Yet Another Reason the Internet Knows Everything

i saw a commercial for some potato peeling gloves on the TV and wondered what was on the gloves. so i used google to look them up and found a way cool website about TV products. next time you are tempted by a TV product you can look them up here.

google graph api

need a quick graph? screw making it yourself. if you need less than 50,000 a day, have google make the graph for you!

web test

it's been a nice relaxing holiday; another mindless webgame and the discovery of a new tool for the toolbox.

i've been playing with duels.com - a free webbased rpg geared ONLY for leveling characters. Not too thrilling once you realize how many mouseclicks are involved in the long run.

after reading one theory how to scam the system, i realized i may be wasting my time with the mouse and duels.com proposed traditional interface.

http://www.iopus.com/ makes a free browser plugin called iMacros - a toolkit to train a browser (or script it) to do web testing / automate web tasks from firefox, IE, vba, delphi, whatever.

one problem with duels.com is you can only fully interact with people logged in, so the lists are always changing. I thought I could just harvest userid's behind the scenes and interact with those directly, but it needs tokens from the browser session to build the challenges - so numbers alone of people most likely offline are not going to help me. After pasting a table of live data table from duels.com of users logged in into EXCEL, i stumbled across the fact excel can live-query a table on a webpage, and it was a hop skip and a jump to punching that into iMacros. See associated screenshots for excel, and iMacros running. THe most annoying thing about my knowledge and EXCEL? the absence of a full carriage return line feed character - I can put a LINE FEED char(10) into a string, but then need to cut/paste to word for that to automagically convert it to a real carriage return line feed so I can paste it into imacros.

i'm sure I could script the whole process, but now with about 10 keyboard commands I can automate about 8 minutes of work for my duels.com account - and in only a few hours went from 3 days of screwing around a few hours a day (44,000 experience) to this morning; 77,000 experience. so it seems to be working.

B-day

For his birthday, grandma gave kev a picture of....... ME!

Car Innovation

this car in the hybrid mode would get 300 mpg and at under $30k it seems to be heading in the right direction. the vast majority of car time is probably spend with one person driving to work and if this car comes down in price it would make sense to have one of these in the driveway for the commute. plus the car does look pretty cool. i really like how it takes advantage of a couple of efficiencies like using recycled materials for some things and having solar panels that generate power for the cooling system.

drive image xml

drive image xml looks like a halfway decent backup/recovery utility. i'm posting it here as a reminder next time i need such a tool. if you need a dvd backup selfboot option, check out this method on top of ping , it might also work on vista. hopefully ill never need that.

oh kev, you may need sysangel

Nerd Friendly

i dislike it when technical information isn't available for those of us who can use it. people also do not understand basic things like numbers are meaningless without units and what units belong to what types of numbers.
kodakgallery.com does not have a good sorting process for allowing images to uploaded and orders placed. last night i uploaded my 20x30 poster from our alaska trip and placed an order. turns out the lab rejected it because it had too high a resolution and they can't print that high. why they can't downsample there i have no idea. so i called customer (dis)service. after much frustration i found out they have the following limits on their files (though i question how true these numbers are): max file size is 9 mb and max resolution is 2500 x 1900 pixels.

*** update *** yup the lady didn't have a clue what she was talking about. i downsampled to 300 dpi instead of my original 600 dpi and ended up with a resolution of 9000 x 6000 pixels and it printed (no idea if they downsampled more) the file was about 29 mb.

Sarah and the Little nerd

Ye Old Nerds

Happy B-Day to the Elder nerds of the blog... I put together a little trip down memory lane of some fun pictures in somewhat random order, enjoy.



p.s. the little program to make the slide show is pretty slick, I'll use it again sometime for sure.

compucrap bites the dust

compusa is closing so get yourself over there and get the going out of business deals.

wget

I'm sick of the GUI's, that is GROSS, UNUSABLE want to be INTERFACEs. i'm going retro, 10 years back and going to do console. we lost so much power when we told people it worked better if it had a picture on it. get your cross compiler running and load up the real tools with 10-30 years in the making. try the following

grep: Search for PATTERN in each FILE or standard input.
gawk: utility interprets a special-purpose programming language that makes it possible to handle simple data-reformatting jobs easily with just a few lines of code.
sed: is a stream editor. A stream editor is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream
wget : GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

you'll be a much happier text processing nerd. well, ok, you can get some of them prebuilt here, and then read a 10sec how to here. on the output of your script toss it into gnuplot and you'll be able to do with your pinky and 10 lines of code what the new generation of engineer thought impossible. now to figure out how to control a web page form from the console and I'll be able to interact with the web from a script and be done! maybe i need this form of python

kev i know you had some web scraping experience in the past, what tools did you use?

