Friday, March 31, 2006

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

c64 on a chip

checkout this link

apparently the c64 has been compressed to a single chip, packaged with about 35 games, and is hackable for external memory, keyboard, and video support. anyone know about these? a pic micro controller has potential, but this is awesome. anyone know if ruby has been ported to c64?

layer instead of virtual machine

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/installation/hack-attack-safely-install-software-in-a-virtual-layer-162910.php demonstrates a new tools to install a program into an isolated layer to it won't destroy the rest of your OS if something goes wrong. this looks very nifty.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1941342,00.asp

the 120 day eval here http://www.altiris.com/Products/SoftwareVirtualizationSolution.aspx

Saturday, March 25, 2006

google video soldering

google video can teach you to solder... kind of. I didn't see where it explained wetting, flux, or the need to clean with alchol but it gets you started.

can you fold my shirt?

food poisoning


a pretty good summary of food poisoning 'remember, the danger zone is between 40 and 140'

Have a look at the symptoms and take a stab at what you got. its not just meat. theres ones from starchy foods, sandwich spreads, canned food, something fertilized with manure (yeah.... thats probably what you got =), mushrooms, tofu, and cheese.

1. The first step in preventing food poisoning is to assume that all foods may cause food-borne illness. Follow these steps to prevent food poisoning:
2. Wash hands, food preparation surfaces and utensils thoroughly before and after handling raw foods to prevent recontamination of cooked foods.
3. Keep refrigerated foods below 40 degrees F.
4. Serve hot foods immediately or keep them heated above 140 degrees F.
5. Divide large volumes of food into small portions for rapid cooling in the refrigerator. Hot, bulky foods in the refrigerator can raise the temperature of foods already cooled.
6. Remember the danger zone is between 40 degrees F and 140 degrees F.
7. Follow approved home-canning procedures. These can be obtained from the Extension Service or from USDA bulletins.
8. Heat canned foods thoroughly before tasting.
9. When in doubt, throw it out

Nested VNC


Nested VNC's go good with hash browns. is your VNC running? check it gotomyvnc.com

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Dirt


I passed a sign on the way home today. It got to thinking theres more than one way to 'sell land', you can sell the whole thing, or just part it out.

finance.google.com

finance.google.com a new addition to the google empire is very intuitive and brings a similar interface with the one found in maps.google.com. the ability to seemlessly scroll around and get 'just what you want'. way to go google! one very interesting feature is the syncing up of headline news with stock price. very cool.

dualscreen?

whats with the dualscreen pic link at the top? thats not very nerdy tale-ish.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

sam spade

I ran across a link to samspade.org and it looks like one of the programs may allow you to surf the net without rending the pages. useful for debugging pages and what not. I thought that was real 'matrix' style. maybe worth a look.

Monday, March 20, 2006

dan's dream

dan's dream of a quality accounting software package that is web based and availalbe to churches has not been forgotten, at least not by me.

http://www.theartofennui.com/
rekindled the spark in me.
this framework seems 'interesting' to say the least.

A job potential

i recieved a call from la sierra university this morning. the head of the chemistry dept. is looking for a new person and my undergraduate institution gave them my info. which was pretty cool of them. it is an interesting prospect as i would enjoy teaching at an sda college but i don't forsee myself persuing this job. 1. LA 2. LA 3. not great timing since keith is still working on his MBA 4. La Sierra campus isn't my favorite 5. low pay
but it was still flattering to get the call. so anyways pray that if God does want me to do this he better make is super obvious by getting keith a job he would dream of having, without him even looking for one, because LA certainly isn't motivating.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

T-day 06

if people want to do thanksgiving at our house this year we'd be happy to have you! we have 3 extra bedrooms, and if everyone lets me know ahead of time I'll make sure theres a decent bed in each one. bring the welt makers.

Scorched Earth 3D

15 years ago, Scorched Earth on the 386 with my dad and brothers was a monsterous riot of fun.
It does my heart good to find it's not been forgotten AND that open source, multiplatform compiles have struck again.

Scorched 3D has a bit of a learning curve, and i'm getting use to the view, but POTENTIAL it does have!



Friday, March 17, 2006

CF 4gig = $140


newegg has a sandisk 4gig card for less than $150. it looks like the price point (price /mb) is roughly the same as the 2gig cards... cool!

