Category: Geekitude

No problem! All you need is an air conditioner, a 2500watt inverter, and some monster power cable, and install it in your pickup truck.
Thanks to Hackaday.

I’m exploring some of the weather station solutions for Linux. Folks have been doing various weather stats gathering applications for Windows based machines forever, I’m curious about doing a multiple-input monitoring system that will keep track of indoor, outdoor, and water temperature, and display them on a handy screen.
It looks like one of the more popular systems is Weather Display, which conveniently has a Linux version.
Excellent, thinks I. I’ll check it out. Oh, and on their Linux page, they have a handy Getting Started guide.
Which is a link to a Microsoft Word document.
The mind boggles.

Anyone remember Pointcast? Back in the late 90’s, this tool was a ‘push’ concept that downloaded headlines, quotes, stocks, and other article details to your PC and showed them in a sort of animated presentation via a screensaver. I found it fascinating. If an article or headline showed up I was interested in, I could pause the display and ask for information on that article.
With RSS feeds being available from just about every source, it just seems natural that we should be able to re-implement Pointcast using RSS feeds for data sources. I’ve seen some tools for MacOS that do thi (but only the headlines, and not really showing ‘content’, just sort of waving pretty headlines), but nothing for Linux that would actually summarize the feeds.
So who wants to write an XScreensaver plugin for this?

Continuing the posting I did yesterday about Radio Paradise and XM Radio, Bill has given a lot more information on the situation between RP and XM and Sirius. I highly recommend folks take a look at the ongoing conversation on RP’s forums.

Last week I braved the discount racks at Microcenter down in Cambridge for an hour or two just sort of looking to see what’s available. I would highly recommend this exercise to anyone who likes finding affordable items in the “Gosh, I could use that!” mindset.
This weeks find included a set of opened-but-new Shure E2c noise cancelling headphones for the tasty price of $69.99. These are the in-ear ‘bud’ style, which have traditionally had problems with long-term wear, not to mention no noise-cancellation ability.
The Shure headphones come with a handful of replaceable clear soft plastic and foam inserts. It took quite a while to find a mix-and-match arrangement that fit my (apparently) different sized ears. I ended up with the ‘middle-size’ plastic insert for my left ear, and one of the foam inserts for my right. This arrangement gives me a noise-cancelled environment that’s mobile, small, and plugs into my stereo jack on the laptop (Mmm, Radio Paradise), with the added bonus of being small and mobile. Oh yeah, and they sound GREAT.
The final factor will be long term wear. So far I’m going on 2 hours and they’re still quite comfortable.
Of course, there’s the drawback. They’re noise-cancelling headphones (passive, not active), which means that when the music’s off, it sounds like someone has wrapped my head in pillows. Because of the complex process of putting the headphones in, I tend to unjack it if I need to run to the bathroom or to the kitchen for more coffee or wahtever. Makes chatting in the kitchen a bit of a challenge (though normally I’m working alone, so no biggie).
So the next step is to wire up amplifying mics I can jack into personally, so I’ll have my music at the desk, and have a hearing-aid system when walking around.
My steps toward becoming Cyber-Geek continue.

If you have a pulse and are connected to the net at anything faster than pigeon speed, you’ve heard that Sony has released the Playstation 3 at the E3 gaming expo. I don’t know about you, but the specs on this thing are pretty mindblowing. Checkit:

• It will support Blu-ray (obviously), DVD±R/W, CD-R/RW
• Backwards compatible with the PlayStation 2 and original Playstation
• One 3.2GHz Cell processor – total system performance rated at 2.18 teraflops (uh, that’s actually about twice what Microsoft is claiming the Xbox 360 will do); it will have 256MB system RAM 3.2GHz, and 256MB GDDR VRAM at 700MHz
• The nVidia graphics will be called the RSX (Reality Synthesizer), and will trump the Xbox 360 with 1080p (yes, that’s a p) graphics support.
• There will be a 2.5-inch hard drive (i.e. laptop hard drive) attachment – a first for a Sony launch (no, we don’t count the PSX and/or the FF add-on)
• Memory Stick Duo slot, and very surprisingly, an SD and CF slots
• Bluetooth support with up to seven wireless controllers
• Six USB system ports
• 1080p HDTV direct support (!!)