bubble

so I was actually wearing brown pants a blue shirt when I watched this at work (after hours).

rip saw

for a measly $200,000 we should all go in together and get one.

nano solar

for jen, $0.30/Watt

gizmodo

I think i'm going to replace my long time lunch reading site of geek.com with gizmodo. gizmodo has cool stuff like robots being used as amusement rides, (see the predicessor, a robot arm used in the nissan plant that is converted, and the guy almost hits his head on the concrete). the other day I also saw some weird thing on there about encasing the ipod in clear plastic for sculptures. it just doesn't get any more nerdy than that.

and for the type-o's, you can thank stupid IE. I now am a complete deciple of the auto spell check underline feature in firefox and as you can see, I cannot operate without it as this was created in IE.

Rev 13?

Music Genome Project

The music Genome project was an initiative started in 2000 to apply the concept of genes to categorizing music. it looks like there is one site that uses the technology so far, Pandora radio. i'm still not completly sure how the technology works, but I think it is a little more subjective than I would like, a technician listens to the music and then puts in coeffecients for the 150-500 parameters. it looks this might be a good place to test a neural net if someone was so inclined.

Game Music

Music from video games actually has some influence on the population. probably the more you game, the more the influence, but this morning in church I thought of a 1980's NES tune that would just sound AWESOME on the pipe organ at church and I have lost much of my day trying to resurrect the video game and find the melody so I can find the original tune. I suspect the tune I'm looking for is actually a classical music piece that was modified for use in the game, but I can't remember enough of the melody to be sure, and to make matters worse, I thought I knew the name of the game it was in, but it wasn't, so my quest continues to find the tune. Once found, and if I determine the song has enough redeaming qualities to stand a chance to be played in church, i plan to make a request of the organist. I will keep it to myself that i'm pretty sure this tune is in a zombie / Dracula game. i'll know for sure once I find it.

until I find it, I invite you to look up your favorite video game and listen to some tunes. I have found a decent site with many mp3's and midi files (and educated me some on creating/ripping midi files with tools)

to make it even more interesting, In VKAGERO: DECEPTION 2 there is Keith's Battle Theme that does not invoke my best musical appreciation, but does have enough redeming sound for me to be somewhat proud of an association.

hot rod

Given Keith's handle in the BBS days, I had high hopes for this movie.

Hot Rod.

It did not disappoint.

desktop interface

'97 - 10 Year Reunion

I'm sure many of you are curious how the 10 year reunion went...

Sat. morning Dwight Moody gave an excellent sermon. He is a very good speaker and gave the best sermon I've ever heard on genealogy.

I met a few people I knew in the cafe (yes the food is still the same, but I was hungry so it tasted good). Then we met in the old government room to chat for a while. Eventually, the photographer came by and we went out side to get our pictures taken, here is one Sarah took.


Front left is Amber (used to be Smith) with her 3rd kid and she looks great! Zane is special forces now and is active somewhere in Iraq, she is living somewhere around the Co. Springs area.

People were more mature but pretty much the same as they were 10 years ago.

We chatted for a while longer and took off (to meet my sister for my first lesson in humility). After a short 30 mile ride with my sister we got back to the shopping center where we started and most of the class had decided to meet up there for dinner. It was oriental food (which I'm not a big fan of so I just went in and said hi for the amusement of seeing what their reaction would be to seeing me in spandex :). The we went off for the rest of the week with the family... (you can read more about that on my blog).

sd wifi

wifi card that can drop in replace an SD card. Complete with network failure tollerance.

mpg vs green

This talks about a dude with an 8th grade education reorganizing GM auto parts in interesting ways to do what some claimed was impossible. Excellent read.

sell u'r home

news article show an interesting way to give incentives for buyers to purchase your home. It's got some flaws, but creative.

where this is

its strange/amusing when you run across some advertisements that reflect your area of the world. this is just up the road. (well, an hour or so anyway). its an advertisement image from newegg.

robot gun kills

Wired has a quick blurb on a robotic anti aircraft gun goes haywire.

church

summary of today's sermon: don't give in to lust. But expand your sexual dimensions with your spouse.

In a sermon I:
1. don't think I've ever heard the word sex used so many times,
2. heard so many political or christian leaders names mentioned (all for being caught in bad sexual situations), and
3. heard the word masturbation mentioned from the pulpit (twice, as the statement had to be repeated for effect!)

xbox 360 giveaway

amazon is giving away 100 xbox 360 units. we have just passed 777 on nerdy, this becomes the 778 post. I hope I didn't use up all the luck.

pic of the day

todays pic of the day was good enough to make it to my desktop at work.

