I haven’t done one of these in a while, hauled out my Yaesu VX-3R and recorded a pass. I’ve busted the sync corrector in my program again, so it’s not aligned right, but overall, it might be one my better passes, covering a lot of the continental U.S.
Addendum: The follow up pass was out over the Pacific…
A few days ago, I blogged about a Python program to monitor the status of your Domino’s pizza order. Last night found me at home by myself, with nothing desireable to eat in the house, so I ordered a pizza. And tried out the python script.
bash-3.2$ python dominos.py XXXXXXXXXX Dominos (R) pizza tracker. 1 Large(14") Hand Tossed Pizza w/ Pepperoni, Mushrooms 1 10-piece Buffalo Hot Wings 2 20oz-Bottle Diet Coke Your pizza is being made! 9:03pm Your pizza is in the oven! 9:05pm Your pizza is done and awaiting delivery! 9:12pm Your pizza is on the way! 9:18pm Your pizza was delivered! 9:27pm bash-3.2$ Script done on Sat Jun 14 21:56:25 2008
Silly Internet Quiz of the Day:
How long could you survive in the vacuum of space?
Don’t ask me how I got here, but i thought I’d bookmark the 1922 patent of C. F. Jenkins for sending pictures over wireless.
TRANSMITTING PICTURES BY WIRELESS CHARLES FRANCIS JENKINS
His book, Vision By Radio is available via archive.org.
Okay, I’m not a gazillionaire, so all of this interest is (pardon the expression) purely academic, but check out the 347 lots available in this weeks Christie’s auction of scientific books. A truly amazing collection of rare antique books on a wide variety of scientific topics.
IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC BOOKS: THE RICHARD GREEN LIBRARY
There’s even an Enigma machine for sale.
And a Hooke’s Micrographia, which you can also get from Project Gutenberg if you don’t have 30 or 40 thousand dollars.
What can I say? It’s really good family fare. Animation? Art Direction? Story? All really good! I enjoyed it a lot. So did the wife. And, if the laughter of children is any indication, so did the audience. It’s colorful, clever and fun. Take the kids!
To show just how much of a lunatic I am, today while surfing around, I was trying to remember what the gadget that caused the puppeteer’s voice (or, more properly, the Professor) of a Punch and Judy show to sound the way it is. A bit of searching reveals that the device was called a swazzle, and turned up this page of interesting links regarding Punch and Judy shows.
Why was I thinking of this? To be honest, I have no idea. I can’t reconstruct the path of my thoughts that led me to think of this. Nor can I imagine why I would find this information useful. I’m one bizarre monkey.
Just a fun link of the day: a Mechanix Illustrated article on making home made 3D movies.
This came over the make blog this morning: a rather nice looking page describing a cool robot motor controller.
Crazy link from hackszine.com that monitors the progress of your pizza from Dominos website. Neat!
Hackszine.com: Python pizza status
Platypus is a system that can convert scripts (shell, Python or even perl) into something that looks a lot more like a real Mac application. I have a number of potential uses for it to pretty up some of my scripts, so I’m bookmarking this for now.
I’ve seen a bunch of movies lately. Rather than give details of each, I just thought I’d give a single line review of each.
Iron Man: I was wildly entertained, but inexplicably couldn’t tell you why afterwards, other than to say that Robert Downey Jr. is great onscreen.
Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian: Snoozefest, lots of shots of people walking in front of CG imagery.
Speed Racer: Underrated, yes, lots of visuals, but enough story to make it tolerable.
Fido: A funny, quirky movie which answers the question “what if Ward and June Cleaver owned a pet zombie?”
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Not genuinely bad, but pales by comparison to the original three, keep expectations low (think “National Treasure” rather than “Raiders”) and you might have fun.
The new A&E remake of The Andromeda Strain: Every element added to the original blew chunks, a catastrophe of a script, ludicrous beyond the measure of things. It needs a second line to describe just how mind numbingly terrible it was. Or even a third. Did you guys have writers? Really? The tagline is “It’s a bad day to be human”, but it should have been “It’s a bad day to remake Andromeda Strain”.
I attended the first one, I’ve pencilled in the next one on my calendar.
Well, all this reading about the board game Hex made me want to play. Six is an interesting, capable hex player available for Linux. It’s really very slick, it plays on any board size from 4×4 to 14×14, and at multiple difficulty levels. I’ve only played a few games, but have already learned a lot. Here’s the board from one of my 10×10 games where I played white. I lost, but I thought I did okay in defending.
I’m already learning a lot. One of the neater things about Hex is that since pieces don’t move after you play them, the entire game is right there.
As we get closer to the Wall-E premiere, you’ll probably be seeing this animatronic version of Wall-E in various promotional spots, and eventually deployed at the theme parks. One of my good friends at Pixar, Tom Duff helped work on the software to help control him (a very cool project) and so it’s good to see him out in the world. Check out:
MUST WATCH: Animatronic WALL-E Spotted in LA | /Film
I think it’s very cool.