Category: Geekitude

I just got back from running registration at a customers event down in Washington, DC. Jonah generously agreed to be my second, as well as let us use his truck for hauling the equipment to and from the event. One of the nifty toys he has installed in the car is an XM Radio SkyFI receiver.
For the uninitiated, XM Radio is one of 2 satellite radio systems available that provide full time access to hundreds of radio stations from anywhere in the continental US. I had been intrigued by this concept for a while, but the cost of the receivers and the monthly fee (around $10) sort of scared me off.
Since this was a longish (7 hours) road trip each way, I had plenty of time to get a feel for the system.
I’m impressed! On the way south, we chatted a lot, so we left the receiver quietly playing 80s tracks. The unit rebroadcasts the reception via a local FM signal, so it was simply sitting on the dash playing through the cars stereo via the radio. The XM display would show what song by what artist was playing (in that nifty amber LCD display). Unobtrusive, no commercials (other than ones for XM itself), nice!
On the way back I did a lot of driving while Jonah slept, so I noodled around with the receiver, checking out other channels. The unit has a jog-dial on it that shows what station you’re tuning to, and the title and content. Blues, various rock stations, a couple different Jazz stations… then it got interesting.
Various news feeds (MSNBC, CNN, etc), a couple comedy stations and… whoah! NPR!! There is a full NPR feed as part of the lineup. We listened to This American Life as well as some other shows. The signal was strong, clean, and we were able to listen to it from the middle of New Jersey all the way into Massachusetts – something you can’t do with any local radio station, let alone NPR.
Okay, so that’s pretty neat. But it just got better. XM Radio is preparing to release MyFI, a portable XM radio receiver the size and shape of an iPod. It’s somewhat expensive ($349), and not out yet, but it’s mobile, rechargeable, dockable, and pretty durned sexy.
If XM were to ever get Radio Paradise as an active channel, there would be no question, I’d be there in an instant. As it is now, I’m just screamingly tempted. Heck, just for the regular drives we do up to Maine during the summer, having regular, dependable radio reception from door to door would be wonderful. And with something like the MyFI, we could put it in any vehicle we happen to be driving up in.

Stormchasers is da weirdest peoplez, but they do take some damned cool videos.
(thanks to rmd for the link)

A while back I had a hard system shutdown due to a battery failure, which ended up trashing some of the setup in Evolution, my mail client. I got it sort of running again, and restored backups of my calendar and my contact list, but I was having abysmal performance problems. Things were just deathly slow.
I reverted to using Pine for a while, which was fine, but I found myself -seriously- missing my address book and calendar. I guess I’ve been successfully reprogrammed.
Anyway, this morning I sat down to figure out my performance problems. I do everything in Evolution via IMAP (as I believe all mail clients should). No folders or information is stored locally, except instructions to the mail client as to where to go to find the IMAP mailboxes.
One of the settings in Evolution tells it that whenever it does something, it shoudl not only scan the inbox for new messages, but also scan all my subfolders. I had inadvertently set this option ‘on’. So everytime Evolution did something with the IMAP server, it scanned all my folders. And baby, I have a LOT of large mail folders.
Unchecked that option, and Evolution veritably -leaped- back into workable performance realms. I am a happy man.

How many of these make you go “I know what that is! I used to do that all the time!”

IN#4

Control-Alt [SIDEKICK!] - Delete

C> ^P[enter] [pause] “GodDAMMIT! “

Hmm. Cool machine. What’s this? Superzap? That must be a game!

[S]pell “Tiltowait” HAHAHHA! DIE!

“Sure, I got Bilestoad. Whatcha got? Ooo, Karateka! ”

“I’ll take 2 doublesided, doubledensities please. Yeah, I could use 3, but I don’t have the extra $2.”

^R^R^R, hm… ^C… yeah… ^R^R^R… okay, i’m done. ^KX.. [C]… Damn [E].

“Whadya mean no command line!?!? It’s a friggin PDP11! Yeah, I got another interpretation of POS…

“Dude, I found this box. $5! 2 RX11s, an 11/34boardset, an RK11D and.. YES! An RL11! You still have those 2 RL01s? Man, this’ll bring me up to 10meg ! Score! Can I borrow some packs? I’ll sysgen this weekend… should only take about 22 hours.”