Note to Self

do not believe the internet
i know, it has been said before
and i thought i knew better
but reading this,
tells me i was taken with
the exploding video
i am ashamed

Microwind Generator

claiming up to 30x more efficient then turbine driven wind generators.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1052/

keith made it in dilbert

T-Day '07

So jen and I are making the treck north to Idaho this year. we got the tickets this morning. we'll be leaving monday night around 5pm jen can give specifics on what time we get in up there. all this was prompted because southwest DING came on and we saved a few dollars. not alot, but a few. tickets were purchased before I submitted my vacation request (did that this morning) and before we asked the guys up north how much time they are allocating to T-Day. so..... regardless of if the hosting house will be there for tue and wed, we'll be there =)

A Good Nerdy Excel Week

functions i successfully used in excel this week include
sum, sumif, if, vlookup, isna, min, small, column, address, indirect, concatenate, fixed, countif... plus some regular multiplication, addition, subtraction, division and what not.

result: a super set of spreadsheets which takes care of my overly complicated grades for g chem. i can excuse quizzes and not have the points count for or against the student (essentially average it it). when students do the extra credit that replaces the lowest and second lowest quiz and homework scores it figures it out for me once i type in the extra credit score. the homework is imported from another system and my spreadsheet will lookup the values each time i paste in the new data so i don't have to constantly wonder if people i've given extensions to have the proper score recorded. thanks to keith for help with the isna and some nested ifs.

after the next test i will also add in the function of dropping the lowest exam score (kinda pointless with only one exam so far though). but overall i think i am ready for just about anything... ahahha ya right. but i am ready to enter most stuff, i think.

way back

archive.org brings us way back to nerdy tales in 2004 its amazing, nothings changed. you can see the entire archive here

wedding

I'm the only nerd that couldn't make it to the wedding up in GP, so some of you nerds need to logon and tell me how its going!

tmarketer

credit

maxed out, video

goodlookin' beater

"
The car is on its ninth timing belt, ninth water pump, and fourth clutch. But the engine and transmission are original, as are the floor mats.
"

computer scrounge

200,000 lbs of donated computers and e-waste a MONTH.

battery boost

it's about time.
a new battery is in engineering.

"
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
"

1000 islands

google map shows a coole place,
and this has surface pictures of what has to be some very expensive homes.

notepad2

I haven't tried it yet, but I do use regular notepad each and every day. maybe notepad2 (with source code) is better?

Are You Ready for THIS!!??

costco can prepare you for anything. death, taxes, and emergency food rations in a bucket (complete with 45 servings of whey milk).

robot leg

http://www.martinbuehler.net/

wearable bleach

diluted bleach in a spray bottle
several stencils
permamenent fabric marker for detail

bleach your shirt.

liquid rescale

http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/examples

Time to Encrypt

when i consulted my local, excellent tech support i found out that IT in fact had access to my drive through a share (my tech support explained why and how it stunk). legit in the sense of if they want to update something related to my being able to log in or something, but i was disturbed that they had access to my other files. grr. so my tech support suggested TrueCrypt.

i dl it and followed the very helpful directions for first time users. thus far it they couldn't be better directions. in the instructions it also has this awesome sentence.

Move your mouse as randomly as possible within the Volume Creation Wizard window at least for 30 seconds. The longer you move the mouse, the better. This is important for the quality of the encryption key.

are we there yet?

"A 15-year-old boy from the Urals suffered acute frostbite after riding the wing of a Boeing-737 plane on a two-hour flight from Perm to Moscow, Russian radio station Mayak reported on Monday."

link

FBI Carder

"The shower ran so long one month that the FBI got a bill for 18,000 gallons of water. Thomas says federal investigators appeared at his door to see if he was growing marijuana or making homebrew. "They opened a federal investigation to find out where the water went," Thomas says laughing. "And the water went down the drain. Because it was my only way to relax."

wired.com story

keith in CA

I've been telling everyone I feel a little dirty, and no one really understands why. you see, all my life i've criticized the California drivers and i really don't want to join the club... the club of people that has CA on the license plate. not that I think i'm a bad driver, or that I may become a bad driver (i probably will), I just feel a little piece of my soul is given in homage to the san-andreas fault for living here.

