sketchup

google sketch-up looks like a good tool for basic 3d drawing. any of you guys seen this before?

LX3.0

I got a new flashlight from REI, the Gerber LX3.0. after reading this it appears as though I should have got something from fenix. oh well. I'm still very happy with the gerber. maybe i'll get creative and replace the resistor for solid state regulator.

macro lens

The new lens says hi

techno

di.fm, an awesome website, has a nice interactive graph about the trends of the music I listen to.
check it out here.

White and Nerdy Redux

Okay, I know we all heard the song already, but I just found the video....

PDFCreator

Did you guys know you can MERGE PDF's in PDFcreator? yup sure can. pause the PDF printer, print to it, select all jobs, then go Document/Combine in the PDF print spooler and Blam (on your spice weasel) you have just combined to 1 PDF output.

now it may not seem that nice to you, but I have 15 documents I have to print EACH AND EVER TIME a new temp starts, and I've had about 10 of them this year. windows is buggy and when you select all the docs, right click print, it will crash your computer, so you end up printing each one, one at a time. now I just print one PDF and i'm good to go.

i'm so happy.. fell Feel my joy
found in goole cache here

Invasion: Battle of Surival

check out invasion: battle of surival, a RTS (real time strategy) game that is a pretty decent (near exact) clone of warcraft. so much so, during development, they stole graphics from warcraft and ended up building an engine that warcraft tiles ran in. this created certain 'legal' concerns with blizzard as they had never really intended warcraft to run native in linux but all this pishposh was for not when these guys re did their graphics (made their own) and we now have a unique game.

built on the Stratagus engine (opensource) I think its totally awesome. it crashed during jen and mine first round of network play, but were giving it a second go tonight.

Hieroglyphs

all good nerds need to be able to communicate with good pictures, just like the ancient egyptions. when you get around to thinking up your language, check out wikihiero and pick a good picture phrase to start communicating with .

i'm still trying to figure this one out

cactus

The cat hasn't noticed it yet (it is still standing AND has flowers). for the first time ever, our christmas cactus bloomed. pretty cool huh?

programmer

I don't program, i know, a disgrace to the nerd name, but for those of you that do, check out a code documenter. from what I can tell, doxygen may auto generate HTML files that allow you to navigate your code and look for dependancies and errors as shown here
.

nerd wars

i'm not sure what is more nerdy then star wars.
this jedi sword game is pretty fun.
lostvectors.com/jeditrainer/

bitwine

http://www.bitwine.com/ hey, anyone seen this thing? use skype to do payed consulting? looks like a good plugin for the end of a good blog entry.

moterhome

titans

for a school project, ended up doing a video. heres the CD insert

Typo Follow up

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.
- Randy K. Milholland

video converter

my nerdness is slipping. i'm so far gone I can hardly convert video formats anymore. SUPER has come to the rescue and will help me rip google video for use in a class presentation. my nerness shall be restored.

weffriddles.com

suggested from a friend.. i'll have to look at it when I get a sec.
weffriddles.com

Universal Port?

USB is Universal Serial Bus... is it becoming truly universal for things that don't really need the bus?
An interesting product indicating the versatility of usb is a battery that has a usb plug on it. it functions as a battery but can be recharged by plugging it into the usb port on a computer (or x box or whatever has a usb port). at $20 for two AA it isn't exactly cheap, but the idea is excellent. see usbcell.com for details.

i do hope this expands greatly, not necessarily usb, but the idea of a multifunction port. wouldn't it be nice if a house were wired for power and internet at the same time so that any power outlet is an internet outlet and vice-versa?

Survival

This guy has some good ideas... I like the condoms for water storage.

http://www.equipped.com/drperskit.htm

interesting math side notes

always fun to actually read the news and other feeds on my home page.

from wikihow.com
Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs

and from the bbc
Ancient Moon Computer

sort

sorting algorithms visulized.
very cool.

bad criminal

this guy is awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mim90zCi34Y

$20 nockaround?