Wow. Can you imagine getting a ‘login: ‘ prompt? On a LAPTOP? ‘Hey, mind if I log into your machine? Here on the airplane?! Hahahahah!

This afternoon I had the joyous experience of having a tooth extracted – nothing really dramatic honestly, it only took about 15 minutes, it was just unexpected. Went in to have the tooth looked at, and the x-ray showed the tooth almost totally gone. Out she comes!

After getting back, and nursing some gauze, we started chatting about the future of dental procedures, and the potential that sometime soon teeth may not need to be repaired anymore… they can be removed and simply re-grown.

Continue reading “Baby teeth used for Stem Cells?” →

While down at Ubercon this weekend (which was a blast, btw – if you like gaming and webcomics, this is definately the place to be. Next Ubercon is in March, 2005!), I sat down in the LAN area during a break from registration, and played Evil Genius for a while.
This is one mighty warped game. You play your standard Evil Genius (straight out of Dr No and the like) building your underground fortress and trying to gain notoriety with your hordes of yellow jumpsuited minions and psychotic sidekicks.
This game was put together by the same folks who did Dungeon Keeper, a game that broke ground by placing you, the player, on the ‘evil’ side of the equation, trying to maintain your dungeon against those pesky heros and wizards who try to wipe out all your creatures. It’s been 5 years since that game came out, and Evil Genius has revamped the concept into a slick, beautifully laid out, modern version of the same concept.
It’s a LOAD of fun, and is making me ponder getting Transgaming Cedega tools in place to try and run the game under Linux.

From another mailing list, someone brought up this little applet (requires Java) that demonstrates a way to make very long pulldon menus navigable, by ‘zooming’ portions of the menus based on mouse position.
Apple used a similar concept with the OSX Dock, which can expand the portion of the menu you’re interested in.
It’s great to see folks thinking about new ways to approach old problems rather than falling back on “this is the way it’s always been done”. How many people really think about pulldown menus in this depth and spend the time to go “Hm. I wonder how this could be improved?”

I just introduced my mom to Wikipedia, and spent the next 1/2 hour updating and creating pages relating to fiber arts (her specialty).
If there’s any project that truly represents the spirit of the Internet – global sharing of information for anyone and everyone who wants it – it’s this project.
I encourage everyone who believes that Information Should Be Free, and wants to participate in the group-think that we all dreamed a connected world should be to hi thee to Wikipedia and contribute. Everyone has some information that’s not there already. What do you know that someone else hasn’t documented and shared already?

On my cell phone (a Kyocera 7135 I’m sure ya’ll are tired of hearing about), I had a wide range of browsers to choose from when doing webstuff. The Kyocera built in something or other was the one I chose first, and it was ‘eh’. Palm phones aren’t known for their screaming horsepower, and trying to render 150k jpegs down to something legible just brought the poor machine to its knees.
I rummaged around and found the Eudoraweb browser. It’s a HECK of a lot faster than the browser I was using, perhaps because it never loads images unless you ask for it. It shows byte progress as pages are downloading, and it’s bookmark system is nice and simple. I’ve switched to using it full time now, browsing Slashdot, my blog, a few other blogs, and various Livejournals seems to work perfectly, as long as you keep in mind this is a 33mghz CPU with 16meg of RAM trying to render pages that were designed for osmething with a lot more horsepower. Useable, but not quite the same as the desktop experience.

This guy is definately loopy. He’s attached a jet engine to a shopping cart. “After 50mph it starts to get unstable…” Yeesh.
Thaks to Greg Hughes for the pointer

This was just passed to me by some folks on IRC. It’s about 3 minutes of a demonstration of choreographed dancing by 2′ tall robots. I had heard about this particular piece a while ago (the file is dated 12/18/2003), but had sort of dismissed it as “yea yea, dancing robots, Marvin does the hoochee koochee. Big deal.
This is MUCH better than I expected. These robots are apparently built by Sony, and are called Qrio (also spelled ‘Quro’ some places). They are some of the most articulate robots ever made, able to run, jump, roll, pick things up, do visual face recognition, have tactile feedback in their hands, etc.
As noted on several other sites, Japan (Honda and Sony in particular) are YEARS ahead of anything the US is producing in this arena. The Qrio site above has many videos and pictures of the robot in action. Truly inspiring stuff.