Vector TD hits

I was looking through the log files to see who's been coming to nerdy and what they've wanted to see! we have a visitor from the UK that came to see 'vectorTD hack' and a visitor from UC Davis that came to see 'vector td frog'. wow. that thing is very popular. we also got someone coming to take a look at the iridium picture (which is a picture of the satellite, not the element). thanks for putting that cool sitemeter online kev!

-17aug08 link added above because of the huge number of people that come for the hack, and just get this post with nothing!

dumpster float

an attempt to get scrounging and $30 to go 50 miles.

from last picture:
After nearly 9 hours of paddling, we only covered about 15 miles. We ended up in Chesterfield, far short of our goal. Even so, it was a wonderfully enjoyable day, and we learned many lessons that will help us out in future years. Here's a sample:

1. Vinyl awnings alone will not keep you afloat if you strike too many rocks.
2. Low rivers don't flow very quickly. If you want to cover a lot of distance, go when the river is higher.
3. Lifejackets make excellent seat cushions.
4. $30 is more than enough to build a serviceable junkboat. It won't glide along like the fancy storebought canoes, but it will be great for a leisurely day of paddling. And fishermen and other canoeists will definitely take notice.
5. You can find some crazy stuff in the dumpster by the railroad tracks.
6. Duct tape isn't as waterproof as you might expect.

alpha/beta gel

Physics, shmysics.

How this 12inch miracle tube could halve heating bills | the Mail on Sunday: "It sounds too good to be true - not to mention the fact that it violates almost every known law of physics. But British scientists claim they have invented a revolutionary device that seems to 'create' energy from virtually nothing."

Find Fosset Plane

Wired has a quick blurb on using high res imagery to look for the fosset plane (that supposedly carshed out my back door) with tools over the internet. amazon.com has some mechanical-turk project that walks you through how to load the latest KML plugin for google earth to get the most recent images (i didn't know you could do that!) and help search for the plane.

Tiny Watcher

I was reading windowssecrets.com and it was talking about MS replacing about 10 files in windows XP and Vista even when you say NO to an update. kind of hackerish if you ask me. at any rate, they referenced Tiny Watcher, a program to watch changes to the registry. I'm not sure i have a need for it right now (machine is in bad shape) but on a new install, or when building a core load it might be nice to see exactly waht programs are doing what to the sacred registry.

The way Tiny Watcher works is pretty simple: basically, it starts by taking a snapshot of important parts of your Windows system; then it tracks changes(every time you log in, or whenever you want to). When a change is detected, you are notified.
For example, you will be notified if a program puts itself in the startup lists of your machine, or if files are modified/created in your Windows directory, etc.

bannanna in space

http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com/en.html

team fortress 2

i've never played team fortress, but the videos for the game at
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/09/12/team-fortress-2.html
show this may be one I should consider.

mathworld

how mathworld.com has not made it here yet, i'm not sure.

hope

despair.com helps me realize i'm not the first to think some people are stuck in their ways or my efforts are wasted.

scrapyard

Make is great, and I enjoy seeing people repurpose stuff; like this trycicle/lawnmower

coder or killer

quiz
i guess and got 9/10 correct -kev

I didn't fair so well -k2h

kevs sitemeter

this is from kevs new sitemeter thinggy-mo-bop for nerdy. WOW. so COOL!

sitemeter
world map
north america map
location (it thinks i'm in fernley, 30 miles east)

Make a Baby Day!

Not really worth it (the having a kid part).

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/09/11/russia.conception.ap/index.html?imw=Y&iref=mpstoryemail

night flight

unmanned, over 50 hours of flight on solar power.

ALT sitecounter

so who posted the ALT site counter? anyone want to get that online for us?

remover

and then i thought - that is so not my experience.

perhaps:

is more like it.

XBMC + Subscriptoin

VUDU

it even uses what sounds like bittorrent behind the scenes to move files.
aside from the marketing, i hardly consider this 'innovative'

Good Bye Nevada

We haven't sold the house yet, but it is now priced to sell as I have accepted a position near jennifer. I gave my 2 week notice today, and start at the new company on sept 24. I got out of classes just barely. one day later and I would have been out $1500. I expect to continue my MBA down there, but i may need a semester off to get going at the new place. the $5k over the salary i'm making now won't pay for the difference in overhead and cost of living in CA vrs NV, but i'm glad to have it!

Shirts that Make the Man

okay not quite, but i did mention something very similar to this story to keith. he didn't appreciate my comments.

NSA Lifer

link
...
July 11, 1968
Your voice is always with me. Today I went to the bank and told the teller that your birthday was coming up and I wanted to get you a television. The teller really seemed happy about it, and he winked at me when he handed over the money. I know this is just my fantasy but I need something. I’ll put the money back in the bank tomorrow. I can’t get you a TV now. Contact would be treason, I think.
...