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Centarsia at work

A few months ago, a web design company contacted us about using Centarsia as a backend tool for a website. They needed it to automatically make a queue from a folder location and provide some sort of output that their Flash app could use. Daniel pretty much never does this kind of work for people (too little interest in more obligations), but the end customer is the MS Society (the folks behind the MS150) and we quoted a price we could live with.

In the end, they got a nice little program that runs from the command line and they've developed this site with it: FaceofMS.org (the part after the intro). Unfortunately, it only works on Internet Explorer with Flash installed, but still, it's kind of cool to see a creative application of the technology.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

fireworks


fireworks for the mall that was opening across the street.

Sharpies


When we sold our old house, I used a sharpie to 'paint' the front door.

We have a new bookshelf, and we plan to use the same technique to spruce it up.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

movie fun

I know we all needed more ways to spend out time...

Fun with movies 1

Fun with movies 2

Thus far I'm 7/30. I don't think I'll "win"

overvalued realestate

according to money.cnn.com article markets are overvalued
Reno 40%
Spokane 17%
Boise 21%

Monday, March 13, 2006

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning


free star treck spoof. starwreck.com available [legit] on torrent . it was made in finland or something so it has english subs. I'll let you know how it is after I see it.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

ElizabethTown


There is a big flaming pinAta bird in this thing... and don't take that to mean this movie is very good.

time travel flic?

ok.. over T-day dan brough some go back in time film, produced by some dudes at the university of texas or something on a $20k budget? I need to know WHAT IT IS CALLED. someone help!

x86 assembly


The 'ol apendix burst halfway through my x86 assembly class in college and I missed the last part of the class. I still havea little interest in assembly so every now and again I gravitate towards some examples.

check out 256b.com where you can see cool things compiled in 256b or less.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

flash mute

sick of flash taking over your soundcard and playing crap? fix it with flashmute V2. after installed hit CTRL-ALT-M to toggle between muting your browser and un muting it. no more anoying 'sound comercials'

Spore



in case it doesn't load, see it here

Friday, March 10, 2006

Screen of Death

my brother was showing me some screenshots that people have posted of the new KDE not yet released. and i found this one particularly interesting. personally i like it WAY better than the blue screen of death.
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

micron aquires lexar

ok... those in the know need to shed some light on this little deal. micron aquires lexar media? citing superior controller technology? isn't lexar the losers that tried to lock the CF cards to their readers, and if it wasn't a lexar reader limit the speed of transfer or something.. I'm a sandisk fan myself.... but hey... for micron its lexar that floats the wafer.

ambition is no longer running

movie hoodwinked

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443536/

Hoodwinked, the movie was quite entertaining. About 1 hour into it, there was a hillarious chuck of dialogue:

Villian: "why don't you go home and cry to your granny?
Dolf, tie up the brat.
Lisa, hold the book.
Vincent, get the truck.
And Keith, ... darn it, change your name, please? That's not ... scary, and I'm embarassed to say it. 'Boris' try that. Keeiith, you know, ohhh watch out for keith... "

Hero interjects: "Your crazy!"

Villian: "Maybe so, but I'm top of the woods now!"

-=launch into song by villian.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Don't read before/after/during eating

i am reading a book at lunch times called "the 13th element" by john emsley. it is on phosphorous (13th element discovered, does not have 13 protons). the section about phosphorous poisons (nerve gas, insecticides) has a table on with LD50's for some phospates marketed as pesticides. More intersting was the explanation of "LD50 (rats, oral)"

This stands for 'the lethal dose that will kill 50 per cent of rats who were given it orally' and it is measured in terms of the weight of toxin in mg, per body weight in kg. Rats make good subjects for testing because they are unable to vomit, so anything they ingest must pass through their bodies.
this made me wonder, really? i found this web page on the inability of a rat to vomit. which gives further references and such. and i think rats really can't vomit. how curious that vomiting requires such a high degree of muscle coordination.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Fuel injenction your lawn mower



If you guys were gear heads (you know you want to be) and want to put your computing skills to work, look into the megasquirt home jobby - do-it-yourself fuel injection system. I did a quick read of the schematics and it seems to be a pretty straight forward micro controller project. it looks like they did some pretty good work on the interface and how to program it.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

PAINT

mspaint bails us out countless times.

An opensource senior project as WSU is now a considerable upgrade. free of course.
checkout Paint.Net

oh yeah, these guys now work for microsoft, but they are still keeping their open source project alive. pretty impressive.