will do a rudimentary search of your Radio 8.x site. It only works on the desktop website, not the public one, though, so if you publish your site to a remote server it won’t work for your readers.

8:12:09 PM #

2002.01.21 (monday)

Jonah Goldberg on the NYFD flag-raising statue:

Well, if “factual correctness” is such a non-issue, why not have a Muslim woman in a floor-length burqa, a Chinese guy in a wheelchair, and a whole passel of midgets of various hues and nationalities? We could mix up a real rich ethnic cocktail if the artistic expression of diversity supercedes any concern over factual correctness. Hell, why even make them firefighters - or humans. Why not have a police dog, a fire hose and a superpatriotic hairdryer raise the flag?

11:30:02 PM #

Amateur Nuclear FusionDiagrams, working models, how-to articles, and some external links.

Skills are the key factor. The experimenter should have some basic skill sets including welding, machining, vacuum technology, gas handling, electronics, and nuclear instrumentation.

If fusion is too advanced or dangerous for you, back up a level and check out some other High Energy Amateur Science projects, including magnetics, tesla coils, and homebrew instrumentation.

11:30:01 PM #

2002.01.20 (sunday)

Tracking: mail-to-blog URL mangling
1:46:54 AM #

Microwave Experiment Page (via antiquark)Lots of “safe/unsafe experiments” plus plenty of outbound links.

1:26:34 AM #

How to Build a Stable Plasmoid (via larkfarm)More microwave oven experiments. This looks extra-dangerous. Includes sound effects.

1:06:14 AM #

2002.01.18 (friday)

How to change the daily archive link graphic
The question poster actually wanted to change the little individual post link grapics (currently a little hash mark), but this is handy too. I want to change the daily graphic to a section symbol (as I have back at my Manila site [qv]) and the individual post graphic to a paragraph symbol.I can’t do anything until I get back home, probably Monday or Tuesday night.

For some reason the post below this had the link to the referers page mangled, and I can’t go back and fix it until I get home. Here it is again (I hope Radio auto-links URLs like Manila does): http://referers.userland.com/staticSiteStats/referers?group=radio1&site
00016

I should probably open a hole in my firewall so I can get to the Radio webserver from the road.

5:55:35 PM #

More google hits starting to roll in [referers] (22 Jan 02: fixed link mangled by mail-to-blog). I thought it would take longer to get indexed; daypop hasn’t gotten around to adding this site to their regular rounds yet, and I explictly asked them to by filling in their “submit site” form.Mail-to-blog is very nice, especially when I’m on the road, but I really miss being able to change any aspect of my site from anywhere as I’m able to do with Manila. I’ll just have to wait until I get back home to put the referer link in my navlinks.

5:55:34 PM #

Holy crap, google has already picked up this site: [what is a blow off valve and what does it do]
11:49:34 AM #

2002.01.17 (thursday)

test post from a field in rural northern Louisiana. 5:51:54 PM #

Anti-MosquitoesApparently this win9x app generates some kind of high-pitched noises inaudible to humans that drive mosquitoes away. Doesn’t work with XP, and there aren’t a whole lot of mosquitoes in Arkansas in January, so I haven’t bothered trying it out yet.

11:25:34 AM #

Arkansas Interstate Lane Closeures
10:55:04 AM #

2002.01.16 (wednesday)

Medieval Woodcuts Clipart CollectionPart of Gode Cookery, a site devoted to medieval cooking. The woodcut collection is very extensive; unfortunately, the navigation is pretty bad. Don’t miss the other sections, such as Medieval Macabre and the Tacuinum Sanitatis, which contains color illuminations instead of black-and-white woodcuts.

10:03:23 PM #

RetroclipOld-fashioned woodcut and pen-and-ink clipart. Lots of good stuff, especially in the contraptions section. Aesthetically pleasing, but functionaly retarded page design and navigation.

9:41:18 PM #

The Math in A Beautiful mindBrief discussion of John Nash’s actual mathematical accomplishments, which are apparently glossed over in the film (which I have yet to see).

