Nerdy Tales

Boot multiple iso images from your thumbdrive

2010-07-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/ details how to install a boot loader so you can have multiple .iso files on your thumbdrive to boot to.

This seems quite usefull to me.

Church Children's Story

2010-07-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

Here is my handout from the childrens story I did. Perhaps you can change it for your needs the next time someone asks you to do the story.

This is adapted from my memory of the childrens story I heard when I was about 7 or 8, and from http://crazytieguy.com/airplane.htm

CloneZilla

2010-07-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

I've used this on a few machines and am quite impressed. CloneZilla is like Norton Ghost Just not $70 for use on 1 machine; Open source AND supports PXE boot.

I went the bootable CD route (about 130mb) - but you could put this on a thumbdrive.

Opted for the basic disk clone, and simple compression that is optimized for speed.

A feature I greatly like is the ability to push a harddrive straight to a network share (SAMBA)

in a windows environment. This saves me packing around an external harddrive, and keeps my images on the domain where they hit the backup server.

In CloneZilla, if you're on a domain and wish to use the SAMBA feature, when asked for your username enter it in the form domain\username.

My favorite part is that each section of the wizard actually builds the relative simple commands for you, then shows it to you. This way it's teaching you should you ever need to extend features not presented in the GUI. As an example for connecting to a network share to store or retrieve the images: mount -t cifs -o username="mydomain\myusername,domain=mydomain" //servername/sharename /home/partimag (where /home/partimag is the local linux file system). This bit of thoughtfulness is greatly appreciated by those of us that don't use Linux on a daily basis.

If at anytime in the wizard your change your mind, or made a mistake, cancel out, then press 'enter' to tell it your canceling, then choose to restart the wizard. It felt a little backwards the first time I used it, but it's way better then rebooting a live disk every time you want to change something.

Now I just pop the disk into a sick machine, boot (about 2 minutes) attach to the network share, flash my prepped windows 7 image with office configuration from the network onto the local machine (takes about 10 minutes) and save 1 hour and 15 minutes of installing and configuring when some random machine gets sick. Windows 7 (with the exception of INTEL NIC and integrated audio drivers?!) just figures out new hardware, and we're good to go.

The only downside I've found is that that it cannot take an image and put it on a smaller harddrive (while only looking at what was used) - though it does only store what was in use, and can upsize if you go to a larger drive. therefore, for your master images consider creating them from a drive that is small to give you the greatest rollout options. Lucky me grabbed a 500GB drive off the shelf for my first image, and I've still got 40GB drives in the field! I'm willing to concede that Ghost wins there, but it's still not worth the price if that is the only feature i'm missing while saving $70 + seat licencing.

With the CloneZilla server, and PXE boot, they report flashing 41 computers in a few minutes. That sounds pretty cool for a school, or a facility that has enough money to standardize their hardware and rollout dates.

http://www.clonezilla.org/

http://partedmagic.com/

##my notes on creating full disk image

##take all defaults unless otherwise stated;

device image

SAMBA_Server

DHCP #so we can see the network

Server: UCCS2

Domain: UC

Share: /iso #/image is the default

username: uc\me

Beginner Mode

Save Disk

##my notes on restoring full disk image - so my coworkers don't feel threatened by linux

Language: English

Don't touch keymap

Start Clonezilla

Device_image

SAMBA_Server

DHCP

Mount SAMBA Server: uccs2

Domain: uc

Account: uc\me #your FQDN for your user

Directory for image: /iso #whatever you sharename is on that server

Enter your domain password, 'Enter' to continue

#see that //uccs2/iso mounted to /home/partimag

Beginner Mode

Restoredisk #Restore an Image to local disk

Choose image #CloneZilla appears to read the contents of the folders and recgonizes what it's built)

Choose Local HDD to restore to, 'Enter' to continue, 'y' overwrite data (x2)

multi-monitor wallpaper

2010-06-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

The program at dualmonitortool.sourceforge.net works very well on my 4 screens for setting a unique/spanned image on each monitor.

Nerdy songs

2010-06-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

Alodia found an electricity song and I find the Unit Circle Trigonometry song quite disturbing.

The Matheatre guys are great.

GOOGLE

2010-05-23T19:46:00.000-07:00

Watched this video on Google. It's rather interesting.

(I wanna go work there, but only in the kitchen!)

ChromeOS - old build but runs

2010-05-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ Actually runs on my acer netbook. wifi works, boots fast from usb pendrive.

It has Debian at the core and has apt-get.

I'd appreciate it more if the terminal more consistently opened when I pressed ctrl-alt-t (it only works sometimes) but for what it is, it's quite fast.

http://www.slitaz.org/en/ still has my vote for lightweight installs - but without yum or apt-get it's not too exciting; tazpkg get-install does work, but it feels clunky and second rate.

proxy your browser; ultrasurf

2010-05-22T20:23:00.000-07:00

for those of us that don't want to have to setup our own proxy server.

http://www.ultrareach.com/

it appears quite painful to packet shape for us administrators. that being said, i want to use it!

