The Hubble’s main ACS camera appears to have suffered a short circuit that has resulted in the camera powering down and entering a safe mode. The engineers seem to think that it is rather unlikely that it will be returned to working order, and the problem may affect the actual praticality of the [...]
Today, Microsoft has finally released their long coming upgrade to the venerable XP line. I’d say that now is the perfect time for you to move on. No, not by upgrading your box from Windows XP to Vista, but by keeping your $200+ dollars in your pocket, and shifting to an operating system [...]
Adam Dunkels Contiki operating system sported a full TCP/IP stack, and ran on very small microcomputers such as the Commodore 64. Apparently now he’s submitted his PhD these on the topic. It’s a very interesting bit of work, check it out.
The Contiki Operating System - PhD Thesis: Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded [...]
Apparently, this memo has been out for a while, but I hadn’t seen it before. I know, I like to rant about Microsoft a lot, but it’s really quite interesting.
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
Some quotes:
… so far no-one has been able to identify any Windows system that will actually play HD [...]
On Mythbusters tonight, they covered an interesting myth: that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times. My strange brain full of trivia made me exclaim “That myth was already busted, and by a high school student!” Indeed, a few minutes with a search engine revealed [...]
Here are a bunch of books that are licensed under the Creative Commons and for the most part can be freely downloaded, read, and even redistributed (if non commercially). They include books that I already have in dead tree form, like Asterisk: The Future of Telephony or Lessig’s Free Culture, but [...]
I like to read old science books. They serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come, or just as often, how ignorant we remain. This book is nicely illustrated tome, briefly covering topics of astronomy, biology, and particle physics. It’s coverage of evolution seems particularly interesting to me, especially for its [...]
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who collects something truly odd. This guy has a website dedicated to the insulators that are used on telegraph poles along British railways. That’s… just… Wow. How niche can you get?
Teleramics - Insulator collecting UK
The new WordPress 2.1 Ella was released about 17 hours ago, and since this coincided with a few minutes of boredom, I upgraded. Check out the link for details on what’s improved: most notable to me is that it does appear to be significantly faster. I noted a couple of strange things though: [...]
When I was probably ten or twelve years old, I remember that the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott somehow came to my attention, probably through something related to Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American. It is an interesting book that tries to present an easy-to-understand example of how we might visualize four [...]
We woke up and got in line for the Best Buy in hopes that we might get a Wii. They had fifty. We were fifty second in line. Sigh.
Technorati Tags: Nintendo, Wii, Disappointment
I’ve mentioned it before: when you are interested in as many strange things as I am, web surfing can be dangerous to your time. Lately I’ve been going through my blogroll with two purposes in mind:
Delete the stuff that I don’t read anymore, or consider boring.
Tag the remaining links with slightly more meaningful tags [...]
Let’s face it: I’m not Canadian, so I don’t really care about hockey. But still, I found the following story to be both amusing and thought provoking, and i suspect that similar situations can occur in baseball (a sport that non-Canadians enjoy) so I’ll comment briefly.
All-Star games are odd things because they [...]
During a stop to the new Coppola winery in Healdsburg, I noticed that they had a kit for a pinhole camera on sale for a mere $4.99. I’ve goofed around with pinhole photography a bit before, so the allure was too much to resist. A couple of hours later, I had the camera [...]
You only need to make one mistake when it snows in Portland: that’s trying to drive at all. Here’s a clue: walk to your car. If you can push it sideways away from the curb, you shouldn’t attempt to drive it. Just stay wherever you are at. If you do [...]