I was looking at walmart and ran across some $20 pay as you go phones that work on the cingular network. it got me to thinking that for a mere couple of dollars, I could purchase a new phone to move my simcard in from my work phone so when I crash, or fall in the lake on the weekends I won't lose my corporate phone? would this work?

funniest

thefunniest.info lets you vote between scraped images off the net (and user propersed images) to derive a dynamic top10 list. found this from kevs crappy comic link.

Iridium

were you thinking i was going to talk about the element or the satellite service. well, i found some cool stuff on hack-a-day about a recent burning man festival where they tracked solar flares reflected off the iridum communications satellites. you can see when you can see a flair in your neck of the woods, weather you be in the central or western neck at heavens-above.com. more on flares here

wired has a great article (from 1998, the start of the iridium service) that is well written, and tells the story of how a 3 man rogue group from motorola turned out a product that should have gone to governments but found a way to deliver it to the public sector. I particurally like the part how in 1991 they announced the plans to the public, but they forgot to get clearance from the FCC (and the worldwide counterpart) for frequency allocation. that could have been a show stopper. dating back to the 1945 erra, the satellite communcaitons idea was actually what gave birth to the application of geosynchronous orbits. its a little strange because the article says LEO (low earth orbit) was chosen because of the 1W limit they wanted in the handhelds, but ham uses 5 (and up to 7 in a pinch). maybe its because its 1.6ghz as opposed to 430mhz range. who knows. one other reason for non geo orbits was given, in that they'd need 30 foot dishes up there, but LEO is like 450miles away, so the arrays could be built much smaller.

one final thing, and jen, you can verify: supposedly iridium is 77 electrons? but as luck would have it, the final mesh ended up being 66 satelites due to the optimization. the name stuck, and

this is why all your chem students think iridium has 66 electrons

comic

this comic is awesome.
the artist has many drarwings (pronounced like the jack handy snl from years ago).
you'll find out from his other comics that he is nearly obscessed with velociraptors and often sizes up buildings against attacks and also does math as he walks to enure he's going the most effecient route. it's great.

$10

We ran out of a component to build at work, and it set us back 3 weeks in producion. I worked a solid 4 hours (where others had been working months) and found the part locally, and had it delivered the next day.

I increased capacity in the plant by 2.25 million dollars. and I have a shiny new $10 gift card to walmart to show for it.

talk about grattitude. I love this place.

browser speed

my favorite browser, hands down is firefox because of my extentions.
that being said, if security and speed are more your cup of tea, read this as it's a very comprehensive comparison of what is out there and what it offers in the speed department.

GW score

for kev, my current scores. no serios playing, just screwing around. all good scores were done with mouse. some with keyboard fire, but later (including the top score) was done with mouse move and mouse fire. (pure mouse)

Alien Incursion

I was watching Alien Incursion and saw a GPS coordinate. using coord converter and google maps with coordinates I think this is near Eugene OR. lets see how the movie plays out to see if i'm right.

The measure of a nerd

So, we just watched a movie where things were a little different. People were running to payphones to make calls, the cars were old and the computers were big ugly boxes.

After the movie some people were asking how old it was (Leanna and Sarah). I recalled seeing some of the computers in the movie and said... well if 386's were hot then it had to be somewhere around 92. They picked up the box and.... 1992 I got it right based on the age of the computers. I am a very proud nerd today :).

dress up

I love this time of year. I saw 2 'almost naked' girls in walmart the other day. all under the pretense they had 'dressed up'.

today at work is the big dress up day. best so far is two of my friends that dressed up as these guys and look EXACTLY like them.

1000'th SOL on mars

DST?

it is daylight savings time now right? todays the day we set our clocks back? which one of you nerds forgot to remind me. i'm pretty sure its today because the cell phone, atomic clock and computer have all moved back, where the stove, microwave and alarm clock have not.

gridwars

an awesome game. really worth a look.
even better when your hacked xbox controller works on your laptop.

