Monthly Archives: January 2006

Cooking with sugar

Dan Lyke’s Flutterby! has an interesting article on cooking with sugar. I haven’t looked into this as closely as Dan apparently has, but I am aware that the addition of some corn syrup into sugar recipes can prevent crystallization as you heat sugar mixtures. I recently had some fun making my first real caramel for an apple tarte tatin that I made for Christmas dinner, but there is lots to this whole science of sucrose manipulation: check out this cool recipe for lollipops from the Exploratorium.

[tags]Cooking,Candy[/tags]

New Find Pushes Back Date of Mayan Writing

I’m a bit of a nut about ancient writing (probably as an outgrowth of my interest in codes and cryptography) and one of my interests have always been with the Maya (after all, astronomers and writers, okay, the human sacrifice thing was not so good, but still…). Scientific American has just published this link about recent work that pushes the dates of the Mayan writing systems back to about 200 to 300 B.C. Interesting stuff.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: New Find Pushes Back Date of Mayan Writing

[tags]Heiroglyphics,Maya[/tags]

What will Apple announce this week?

Well, it’s time for MacWorld San Francisco.   I’ve used the Democracy plugin to create a poll in my sidebar on the right.  Any ideas on what Apple will announce?   Everyone’s expecting some kind of dual core laptop, but what else do people think might be announced?   Feel free to add any ideas that you want.

Currency goes Bananas!

The famed

Check this out! Collectors go ga-ga over any bill which has a printing mistake, and this one is a doozy: a Del Monte banana sticker got stuck on a $20 during printing, before it was stamped with the seal and the serial number. Crazy, crazy. They estimate it will be worth $20,000, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will go for a lot higher. Bizarre stuff.

In Digital Music, Its Gates Vs Jobs

Om Malik writes about what he sees as an inevitable collision of industry juggernauts, Microsoft vs. Apple, Gates vs. Jobs in a battle for downloadable music supremacy. But I’m confused by one of his comments:

The MTV’s Microsoft-powered Urge online music service will be selling to the ultimate demographic: the teen set.

I’m left wondering why he thinks teens are the ultimate demographic. You want guys like me in your demographic: guys from about 25 to maybe 45. Why? Because we are still young enough to be gadget conscious, but old enough to have disposable income. Trying to get money out of teens to young adults is essentially a zero sum game: they already spend all the money they have, so you have to make a product more compelling than any other product they are already spending money on. I suppose it is possible that URGE might be such an endeavor, but I doubt it, particularly when some kind of annoying DRM is going to be part of every Microsoft solution.

Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote

Engadget blogged with Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote, and I’m left with a couple of questions/remarks:

  1. Is this really what a keynote is supposed to be? It seemed like little more than a presentation of a particular company’s product plans. That is normally not what I think a keynote is for: even at CES. (Okay, it looks like Intel did it too, but sheesh.)
  2. Gates pulled out lots of gadgets, none of which (as far I know) you could actually go out and buy today, tomorrow, or even within a month. He lead with “I though I’d start off and show a scenario that we think will be real in the next four years”, with no indication how we are actually going to get there. That seems pathetic.
  3. Then, the demo of Vista. Oooh. Quicktabs. Transparency. Parental controls on games. Oooh. Big deal.
  4. Join venture with MTV. Wow. I’m asleep with excitement. Justin Timberlake makes an appearance. Wow. That’s really innovative: using a celebrity to sell a product. How ’bout using a product to sell a product?
  5. You’ll see more Tablet PCs, apparently from Gateway. Reviewing their product lines, you might actually be able to buy one of these, but Gates’ message is diffused by generality. No clue as to why the average human might think a tablet was a good idea.
  6. Discussion of Windows Mobile and Palm. Fine, whatever. Phones are phones. It’s a pretty low margine business, I’m not sure why its good that Microsoft is participating, but I have a Smartphone and a Windows Mobile PDA, so I guess I understand.
  7. We’ll see more Media Center stuff, including portable devices. Doesn’t seem like they have anything actually new to see though.
  8. “We’re all going to have fun using these systems.”

Someday. Really. You can’t buy them today. You can’t order them today. But they are coming, and you should be ready.

Next week, when Mac World is underway, compare and contrast this keynote with what Steve Jobs does.

Addendum: David Pogue writes in the New York Times a sentiment that I can empathize with:

But I think that what most people want from the next Windows isn’t more stuff added, but rather stuff to be taken away–like crashes, lockups, viruses, error messages and security holes.

Amen, David, amen.

DD-WRT

Last night, I upgraded my Linksys WRT-54GS router to DD-WRT, a more flexible set of firmware with greater capabilities.  It seems to work just fine, and includes many neat additions, such as the ability to adjust the router output power, new security measures, telnet and ssh access, improved QoS routing, and all sorts of other neat things.  If you’ve got one of these routers (check carefully for versions, some recent Linksys routers are incompatible) I’d recommend this distribution as easy to setup and configure.