7:49:22 PM #

NA Blow Off ValveThe ultimate rice-boy accessory:

Once the accelerator is stepped off, the NA Blow Off Valve will generate a sound like a turbocharged vehicle’s blow off valve. The sound from the NA Blow Off Valve can be adjusted to be the same as a turbo blow off valve. The NA Blow Off Valve sounds like a real blow off valve in turbo applications. You will not be able to tell the difference on the sound generated between the NA Blow Off Valve & the turbo blow off valve. The sound generated is conspicuous, and will not make one have a second look to ensure if it is genuine.

At $304, it seems a little pricey - how much does an actual turbocharger cost?

6:54:49 PM #

Gene Siskel:

Two things are not debatable: eroticism, and comedy. If you don’t think it’s sexy, or funny, there’s no way I can change your mind.

6:21:48 PM #

I’d really like to be able to assign a title to a given day’s archived page, as I am able to in Manila; I really don’t like seeing the same title on every archived page. At the very least, a macro to return the date of the page being rendered would be nice, just to put the date in the title string.
4:47:14 PM #

Universal Ringtone Converter (RPNTone)Converts MIDI files to ringtone text, which can be mailed or otherwise uploaded to your cell phone. It also converts text to MIDI, and includes a basic MIDI sequencer/editor.

This site is hosted at geocities and often exceeds its daily bandwith limit; try again tomorrow if you can’t get through.

2:24:54 PM #

Transformers Adult Fanfiction ArchiveThey left this guy out of The Geek Hierarchy.

8:33:46 AM #

Plextor announces 40x CD-R ($190, end of Feb)

The 40x recording speed is reached by 4 steps: The drive starts writing at 20x, rises up to 24x, rises up to 32x and last reaches 40x. The 40x writing speed is reached at 54mins, when using 80minCD.

8:30:56 AM #

2002.01.15 (tuesday)

Talking without thinking:

You know, I get a lot of flak for bashing President Bush. And rightly so, if you disagree with my political points-of-view.

I’ve never considered a difference of opinion (especially a political difference) justification for giving someone flak. Ranting without thinking about what you’re talking about, on the other hand…

But you have to admit that this whole Enron debacle appears to be blowing up in his face. I don’t think even daddy’s friends, money and power can keep him out of this mess. I predict impeachment (not sure of the offense yet) within a year or so. It might turn out that Dick Cheney is more involved than Bush, but someone’s going to take the fall for this. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

They took some contributions. Big deal, lots of democrats did too. And not just from Enron. Bush/Cheney didn’t make the decision to hide losses in bogus subsidiaries, or to rubber-stamp the audit, or destroy the records afterwards. Sure, Enron execs asked for some favors from various cabinet members as the company began its spiral, but they were mostly rebuffed. Most of the benefits of their money-sprinkling in Washington came years ago in the form of deregulation, while you-know-who was in the White House. If anyone should take the fall, it should be the Enron execs and Anderson accountants - and I mean jail time, not just a few token firings. Firing a guy for rubber-stamping bogus accounting statements is like a free advertising - there’s plenty of other execs who want to bury some embarassing numbers long enough to dump a ton of stock, and this pattern of behavior will continue to repeat itself (though maybe not on this scale) until someone gets some hard time in the slammer.

10:01:42 PM #

Jobsian fanatic and self-proclaimed “Wilford Brimley on ‘ludes” [cite] lookalike Doc Searls criticizes XP while praising OSX, but it’s pretty obvious he hasn’t seriously used XP (or any other Microsoft OS):

I am told that Windows XP is designed to be equally failproof. Maybe it also has a process viewer of some kind. But it doesn’t have a command line interface, does it? Not sure. I kinda doubt it.

In fact, it has both; the command line has been there since DOS, and the Process viewer (aka Task Manager) has been there at least since NT 3.51.

Even if it does, it lacks all the tools that are standard in the Unix toolbox.

They’re don’t all have the same name, but you’d be very surprised at how much you can accomplish in the Windows CLI. For example, Windows doesn’t have grep, but it does have find (which isn’t the same as the Unix find). He does have a point, though; the standard unix utilities are in general more powerful and flexible than what is provided with XP. Just look at the options for XP find vs. Unix grep. No contest - but the stuff you need 95% of the time is there. For everything else, there’s always cygwin.