Trip Stats

2010-02-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

I like to track stats on my little car, so here's the numbers if you're curious. It is interesting how much of a difference wind makes (42 vs. 30 MPG for the same road). Having a tail wind instead of a head wind increased gas mileage by 40%.

Date Start Stop Miles Gallons Notes MPG
02/04/10 Home Ogden, UT 312.5 9.18 Freezing fog, black ice, and variable speed 34.05
02/04/10 Ogden, UT Rawlins, WY 598.1 7.34 Some tail wind 38.91
02/04/10 Rawlins, WY Longmont, CO 817.9 5.18 Tail / Cross wind in WY 42.42
02/06/10 Longmont, CO Idaho Springs, CO 992.0 5.44 Winter Park and Around Golden 32.02
02/10/10 Idaho Springs, CO Evans, CO 1347.2 9.77 DIA / Around Golden and Greeley 36.36
02/11/10 Evans, CO Rawlins, WY 1568.8 7.36 Heavy crosswind and head wind 30.11
02/11/10 Rawlins, WY Tremonton, UT 1886.0 8.77 crosswind and head wind in WY 36.15
02/11/10 Tremonton, UT Meridian, ID 2164.4 7.87 Good roads cruise control set at ~78 mph 35.37

Total 60.91 Overall Average MPG 35.53

Physics Limericks

2010-01-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

Roger Clemens was stuck on a lake,
With no wind, oars, or fuel — big mistake!
So he thought like a rocket,
And emptied his pocket,
And left all his change in his wake.

Physics Limericks from the texbook for Harvard Physics-16

Pidgeon: Impossible

2009-11-18T08:34:00.000-08:00

http://laughingsquid.com/pigeon-impossible/

visualize choose your own adventure

2009-11-12T17:55:00.002-08:00

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

great writeup an illustration of a breakdown of the choose your own adventure books and changes over time.

cpu index

2009-11-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

makes for an interesting read. there are several search tools to find not-so-common processors. may be a good resource if you're trying to bring objectivity to your next netbook purchase.

DTV map

2009-10-21T21:37:00.000-07:00

We Still don't have a TV (gave our big one to kev)- internet pipe is all we use, but if you are one that uses it, check out this handy dandy map from the FCC to show you which direction to look to to fry your eyes.

from the looks of it, bad guys would only have to hit one mountain top to put this place is chaos. thats a little scary. the only station not effected would be the PBS station, and we all know no one watches that anyway.

Leslie says Hi!

2009-10-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

now I haven't gone too far from the spirit of nerdy tales. I introduce to you our next star up and coming nerd, Leslie!

Peek

2009-10-17T08:50:00.001-07:00

I have been really leaning towards getting a netbook, but truth be told, the peek may be a much better solution to what I want to do with it. just give me access to info. the geekypeek.com site lists some behind the scenes info from the developers. looks like targets got one model old for $15 for the hardware.

there are quite a few email to network gateways, and if there was something else you wanted, its pretty trivial these days to make the bridge yourself. i could actually see myself with this thing on a backpack trip, where its unlikely i'd have a netbook.

MRTG

2009-10-15T20:37:00.000-07:00

I keep rediscovering MRTG. one of these days I'll have to put it to use. a little graphing utility written a language I now know a little about, perl.

#twatch ethernet+LCD

2009-10-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

I found some guys over at Dangerous Prototypes who seem to put out some pretty cool work. the latest, an ethernet enabled LCD for around $40 is very snazy. to bad the shipper seed studio is in china with paypal only (I hate paypal). I have nothing against china, just a lack of love for paypal.

Some of ians other work included a web server on a business card with an EXCEPTIONAL writeup on hackaday. it seems to have every thing in the writeup including do-it-yourself board etching and SD card FAT.

some where in all the clicking around I found HXD, a tool supposedly good for raw editing of SD cards with out a file system, something i have needed at work for awhile now.

additional taxation

2009-10-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

Those of you that live outside of ME HI OR CA or a few other states know who you are.. your the guys that get your cans and bottles for free. for those of us stuck in the good old C-of-A we are subjected to the CRV California Refund Value price addition to our beverage purchases.

now i'm not one to gripe. I have a recycling center only a few blocks away. They are fast, but they suffer the problem that NIST has plagued this country with.. the weight standard.

so get this.... new 'eco friendly' packaging ensures my 5cent bottle doesn't last as long (I do reuse and put other water in it by the way) but when I go to turn it in, this bottle is worth LESS than the taxation I Paid for. - since I suffer from making a point without making one, let me spell this out for the slower among you.. if some bottles weigh more than others, yet they all are worth 5 cents, only the heavy ones will be worth the full amount, the lighter ones will return less when you submit them if they are put on a scale. this begs the question what weight does the state define as a 5cent weight?

so california pockets the difference? with the recession and all, maybe they can make jobs like Oregon does with putting gas in cars... instead of weighing this stuff, pay a dude to count it and get me my whole 5 cents back.

so do I calculate the difference and put the appropriate water back in the bottles to throw the scales?