Wow. For me, the kicker on this is once again they’ve made backwards compatability a big priority. This means this PS3 can play all the games released for the PS2 (somewhere around a bazillion) as well as all the games for the PS1 (another few bazillion). Cool.
Now lets take a look at the Other Side. Microsoft released their Xbox 360. Microsoft has been trying to take over the home market from Sony for quite a while, and while they have a good solid hold on sports games, they’re not making much progress elsewhere. They had hoped that coming out with a new console around the time the PS3 came out would win them points.
The word on the street is that the Xbox 360 is backwards compatable. Sorta. The comments I’ve heard are that it will “run the major titles”.
Does this sound familiar? Microsoft went to the biggest game manufacturers, and asked htem what their top selling games were, and tweaked and modded the 360 to make sure it would run those games. Screw the rest of them, they didn’t make any money.
This approach is SOOO like every upgrade that Microsoft has ever done – Win95, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, etc. The ‘big stuff’ ran, but the little stuff had a tendency to break.
I’ll point out that Sony is maintaining compatability with a machine that hasn’t been manufactured in something like 7 years. And no ‘some titles’ or ‘the big ones should work’ schpiel here. They all do. Why? Because they know their specs, they know their platform, they know what a game can and can’t do, and they built the environments accordingly.
Not that I would have gone out and bought an Xbox 360. I wouldn’t. But the PS3 just seems to blow the socks off anything the 360 is offering, including backwards compatability so I can play those old dusty PS1 games I have.
Now, all I have to do is be able to afford it. Hmm.

You see them at the stores, on TV, and occasionally during police activities, but how do they really work?
Check out the nice full detailed article at HowStuffWorks.com for an inside look at these fascinating and flexible devices. They go into detail not only on the theory and construction, but also into examples of both self defense (keeping an attacker at bay) as well as domestic (re-warming your coffee) uses.
Interested in one for yourself? Make sure you mosey over to Park Sabers and check out their full line of custom built lightsabers.

Since I set up my T40 laptop with a dock and an external monitor, I have to frequently change the resolution from the laptops native 1400×1050 (yes, that high) to 1280×1024 (what my monitor can handle). Up til now I’ve been using the Desktop config tool to do this (right click on desktop, Configure Desktop->Display->Screen size. Whaddapain.
Folks on #kde pointed me to a handy little tool called ‘krandrtray’, which puts a small icon in your systray. Clicking on it brings up a pulldown menu (see above) where you can change many of your screen settings, such as resolution and frequency. Very handy!
I noted that krandrtray was not showing up in any of the menus, so it was a little tricky to find. I suggest using Alt-F2 to launch it, or just launch it from a Konsole.

This is a fun set of flash games that are educational as well. How well do you know your US geography? Place the states onto the map – I played the ‘intermediate’ Place the State one and 46 out of 50 perfect – 92%, Avg error of 17 miles in 497 seconds.
Click here to play

Recently Microsoft launched their answer to Apple’s iTunes music service, called ‘playsforsure‘. The word around the coffee machine is that Microsoft will fail in this endeavor, mostly because they offer nothing over what iTunes + the iPod has, save that their service will run on more devices.
Over at Engadget, Ross Rubin has a wonderful column that takes on this topic, and puts out some great commentary…

The only choice that consumers really care about in digital music is choice in content. After all, consumers don’t pick their cable or satellite TV plan provider based on what kind of set-top box they’ll get. They choose based on the kind and number of channels available. And here again, no Windows Media-based store offers a significant choice advantage over the iTumes Music Store; device platform market share means nothing since, unlike with software, there is practically no incremental cost to support a player with a particular piece of content.