Well, I’ve been stymied. I call on the blogosphere for assistance here.
I bought and built a purple gumdrop iMac for my mom about 4 months ago. This was to upgrade her from an ancient wheezing G3 running OS9 that was driving me nuts to maintain. This was my first experience with OSX, and I found myself liking it an awful lot.
Now comes the problem. I upgraded the machine to > 512meg of RAM and a 40gig HD, and installed OSX 10.3 on it. It was running fine up until a few weeks ago.
Now we can’t start the Finder. No desktop, no nothing. If we didn’t have the dock, the machine would be useless. Nothing I’ve tried has fixed it – neither starting the Finder from the command line (sorry, don’t remember the command we tried, but it resulted in a crash), nor running system update, nor running Repair Permissions. A reboot will return to the dock-without-finder. I’ve tried switching users, but the machine wedges when trying to get to the ‘select user’ screen.
I’ve tried moving the ~/Library/ tree out of the way and rebooting, no dice there either.
The last problem is… well, it’s at my mothers house. So working on it has to be limited to the 2-3 hours I’m there a week visiting. I’ll be there tonight (7pmish east coast time), and on IRC and AIM. If anyone wants to help me debug this, either drop a message here, or be around tonight while I’m at the machine. Let me know though so I can msg / mail / poke ya when I’m online again 🙂

After spending the weekend at Gnomedex, I’ve been bombarded with publishing, security, and blogging technologies. The biggest of these is of course RSS, which by all accounts is changing the face of online publishing.
I’ve naturally been using RSS for my syndicated feeds, browsing blogs using the Sage RSS aggregator within Firefox.
As I add more and more feeds to my view list, I’m starting to hit some problems. First of all, why is it that folks do not put RSS links on their blogs? This should be a given. “Click here for the RSS feed URL”. Chatting around at Gnomedex, if someone doesn’t have an RSS link on their page, you generally view the source of the page, and look for a ‘link rel=”alternate”‘ entry in the source code, and that will point out the RSS feed.
Yuck!
FireFox 1.0 has a nifty little tool in it for doing something called “Live Bookmarks”. If an RSS feed is detected on a webpage, there is a small box in the tool bar that says [RSS]. If you click on it, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for that site, and updates from that site will show up in your bookmarks folder automatically. I tinkered with this for a bit, and found it cumbersome, not to mention seeming to ‘hack’ the concept of a bookmarks folder, which to me is generally static.
Sage does in fact update bookmarks, but all within a special folder (‘RSS Feeds’), and it doesn’t in fact add bookmarks for postings, simply gives you a quick link to view the feed. Also, the Firefox RSS handler doesn’t summarize the feed, it links directly to the articles, so to view the article or the summary, you have to hit the site directly. Good for click revenue I suppose, but defeats the purpose of an RSS feed in my opinion.
But the really annoying thing is there’s no easy process for bookmarking, into Sage, an RSS feed, unless the person who has the site has added the link into their page. The [RSS] button in Firefox can -only- update the ‘Live Bookmarks’ page, and manually adding a simple bookmark URL is difficult in Firefox (Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->Select RSS Feeds->New Bookmark, fill out the info, click [Ok], then close the bookmark editor). What is really needed is a [right click] ‘View this URL’ or ‘Bookmark this URL’ or something similar, so it can be added into the Sage bookmarks folder.
So, in a nutshell, why have the RSS marker in the toolbar, if it’s useless for anything but Firefox’s idiotic implementation of an aggregator?

If you’re travelling, having good games on a Palm device is a big win. Since I have my Kyocera phone with me constantly, it’s great to be able to whip it out and play some games for a while.
I’ve gotten tired of Bejeweled and I’ve been looking around for something more engrossing.

Continue reading “Games for the road.” →