Come on, Doc, get on the cluetrain… at least try a product before proclaiming it can’t do as much as your shiny new toy. I’m no M$ apologist, but Doc is just taking cheap shots for no reason. Why even bring Windows into it?

…this machine is a dual processor G4/500. Is there a way to see what both are up to, I wonder? Must be.

Try ps axo “args pcpu cputime pid pri psr tname” (the format options may be different for OSX, but that works in Tru64, which is also largely BSD based, check your man page).

6:37:25 PM #

MagnetsDissect your old hard drives and extract the strong magnets for fun and profit:

These things will pinch you if you get skin between them, especially if you let one snap against another from a short distance away. They’ll draw blood.

4:40:14 PM #

Survival of Roman TypesEssay on evolution of roman typefaces from antiquity to today.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story is how roman lettering was invented only once, and then returned to again and again over the years, and that those earliest manifestations of the roman letter are as clear and legible to us today as any contemporary type.

2:58:34 PM #

2002.01.14 (monday)

World Currency MuseumBanknote image database and collector info.

11:51:26 PM #

GreymanAnti-alias your fonts by hand with this shockwave app. This sounds much cooler than it is; it’s really less sophisticated than MS Paint.

11:04:45 PM #

Death by CaffeinePick your beverage, enter your weight, and pull the trigger:

It would take 438.48 cans of TAB to kill you.

10:55:02 PM #

Browser DetectionWebapplet returns just about everything about your browser; mostly boring details, but some useful stuff such as max supported SSL keysize.

8:59:45 PM #

DVD Region KillerThis pseudo device driver fools windows (and any software decoders) that your drive is a hardware-protected RPC-2 drive (whatever that means), effectively disabling software region checking. Too bad all my disks are region 1.

8:55:25 PM #

Below, I’ve moved some useful posts from the (now defunct) secret labs. 7:29:40 PM #

I’m trying to hack up a way of back-dating posts, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I went into the www folder, down to 200201 and copied the file 11.txt to 10.txt and changed the date inside the file accordingly. I then loaded http://127.0.0.1:5335/?d=2002/01/10 in my browser, which showed no posts for that day (thursday, the day before I installed Radio) as expected. Typing into the textarea on that page posts to the current day, not the day you are viewing, which seems a little confusing.
7:28:28 PM #

Trying new date format in the day template (with a script by Jake).It took me a while to figure out how to get the name of the day back and manipulate it the way I wanted, but here’s what I came up with:

<%local (d = date (”<%longDate%>”));
local (month = string.padWithZeros (date.month (d), 2));
local (day = string.padWithZeros (date.day (d), 2));
return (date.year (d) + “.” + month + “.” + day + ” (” + date.dayString (d) + “)” )%>

Note to self: I found that structure in radio.root:system:verbs:builtins:date (not sure if that is the commonly accepted notation, but it should be clear what I mean).

7:26:40 PM #

Tracking: 400 Bad Request errors. (Note: these were caused by AdMuncher.) 6:12:36 PM #

Weird, it just cleared the backlog of mail-to-blog posts. The Mr. Pants post below (which was missing the tail end of the quote, I had to go back and manually fix it) was actually sent right before the Good News post, and the post immediately below this one was posted hours afterwards. The 400 Bad Request errors continue to vex me, though.
5:59:24 PM #

Test, my last mail-to-blog post got eaten. I resent it, and it got eaten again. 5:56:54 PM #

via mrpants: Patriotic Liberace (truly horrifying) and an analysis of the Death Star’s trash compactor:

Are we to believe that the architects of the Death Star, a group of individuals bent on controlling the entire known universe, are also concerned about environmental issues?