*update*
k2h almost dead















a little forumn on gridwars here on digg and they reference another game (not quite as fun for me) mono

psycodelic

interesting patterns and sound. this page is certainly entertaining.

smoking

this is totally random, and result of some curious reading for one of the papers in class, but check this out about smoking. (from here)

Genetic Influence

Recent research suggests that certain smokers may be predisposed to nicotine addiction through the effects of a gene responsible for metabolising nicotine. [10] Scientists have found that non-smokers are twice as likely to carry a mutation in a gene that helps to rid the body of nicotine. In addition, smokers who carry mutations in the gene, (known as CYP2A6) are likely to smoke less because nicotine is not rapidly removed from the brain and bloodstream. By contrast, smokers with the efficient version of the gene will tend to smoke more heavily to compensate for nicotine being removed more rapidly.

Some cool concept maps

These concept maps cover a wide variety of topics, but they're all fascinating.

freecycle.org

http://freecycle.org/ looks to be a halfway decent community for trading free junk. i'm going to see if i can find an old directTV dish for my wifi project. today I got DD-WRT loaded on a V4 WRT54G but i'm disappointed with the stock antennas being no better than an internal PCMCIA card. time to use those detachable antenna connections! see endgaget article. hmm.. looks like comercial available 16db antennas as cheep as $45 on pacwireless.com

Hak.5

I stumpbled across Hak.5 which appears to be a video blog on the some pretty good tech. episode 2x03 talks about setting up a small set of scripts on a machine to 'backup' any usb thumb drive put in the machine. it cuts it into pieces and then emails it to an email account of your choice. AWESOME for the college campus camputers.

TIemu

This weekend i'm going to take a takehome exam in one of my MBA courses. i'm actually back to having to take partial derivities and all that nonsense. i don't have any good programs laying around (maple) to check my work, so I fired up a TI-89 emulator. that just saved me $150. get the ROM from education.ti.com

Classics in Typo's

some of my students were mad that i took off points for misspelling the elements on the test i gave this week (they still got most of the points, i just was slightly mean). i pointed out that spelling things properly is always important.

today i was looking through a website for another school and they had their dress code posted and found this classic example of why it is important to know how to spell things, not depend on spell check, and to do some proof reading.

The following will not be permitted in a teaching and learning environment:...sagging paints that do not cover the buttocks while sitting or standing...

Which reminds me of the lease agreement we signed for our appartment in reno

...curtains must show whit to the outside.

What typo's have you seen?

dan and his bike

I'd pay to see dan and his bike do this

Harbor This Fugitive

there are some things that i think should be allowed. i think it shouldn't be a big deal when people where flip-flops at the white house. i also think that people should be able to express dislike of presidents of any country in a variety of free speech ways. so if you happen to see this guy, i reccommend harboring this criminal.

goatguy

I read geek.com off and on, and have done so for maybe 3 years. the articles are usually outdated, the postings are random, and the forumn feedback is from a bunch of flamers. despite all this, I have never been let down by a post from goatguy who has major ties to the tech industry and manages to bring in a good dose of reason, common sense and humor to the discussions. for me, he's like the dave barry of the tech world. if you haven't read anything he [goatguy] has written, try it.. you'll like it.

Thanksgiving 06

so..... i know we have partially discussed this previously but then things changed and now they are only slightly changed.

bottom line
y'all are welcome at our house in reno. (since it isn't selling.) i will be there all week and keith gets thanksgiving and the day after off (i think). so let us know your thoughts and feelings on it.

Last Resort

Found here Page XVII

Way to Loose Customers

radio shack has been going down hill for a while. they never seem to carry what i think they should as an electronic parts type retailer. this evening i went to get an extension for my headphones. radio shack did have a couple of extensions.... for the big ol' sound board type jacks. nothing for the predominate 1/8" mini jack that most everything uses these days. i did find a male-male connector and i asked the lady at the counter if she could check to see if they had one with a female end on one side and a male on the other in the back or if they usually carry them. she looked at the package and said, "this is for connecting speakers to a computer. we don't carry everything here, we are just a retail store..." i wasn't asking what it was... i wasn't even asking her if what i wanted was in their store... i said i wanted to know if they were supposed to stock the one that i wanted.

fortunately the people at best buy had exactly what i wanted for $7. now i can sit another 6 ft away from my computer while watching videos. and the people at the store were pretty nice too. i don't think i'll think of radio shack as a first option for much of anything anymore. actually i should just stop shopping...it takes too much effort.