Thermos

iphone propoganda

so you've heard of the iphone hack, read this blog i ran across, looks like its the frontlines of effort.

solar bike trip

san and dara may like this one:
http://www.solar-umpc.com/

lane spitting

please tell me you people on two wheels are not doing this.

carry a paddle if you become president

why? to ward off the attacking swamp rabbit of course.

gmail video

for all you nerds that haven't noticed the "watch our video" at the top of your gmail page... click on that or here. my two favorites are the legos and the old ladies.

better-n-utube

http://www.paulyanez.com/labs/apple/
has a nifty proof of concept using flash that shows video from popular sites.
snazzy.

motherload; game

i really enjoyed this game.
hint, dig deep instead of clearing out entire sections there are some good valued ore down there, upgrade often, ignore score reset when save often.
i like the idea of 'upgrading' - and the system was done quite well.

like wikipedia but

more honest about it's accuracy:



Uncyclopedia is a fun read.

car hack

anyone want to try this on their car?
I wonder how new the car has to be?
more info on using a laptop to start a car.

Rocky

I Just ran across this. the story seems a little too straight forward. I suspect you may have some explaining to do.

carbibles.com

Carbibles.com is a site with what I consider to be some really straight forward and easy to understand info on cars and specs. I read the section on oil and it agrees perfectly with what i've learned over the last few years. its a must read. for reference, it looks like the site was made and run by this guy

heres the proof its a good read and will suck you in.. after an hour or so of reading in the engine section (i knew alot of it, but his diagrams are superb) i ran across the following

[on the topic of extra valves] When you get further down the page (and if your wife / husband hasn't come and complained to you about spending so damn long reading this stuff so late at night), you'll find some more information on why this is A Good Thing.

I love his cost of ownership example. I think it will help most 'paris hilton' americans understand a little something. look for it on page 2 of fuel and engine

The owners of these vehicles are Barbie and Ken, and to be suitably sexist, Barbie has a pink VW Polo and Ken has a blue Ford Crown Victoria.

ok, off on a tangent, but oh well. its hard to find EPA MPG ratings for cars, but you can see it here where it is from real people submitting data. the datasets arn't very large, but it is big enough for me to see that i'm 1-2mpg low on my milage on the car, not bad, but hope i can do better. the cool thing is that in 2008 the EPA is changing how they rank cars, for example, they will actually turn the AC on when its on the dyno... still not a real world test, but at least the AC's running. see the comparison of what the old numbers were to what the 2008 numbers will be. everything is drastically reduced! all these scientists make up some crappy test when you all you had to do was have a temp worker drive it like crazy and make a few laps in LA and you'd have much more realistic results and it would only cost you the price of the car (the temp worker crashing it would be the obvious conclusion to every test)

housing bubble

another angle on the housing bubble. An interesting read, with GRAPHS

freecorder

freecorder is a tool for recording from pretty much any audio source (hardware based of stream based) and goes straight into mp3. this should replace windows recorder, and i think the interface is simple enough to replace adacity for most things. (i haven't installed it yet, so i'm not totally sure)

157mpg

the loremo AG boasts a 20hp 2cyl diesel stuffed into a 1000lb car, that hopes to do 0-60 in 10sec (manufacturer says 20 sec) and top speed of 100mph. a full $13,000 gets you 157mpg. if this german monstrosity makes it to the states in 2009 i may just have to upgrade.

check out this where highschoolers added an ultra capacitor and a 1.9TDI engine to a kit car and with $15k got 0-60 in 4 seconds and 50mpg

blackhat

heres a presentation from a VERY recent black hat hacker convention. its just to funny, i had to link to it. of course i found this on none other than offensivecomputing.net

for more, see all of metasploits presentations

red pill

I ran across this while looking at a hack mode in the nokia 770. unrelated to the 770, this instead talks about virtual machines and some vulnerabilities with their implementation. one of the higher quality quick reads I've stumbled across recently.

(anyone interested in rootkits and backdoors should read this thing)

it looks like the people on offensivecomputing.net actively search for virus's, trojans and general malware and eat it for breakfast*! this is where the origional paper is hosted.

*as in probably reverse engineer/decompile it, understand it, spruce it up and then most likely deploy an even worse version. ok ok.. thats just mean if its not true, instead see what they say about themselves

tug

crazy tugboat almost sinks

polish headlights

jen and i spent a few minutes (hours) and $25 to take 150k miles off the front headlights. you can see the how to on VWvortex if you need to do it on plastic lenses as well.