5:56:54 PM #

My mail-to-blog posts are getting eaten. Nothing in the event log. And I’m getting the 400 Bad Request errors again occasionally.
5:54:00 PM #

Good news, Radio integration with Manila (and any other centralized blogging application using the Blogger API) is up and running, and should be delivered to the masses soon. 2:20:07 PM #

Gopher 3.0 ReleasedAfter killing gopher with oppressive licensing costs, the University of Minnesota recently GPL’d the codebase, and some development has restarted. Based on the changelog, this 3.0 release seems to be more for publicity than anything else, as there aren’t any real new features listed.

see also: the gopher manifesto

12:34:48 PM #

I’ll be watching Radio Bump to see if he can figure out how to get old entries imported into Radio. It should be pretty easy for Radio to make the appropriate XML-RPC/SOAP/Whatever call to a given manila site to induce some XML output and flow it into some backissues.
12:04:44 PM #

Star Trek Coffees (via larkfarm) 12:48:01 AM #

This is just a test post to make sure I’ve got mail-to-blog configured correctly.
12:32:58 AM #

Hello and welcome back…I’m still experimenting with radio 8.0 but this is where everything will end up if I decide to stick with it 12:27:38 AM #

2002.01.12 (saturday)

I had a rough start with Radio Userland 8.0, but I’m starting to really like it. I’m considering moving the whole weblog over to Radio. I don’t really make heavy use of the dynamic features of Manila other than editing from anywhere, but with the mail-to-blog feature, I should be pretty much set. Giving up the built-in search engine and moving back to a google-backended search will be a minor annoyance, and I hardly ever used the printable pages and mail-this-story features. A little more experimentation is in order.
6:42:00 PM #

The REAL Ultimate PowerSee also: Ninja Lesson [23 Mar 02]

Hi, this site is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS. This site is awesome. My name is Robert and I can’t stop thinking about ninjas. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.

6:42:00 PM #

2002.01.11 (friday)

Marketleap Visibility AnalysisThis webapp queries various search engines and spits out a number that is supposed to tell you how popular your site is, based on number of references. This site has an “average presence.” You can compare up to three other sites simultaneously.

Link popularity analysis is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website’s online awareness and overall visibility.

Hmm… this thing puts about.com in the “900 lb. Gorilla” category. Are they really that popular? And is iVillage really a “player”?

7:42:34 PM #

2002.01.10 (thursday)

Ok, some asshole javascript has totally fucked up my browser (I think it was real.com, but I’m not sure). Something resized one of my windows and removed the status bar to display some ad, and now about half of my new Internet Explorer windows are created without the status bar at the bottom. This is incredibly annoying, and I can’t figure out how to make it remeber that I want it on.
11:53:10 PM #

Seen on the back of a big-ass SUV:

email:www.eqcustomhomes.com

Well, besides the obvious cluelessness, the address doesn’t even resolve to anything. It’s probably the same bozos with the 100:1 perfect compression alien technology.

11:39:10 PM #

Congress Animated GIFEach frame of this graphic is a “map” of voting patterns from the 46th to the 105th Congresses. The maps are generated by comparing voting patterns of congressmen; more similar voting records result in points mapped closer together. Part of a broader paper on the Polarization of American Politics.

11:32:10 PM #

Tron’s 20th AnniversaryGreat interview with director Steven Lisberger. Screw standing in line for episode II, I’m ready to camp out for Tron 2.0 tix.

Although he’s a pioneer in the field, Lisberger sounds skeptical about the current cinematic use of computer effects. “The more advanced the technology in films these days, the more conventional the film,” he says. “‘Titanic’ is a perfect example. Pixar films use cutting-edge technologies to make things look like living plush toys. It seems like our revenge on tech for making things impersonal is to turn it into kitsch. The most powerful machines in the world are being used to make carnival toys.”

10:32:10 PM #

Clean LimeWireLimeWire source recompiled without the adware; currently it’s only hosted on a geocities account wich apparently goes over its daily bandwidth limit every day; you’d think one of the weenies downloading it could put up a frikkin mirror. The link to the GeoCities page is at the bottom of the page linked to above.