Once again Apple is using their SINISTER MIND RAY on me.
My mom gets back from Florida next week, so, naturally, I wait until THIS WEEKEND to complete prepping the new Mac Mini for her return. See this article for some of my chatterings about it. In order to make sure everything is in place, I needed to copy all her bookmarks, files, documents, and games off the old iMac gumdrop and onto the new machine.
Now, for a machine that has no removable writable media, this may be problematic. I suppose I could find the files in the directories, ftp them up to my server, and then down again. Or I could set up file sharing between the two, and copy across that way. I groaned at this option. Nothing makes me want to flee to the antarctic faster than “Oh joy! Lets learn aNOTHER way a company redefined network access!”
But several folks said “Wait, just firewire the machine.” “Uhh, what?” – I knew what Firewire was – it was that cable / bus system that USB was spanking six ways from Sunday. But I also knew it was tremendously fast, and that Macs used it. Okee, fine. “But the drive in the iMac isn’t a Firewire drive.”
“Nonono. Just hook the 2 macs together with a firewire cable. On the iMac, hold down ‘T’ when booting. It’ll come up as one big Firewire drive. Trust me.”
So I did. I borrowed a cable from Thud, cabled them up, held down the ‘T’ key on the imac, and hit the power. Lo, the mac turns on, and quickly starts bouncing the little Firewire symbol around on the screen. Going over to the Mac Mini, I see… an icon grinning evilly at me that says ‘Firewire drive’. Double-clicking it, indeed, it was the other mac’s drive.
Copying files over was trivial – just drag n drop.
Now, doing this procedure on a PC or a Linux box is… well, not possible. The hardware issues alone would cause anyone trying to write this to go quite insane. But Apple has the advantage of owning things top to bottom. Hardware, software, and most of the applications. So they can do magic things like this.
But… single-vendor-solution BAD! Non-free systems BAD! NnnnggggglL! Must resist!

Go to google, or, if you’re in Firefox, just click or select the Google search field. Type ‘define: something’ – something can be anything you’re trying to look up.
Google returns with a (usually fairly accurate) guess about the definition of that word, based on other lookups.
Since I’ve gotten totally annoyed with sites like Dictionary.com and the like (which regularly take 20 seconds just to come up with the input form), this is a great shortcut.

I spent another chunk of today (probably inappropriately) doing more tuning on the blog. This was inspired by a few articles I was reading on Google AdSense tuning, as well as some other tweaks I wanted to do with the page layout.
This turned into a fairly major series of fixes, including finally replacing the top banner with an appropriate background graphic. Doing so uncovered a problem with the ‘date’ tabs that I have over each days postings, so that image needed to be re-rendered.
Please do take a chance to visit it and let me know what you think.
I use The Gimp for all my graphic editing, and while it has a somewhat arcane interface, it’s undeniably a powerful tool. I re-rendered the tab (6 ways from sunday actually, but that’s another story), and posted it.
The problem is that the graphic used for the tabs is a PNG file, a vastly superior file format to GIF and JPG, but one not well supported by IE. Why not? This is still a mystery – it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t been informed of the problem since IE 5.5, but I digress.
Apparently, there is no fix for a transparent background on a PNG file, particularly when embedded in a stylesheet. I’ve decided that most of the readers coming to PG probably are using something more capable than IE, and if they’re not, the page does render, there’s just an odd shadow near the tab itself.
For a demonstration of the PNG fault in IE, here is a set of pages that walk through the problem with transparency support in IE.
I’m still waiting for a realistic reason people are still using IE over Firefox.

As mentioned on Boingboing, Ambient Devices makes a nifty retro-esque system for displaying realtime data in a traditional ‘analog needle’ mode.
The ‘Dashboard‘ consists of 3 analog meters with replacable backdrops. It receives it’s data via FM subcarrier, configured via a web browser. You can go to their site and tell your unit what you’d like to display. Current stock market values? Temperature outside? Amount of traffic to your website today? All of these can be represented in realtime.
The Wireless Weblog has a full review of the unit, including information on the subscription service and everything. Just plain neato.
[Edit 11:58am – Sorry bout that, bad tag in the image. Fixed. -dbs]