killernic

ok.. i've really seen it all now killernic is a network card (that us usb onboard) build around an imbedded linux system. you can run programs in your network card. you buypass windows crappy network drivers and give the true burdon to the network card. intersteting idea.. i'm not sure if its worht $280 tho.

optomistic

snippet from a instant message conversation I had with my boss:

[me]: lots of screwed up stuff around here
[boss]: yeah I love it. These are mearly small chalenges for a positive mind
[me]: small challenges, when put back to back can permantly bind a prisoner

vr plane

story here.


another video hehre

Bogons

Ever heard of a Bogon? yeah.. me either.

free ice cream

Free ice cream on 9/28 for those near a Cold Stone Creamery

steamy

steam bike, anyone?

88-key

psycle its time to plug my 88-key keyboard in and see if I can come anywhere close to this

flickr

who wants to explain what I found on flickr

Get violent with that computer!

In this case, the video's worth a thousand words. The post shares some code that makes a MacBook respond programatically to a physical "smack" (it's actually more like a tap...). The sheer coolness of this has encouraged other people to port the code to other platforms, too.

All the details are here.

Win by losing

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I don't really "get" game theory in general, but I found this article interesting...

Paradox in Game Theory: Losing Strategy That Wins

Death and Taxes

A coworker sent me a cool link to a poster

buy a house?

anyone want to buy a house?

nerdy pizza

this dude describes his reversing a pizza recipee.

nerd lingo

watch this
and get back to me.

dans new boat

the 118 wallypower is suppose to be in the movie the island so i'm going to have to watch it and see. at 110feet and 60 knots, carbon fiber hull and estimated $25 million sticker.. wow.. thats a boat.

is the name in honor of walmart?

Ever wonder why your water bill is so high...

maybe this is the reason

cardboard office prank

geekinvasion.com has some pictures from a cardboard prank that are very funny.

best of craigs list

best of craigslist rules. it even has one about a creepy guy and a girl poisoning her lungs. this stuff is golden.

*updated* link to creepy guy

effecient engines

I've been doing some reading on alternative engine designs (to the traditional piston/crank design most of us have in our cars) and found a weird one on angellabsllc.com The engine design is interesting, but even more interesting is the animation in Excel

I'm popular

I used toe like that song, Popular, by Nada Surf (lyrics)

anyway, maybe you've already seen this, maybe not. I tried it. Rather amusing.

white and nerdy

http://f9.putfile.com/videos/24412412355.mp3
wierd al. white and nerdy. it even mentions paintball. I think it should be an instant classic.

chair mat

I was out front cleaning my motorcycle, as its been over a week since coming back from the alaska trip and it still wasn't unpacked, and my next door neighbor came over to talk. ohh... a little more on the motorcycle since I started with that... the guys at work don't believe me that the trip wasn't a killer because I haven't ridden the bike since I returned. I keep trying to explain to them that the bike is packed (the custom luggage rack) and so dirty I'm even embaresed by it, but they arn't buying it. today was my only night off ( have class tue and thur) so I decided to work on it. it helped a little too that I voluntered to drive home to pickup a rush part to fix one of the machines, so that got me home by 3:30, a little extra time to clean. the price I pay for that is getting up at 5am, going in at 6am on thursday, where I will work until 6pm, uppon which time I will go to class for 3 hours, and then drive 50 miles home. I"m not sure if it was worth it... probably not.

so my next door neighbor comes over and thanks me for mowing her lawn all summer. I told her no problem, and we got talking about the housing market. turns out she still hasn't sold her house across town, and is paying two mortgages while she waits for the other one to sell. the kicker is, her old house is about 1 mile from my old house (which we sold, fortunatly) so we had a good ol' complain session on the local market.

I noticed a rollie chair mat in her garage and made an offhand comment that she might be getting rid of it. she said it was going out for the garbage, so, bottom line, I scored myself a rollie chair mat! I know its not big to you guys, but i've always wanted one and I have been holding out after I saw the price at the local store. ohh.. my bad, CHAIRMAT, i just now looked it up. $44 from staples for a 45"x53". I know petrolium is expensive, but COME ON.