OK, I finally got through, here are the direct download links for v2.1.3 (though they’ll probably change any day now):

• http://wind.prohosting.com/burk017/213/LimeWire.exe
• http://users.pandora.be/karel.boonen/downloads/LimeWire.exe
• You also need JRE: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/jre/

9:32:10 PM #

2002.01.09 (wednesday)

I just watched American Psycho on HBO. Awesome. I never would have rented that. Was it supposed to be that funny, or is it just the fucked up mood I’m in today? I was laughing uncontrollably.
11:45:23 PM #

MicroMedicalNew FDA-approved device can turn your iPaq into a handheld EKG machine. Are you ready for Microsoft PaceMaker XP? “Even more reliable!”

10:45:23 PM #

ZeoSyncThese guys claim they have some new compression technology that can shrink pseudo-random data down to 1% of its original size. Just (try to) read their fucking insane press release. Too bad they’re not smart enough to make a real website. Their main page redirects you to an all-flash site at a numerical IP address - how lame is that?

Although currently demonstrating its technology on very small bit strings, ZeoSync expects to overcome the existing temporal restraints of its technology and optimize its algorithms to lead to significant changes in how data is stored and transmitted.

Sorry - I call “bullshit” on this stuff. [Update 10 Jan 02: New Scientist agrees]

10:15:23 PM #

Digital Data Hit by Anthrax Mail SweepThe US Post Office’s new toy, the electron death ray, has been frying all kinds of consumer electronics, not to mention other stuff like “pharmaceuticals, contact lenses, biological samples, and photographic film.” Wait a minute… contact lenses? Oh and did you hear? They’re jacking up postage again, this time to $0.37. Fucking bioterrorists not only get our mail all fucked up, they figure out a way to make us pay more for it! An incinerator would do the same thing for less money.

9:58:23 PM #

2002.01.08 (tuesday)

What is the difference bewtween Windows TrueType fonts that have a “O” on their icon and ones that have an “TT” on their icons? And how is the “install new font” function in XP still using the dialog box from Windows 3.1?Duh, adamv reminded me that the “O” is for OpenType fonts:

It has some new features that supposedly make it easier to do things like have multiple glyphs per character, deal with ligatures, etc.

Ah, sounds a lot like Apple’s old QuickDraw GX. That really took off. Not. So why is their file extension still .ttf instead of .otf?

5:55:11 PM #

Mightier than the Pen?Digital pens are coming, and not a moment too soon! Now everything you write can be instantly transmitted to the FBI for analysis and to AOLCNNTIMEWARNER for them to encrypt and charge you $3 each time you want to read it again.

Apart from our voices, the pen is the most common communications technology we have—and it is the only one that is not digital.

What about books, broadcast radio and TV?

4:55:11 PM #

Jumble and Crossword Solver (via larkfarm)
3:55:11 PM #

WatsonA “desktop interface” for the web. Looks interesting, but for MacOS X only, and I haven’t had a Mac since 1998.

2:55:11 PM #

0654.gif (via flangy)Animated walking ASCII art d00d.

1:55:11 PM #

The Linux PCI ID RepositoryPCI Vendor IDs.

12:55:11 PM #

This Mira tablet computing device [wired] [register] sounds very interesting, but it’s missing something - a keyboard.Without a keyboard, it’s no good for anything I do on a computer (writing emails or weblog entries, doing any work through a CLI, &c). It is, however, perfect for shopping (esp. if you use Passport/Wallet and don’t have to type in your shipping/billing info), browsing, or other web tasks that can be monetized as services, which is the only thing Microsoft is interested in any more.

Besides that, a tablet is physicaly awkward. For long browsing sessions, you’ll either have to hold it up, which will lead to gorilla-arm syndrome (as seen with long-term use of touch screens) or you’ll end up setting it in your lap, which will strain your neck after an hour of looking straight down. A fold-up design like current laptops also makes it easier to carry around without getting fingerprints all over the screen.

Microsoft’s Tablet PC page shows what amounts to a old-tech dockable laptop that can flip the screen and close over the keyboard to convert to tablet mode; that’s a big difference from a dockable display, as Mira is described as, which would be able to shed extra weight and power requirements by leaving components on the desktop. If they make the desktop docking station beefier and strip the laptop down to screen, keyboard and net interface, they’ll be onto something.

11:55:11 AM #

2002.01.07 (monday)

All American Tribute TruckFeaturing airbrushed Rudy, GWB, and Osama with Crosshairs. Available for parades and events.

10:04:59 PM #

Dave Design (via hardOCP)Machined aluminum enclosure (i.e. replacement for the plastic shell, not a carrying case) for your Visor or Palm, $195.

We manufacture everything in house, and utilize a local aerospace certified plating shop for the anodizing. Each enclosure is milled on one of our two Kitamura MyCenter 3Xi machining centers with programing generated using Mastercam Version 8.1. The initial designs were done using Mastercam Solids.

9:04:59 PM #

Ford F-350 Concept TruckWhoa… real-life Tonka Trux!

8:04:59 PM #

TINRATINRA (This Is Not Real Anymore) converts realvideo to AVI files. I haven’t actually tried it, since it requires RealPlayer to be installed (which I’ve been avoiding).

Ugh, I just went to the real site to try to download the player… it’s so laden with bullshit gimmicky crap I couldn’t believe it. I finally found the deeply buried link to download the free version of RealPlayer 8, and it wanted to install some download manager bullshit activeX control. I bailed out, and now I just feel… dirty.

7:04:59 PM #

2002.01.06 (sunday)

Euro-BlütentrainerFlash game challenges you to find the differences between real and fake Euro banknotes. Click on the British flag to launch the app, then just click on anything you see that differs between the two presented notes. You are penalized for wrong clicks by a time deduction.

6:27:59 PM #

96-Coin Euro Banker’s SetPre-order only, approx. $125.

During the planning phase for the introduction of the Euro, the banking system in Spain - and likely others too - requested that complete sets of Euros be made available to its banks as a means of helping to educate their employees. This was the origin of the 96 coin set (12 countries x 8 coins) which ECI has chosen to name the “Bankers Set”.

If that’s too much for you, you can get all twelve 1 Euro coins for $34.

5:27:59 PM #

Paper iMac ModelMore colors available up one directory.

4:27:59 PM #

[corp-focus] The Boeing BoondoggleIn December 2001, congress passed a bill requiring the Air Force to lease 100 767s from Boeing for use as tankers; these planes were never requested by the military, and the total cost of the ten-year lease (approx. $26 billion) will end up being about five times what an outright purchase would cost.

There also seemed to be a sense that the lease giveaway was a consolation prize for Boeing, which recently lost out to Lockheed in the bidding to be primary contractor on the new Joint Strike Fighter — a project worth a tidy $200 billion.

3:27:59 PM #

Junkbusters Anti-Telemarketing ScriptUse this script when you get a telemarketer call to get their attention and make sure they know not to call you back. [more tips]

2:27:59 PM #

State Do Not Call ListsInformation on state-kept “do not call” lists for telemarketers. Arkansas has one [dontcall.org], but you have to pay the state $5/year to be on it (for database maintenace) and many industries are exempt from having to observe the list (real estate agents, auto sales, insurance sales, stock brokers, banks (though they must observe the list if they are offering credit cards), and funeral service providers).

1:27:59 PM #

Tennessee Interstate Highway ConditionsNice presentation of winter road conditions; this would have been much more useful for me when I was living in Atlanta and driving through Tennessee more often.

12:27:59 PM #

Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lostLongish paper on “How the Internet is being Changed from a Means of Liberation to a Tool of Authoritarianism.” Includes basic technical descriptions of internet operations, threats to vested interests, surveillance technologies, and more.

11:27:59 AM #

Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms
10:27:59 AM #

XP-AntiSpySmall win32 application to disable some questionable “features” of Windows XP, such as the error reporting and auto-authentication. Be careful, it doesn’t seem that this app will re-enable anything that it disables, and it selects everything by default. This page is in German, but an English version of the application is available for download.

9:27:59 AM #

2002.01.03 (thursday)

Hobo SignsGlossary of graffiti used by hobos of yore to covertly communicate with each other.