Scientific American Podcast

i have been listening to the scientific american podcasts the weeks that i have time and today i listened to one that was pretty good. it was the august 30 edition which had a couple of interesting stories. the BEST part was the sketch at the very end of the podcast (after the moderator signs off). it is funnier if you listen to the whole podcast but you can skip to the end if you must.

Google Image Labeler

yeah.. I"m a fan of google. that is until there is anther IPO that is bigger and I fail to invest in, then I'll move on to that company. in the mean time.. I post a link to Google Image Labeler , some kind of game where you can choose words to describe a picture in an attemp to train google computers on picture recognition, or what is more likely... help them build their database of pictures/word assocations. at any rates. you get some kind of score. that should be enough to entice most of the internet world. If I make the highscore list, i'll be famous! just keep thinking that, and you too can turn yourself into a google brainless computer

google tech talks

my latest search of google tech talks revealed a little seminar on how to break web software - a look at security vulnerabilities in web software I Haven't finished downloading it yet, but the last few lectures I have watched form google tech talks have been superb. kev - let me know how this one is. I read some of the comments at google video (you can view comments on a vid) and some people thought it was pretty basic... so maybe its 'not-so-good'

digitization

firstmonday.org, a website interesting in and of itself in that it has 'peer reviewed journal content for the internet' has an article about digitization of media, specifically sheet music at the universtity of indiana. a little poking around reveals some of the hardware they use for various types of digization, and I ran across a most interesting thing entitles 'the chymistry of isaac newton' with links to translated sections of his lab notebook with images

simpsons interview

www.blondeblog.com/vsimpsons.html a verry funny interview of the actuall actors.

Different type of dumpster diving

Saw this in today's Seattle Times. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003226168_diving27.html Not happening in Seattle but interesting non-the-less.

yukon bears and sun

We finally got a little sun in the Yukon, and saw a mother grizzly with two cubs. We were intending to do a 480 mile day and go all the way to Haines, but the crew was too tired, so we spent another night in hanes junction. this time the place was full and we got a less than $100 room. We didn't even try the raven, a local souped up three 'canadian' star hotel. last time we went through, we stopped there for some dining, but they put there german noses in the air and said 'for hotel guests only'. ok.. the town has 3 places to eat, the raisen as we thus refeered to it, a general store which was closed, and the frosty freeze, that had pizza and burgers. we ate at the frosty freeze both times we stayed and it wasn't half bad.

The next morning we did the short jaunt to hanes. AWESOME mountians and it did get a little cold on the pass (around 3000 feet?) someone said the sign was in meters, and we looked at them, because it was NOT over 10,000 feet. The last shot is of a special fire weed that happened to pop up in the middle. I wonder where that came from.

ak - boundry

The canadians decided to mow a strip on the 'unpatroled border'. jen says 'how do you know it wasn't the american's?'....... well.. with some simple logic I explained that the US is much happier to let illegal people in than canada.

leaving alaska

it rained the entire time we were in alaska (about 1 week). it let up occasionally, but not when you needed it to. [*update- right after we left, it both washed out 3 bridges near denali, and snowed] jen and I even bought heated vests at alaska leather in anchorage. the lady was AWESOME, and by far the best motorcycle shop for many thousands of miles. as far as apparel goes, the best shop we have been in thus far. we got directions from the BMW shop in ak (they suck... jen says 'not so good') and they described alaska leather as a set of rickty old buildings on the corner. the warning was just saddness because the motorcycle shop didn't hold a candle to what barb had. barb is jens new hero, and after jen told her so, she reluctantly agreed to a photo op with the sign.

There was a sign at the register.. 'prices subject to customer attitude'. our price was 10% off. after a hasty tour of alaska, including a plane flight to kantishna (the center of denali park) and a 2 day stay, we headed out of alaska, completly soaked, and never seeing the mountian. oh yeah.. the official name of the mountian is STILL mckinly. the park is named denali. something about a loser in ohio or something.

ptarmagin - denali

bear - denali

some bears and a shot of the dirt road in the park.. busses only.

moose - denali

gold panning

glaciers