10:10:01 PM #

Could the vaunted Big 12, hailed by the media as the toughest conference in the country just weeks ago, possibly be any more embarrassed?Now I expect everyone will use Miami’s victory to justify the BCS system (Keith Jackson has already declared that “they are certainly the champions”), but it proves nothing. In fact, this game does more to hurt the credibility of the BCS computer ranking system than help it in my mind, as it was pretty obvious that Nebraska had no business being in the national championship game. Further, the Miami win over Nebraska, no matter how big, does nothing to diminish any claim Oregon might make that they should have been in the game.

All four BCS games have been pretty lopsided (and hence, boring) - but since the BCS dictates the TV schedule and guarantees itself an exclusive audience, they have no motivation to provide entertaining matchups (like the Marshall-ECU, Washington-Texas, and Ohio State-South Carolina games).

8:11:31 PM #

When I moved from Atlanta, I had the post office forward my mail to my parents in Memphis, as I had no permanent address in Little Rock (and wouldn’t have one for almost three months). After a few weeks went by in which I had received no forwarded mail, I called the post office to see what was going on. They confirmed my old and new addresses, and assured me everything was in order, and that my mail might be delayed because of the September 11 incidents (even though I moved before that, and I *never* got any mail forwarded). Yesterday, my father called me and said that I got a huge bundle of letters in the mail - four and a half months’ worth of stuff arrived all at once. Thanks, assholes.
8:08:31 PM #

How to Make Money From Spam (Legally and Ethically!)Rant about a the need for a service that not only already exists, but is explicitly mentioned in the rant. The author is apparently unaware that spamcop does exactly what he wishes it would do:

…receive redirected email, filter it through a real-time spam filter (like SpamCop’s), and then return it back to a specified email address…

Spamcop is completely transparent, judging from the setup FAQ (I haven’t used the fee-based automatic service, only use the free manual reporting service). You have your mail from your existing, publicly-known address autoforwarded to a spamcop address (or have spamcop regularly POP your mail if you can’t set up autoforwarding); it then filters the mail and either drops it in a mailbox on their server for you to POP to your client at your leisure, or else it auto-delivers it to a secret mailbox of your choice (it’s in your interest to never reveal the secret address to anyone other than spamcop, as you will assume mail in there has been filtered).

8:03:31 PM #

2002.01.02 (wednesday)

I finally bought a desk. Well, sort of. I wanted to spend around $300, but I didn’t want a shitty particle-board desk from Office Despot. And most desks I’ve looked at, shitty or not, don’t have a lot of legroom due to bulky drawers on each side which I really don’t want. I finally found the perfect thing - an unfinished kitchen table. Six feet wide, three feet deep, nothing to bang your knee on underneath, with a perfectly smooth, wide open top uninterrupted by that stupid shelving all those Office Despot desks have built into them. A little stain and polyurethane and I’m set.
11:59:33 PM #

I have way too many pairs of pants. I’m considering giving them all serial numbers and tracking them with a spreadsheet. Seriously. I could put it up on the weblog, though I don’t see much point. This will be a huge help when I finally get around to losing about 500 pounds so I can figure out which pairs will magicly fit me again.I figure if I can quit smoking, I can lose some weight.

I’m pushing 300 now, which really isn’t that much, as I’m 6′5″, though I weighed 185 after my freshman year. I think 250 is a pretty good target for now; once I make that, I’ll re-evaluate. I weighed around 240 when I quit smoking in February; after that, it didn’t take long to baloon up to 280 or so, and I reached a plateau about three months ago. Now that I’ve slowed down, it shouldn’t be too hard.

11:59:03 PM #

CSS PropertiesCheat sheet for cascading style sheets. I’ve been tweaking the site template a bit today; I’d like to make the body text more narrow, but I don’t want to use a table since it slows rendering too much and I don’t really want to use CSS because I don’t really know much about it and I don’t have GUI browser other than MSIE installed right now. I thought about the margin tag but manila only seems to support it for the left side and top; I could hard code it into the template but that’s kinda klunky, and I really only want the body shrunk, not the masthead or footer. Oh well, I’ll play with it some other time.

11:58:54 PM #

CrowdsP2P anonymizer. No, it doesn’t anonymize p2p transactions, it uses p2p techniques to anonymize other stuff (including, but not limited to, p2p traffic, presumably). You join a crowd of other users, then pass web requests to random members of the crowd, which either pass it on to other crowd members or to the final destination.

11:53:06 PM #

SlickrunFloating commandline for win32. If you ever use the “run” thingy from the start menu, you want this.

11:49:17 PM #

Home of AdamantEffective, efficient win32 system utilities. Tesseract is an excellent realtime network monitor.

11:46:55 PM #

2002.01.01 (tuesday)

Email Address ScramblerThis script will takes your email address as input and outputs ASCII HTML codes. You put this on your webpage, and browsers will auto-render it in the familiar form, but (in theory) spam harvesters will be too dumb to figure it out. I’ve never heard of these jokers before, and I had a paranoid feeling it might be feeding directly into some spam database, so I scrambled my address as the input and just undid the output by hand.

11:28:39 PM #

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?Interesting academic paper arguing that there is a good possibility we only exist in some evolutionary simulator designed by our highly evolved future progeny; it seems, however, like a mere corolary to the Doomsday Argument [30 oct 01] (which this paper does credit).

11:24:58 PM #

These fucking “what’s in your wallet” commercials are really getting old. They want you to think you’re special for getting their platinum card, like its some honor you have to earn by being a top-tier consumer… how exclusive can it be if they’re advertising the thing on national TV every ten minutes begging you to sign up? You want to know what’s in my wallet? Cash. Now shut the fuck up, please.
7:34:47 PM #

Euro Banknotes and CoinsOfficial info from the European Central Bank. My first impression isn’t very good; I don’t like the fact that the notes are different sizes, though I appreciate the goal of making the notes easier to differentiate for the visually impared. I think I personally prefer the uniform color of American paper currency, but I was impressed with the decision to use strongly contrasting colors for banknotes of “adjacent” value. Be sure to see André Radke’s photos of new notes fresh from the ATM for a better side-by-side comparison.

It seems slightly creepy that the banknotes include “the symbol © indicating copyright protection” - like its some kind of corporate intellectual property voucher instead of government-backed money. It also seems half-assed that many coins of different demoninations share reverse designs (e.g. Ireland, Holland, and, to a lesser extent, Germany).

7:33:47 PM #

Geometric Sculpture (via blackholebrain)Variations on regular polyhedra, constructed with an interesting selection of materials, such as plastic forks, CD-ROMs, and toothbrushes.

11:36:10 AM #

Win2VNC (via larkfarm)Control multiple computers (each with their own monitor) from one keyboard and mouse. This VNC hack effectively tacks desktops end-to-end (even across different operating systems).

11:29:26 AM #

Secrets of the Mind (Case 6)Trick your brain and induce phantom sensations - great party tricks.

Want to fool yourself into thinking your nose is three feet long or that a rubber hand is actually your own?

10:57:59 AM #

Revolving Sushi Watch
10:49:41 AM #

Back to SchoolMust read interview with Elinor Burkett, author of Another Planet, which chronicles the year she spent with a theoretically superior public high school in Minnesota. Unsurprisingly, she concludes that the focus on self-esteem and having fun have hindered the students much more than helped; furthermore, lack of funding and unqualified teachers aren’t nearly as big of a problem as parents - we often hear of problems cause by lack of parental involvement, but sometimes too much involvement can be just as bad. Parents pressure the school to lower standards so their children look better on paper or reduce workloads so their children have more time to participate in extracurriculars or work part time.

It’s a total nightmare for these teachers. One of the best teachers in the school taught advanced-placement literature, among other things. And there was a kid whose parents were probably more concerned with grades than any other parents in the school. The kid was under such pressure at home that he cheated routinely. It was a joke among his peers. Everybody always knew that he was cheating. He copied his final paper for A.P. literature and composition off the Internet. And the teacher nailed him. The parents came in and the father said, “How dare you call this cheating? He was using the Internet as a resource! And if you try to flunk him on this paper I am going to sue you to the Supreme Court!” So if you’re the teacher, maybe the first eight times you fight the parents. But then, little by little, you give up because it’s just not worth it to take these people on.

10:46:40 AM #