Missile Silo coordinates

2009-10-05T21:02:00.000-07:00

over on siloworld.com they have a nice list of Missile silos. Wired has a nice writeup on a guy that converted one to living conditions. I always heard rumors of these around denver, and wanted to make time to go explore one growing up, but I never got around to it.

anyone wanna go halvesies with me and buy a silo? =)

mini fix = 27.5cents

2009-10-04T14:00:00.001-07:00

This looks like this is the 1,001 post for nerdy tales.

My mother in law has been here for a few months to help with the baby (its so cool having her). I promised a while ago to have a look-see at the mini to fix the interior door latch not working. finally, after getting an MBA, having a child, and having a weekend off from work I now have time to look.

Car: 2004 (or 5?) Mini Cooper S (S must be for Super, or sport, or superb or something)

Symptom: Driver side door opener (interior) will not open the door

Intermediate fix: roll the window down when you need out, and use the external handle.... not so fun in the rain.

Solution: The cable had stretched that actuates the latch. looks to be a common problem. Fortunatly the cable wasn't broken (looks to be around $12 if it was) so all that was needed was a shim, shameless fabricated from the first thing I could find, a mechanical pencil.

Mechanical Pencil:
Since this is nerdy tales, we do need to dive a little deeper into the fix. A little history on the pencil is warranted. The pencil came from a second story class room where I completed my MBA. This was about 6 months ago, and I was completing a final exam, on my own when I was interrupted by another student to look at my answers (leeches are hard to get rid of). I can't remember if she needed a pencil or not, but i did not give her this one. It was far to precious. you see, before i started the exam, I fished the pencil out of the trashcan at the door to use on the test.

Since then, I had emptied my backpack onto my workbench (I need a pack to carry my lunch to work while riding the motorcycle). now, today naturally, the first place I look for a solution is on the workbench which is where I found the pencil.

estimated value $0. estimated replacement cost: 27.5cents. Sams club has 32 of the BIC® Matic Grip for $8.84.

writeup with pictures at: broken car latch

'net Resources used should anyone else need to replicate this fix:
Factory Drawing
Locked in
Remove Door Panel
YouTube door panel removal

Hint: on this car, you need to wedge something in the end of the arm rest to release it so it can slide off, thus revealing the 4'th screw. that took about an hour to figure out, and fortunately, no broken plastic in the process.

OpenSPARC

2009-09-11T21:27:00.001-07:00

I've heard of alot of opensource stuff, but can you believe sun opensourced 2 generations of the SPARC processor? and this isn't old 1985 stuff, its from 2006-2008, pretty modern. its only about 500meg for the design and tools to view it. check it out here

troubleshooting tech charts

2009-09-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/31/computer-repair-flow.html

great story

2009-09-01T10:10:00.001-07:00

very well written.

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/father-kills-bear-to-save-son/article156354.html

moving golf

2009-08-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

I helped a friend move this weekend, and this is what it looks like when you put a queen bed on a golf. roof rack says rated for 75kg.

-yes, thats a folding table in there.

old soundcard? A/D converter.

2009-08-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/24/howto-make-a-cheap-e.html

att

2009-08-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

I saw this in class a few years ago. I thought it was pretty funny then, and still think its funny. all it can make me think of is that famous quote from George Santayana - Reasons in Common Sense - 1905 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" . yeah, I'm sure most of you will argue that is a miss application, but I dare say its relevant.

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock

2009-08-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

from thinkgeek, game described at sam kass

mba = DONE!

2009-08-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

yippeee.. I have received grades for my last 2 classes that I took this summer, and It looks as though I have passed. now to start the process to get the paper certificate!

To hold me over, I'm thinking of going with a T-shirt.

big bug

2009-08-02T11:02:00.001-07:00

living in California allows you to see some really weird bugs. check out this guy sitting on the Cantaloupe.

motorcycle south america

2009-07-22T13:01:00.001-07:00

over at http://twofortheroad-storeylines.blogspot.com/ they have a nice log of taking a KLR650 through south America. how inspiring!

ancient ancestor

2009-07-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

There is a nice little database that allows you to search through to see if you have ties to an ancestor soldier in later medieval England. the closest I have been able to find is Mr. William Hebille, an archer in 1417 that fought in France? how exciting.

search wild card work. I found him with heb*

Nerd Poster

2009-07-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

about time they finally made a nerd poster. you can see the full res version here.

Mooning of Amtrak

2009-07-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

Mooning of Amtrak seems to be a pretty big event. maybe, just maybe, this is the answer to get more people to use public transportation. It got shut down this year after 8,000 (yes, thousand) people showed up. And here I thought burning man was the only significant group of crazies.

There, I fixed it

2009-06-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

There, I fixed it, a website for all those Ghetto zip-tie and duct tape jobs everyone has done.

Google Voice

2009-06-26T21:49:00.001-07:00

The other day I filled out an request for an invite because i heard they were getting close to releasing google voice (thats the new and improved grand central if any of you remember back that far) and low and behold, only a few days later I got in! how cool is that. I am so looking forward to being able to screen my calls and listen into people while they leave a voice mail, and choose to pickup in the middle of the voice mail or just let them ramble on and read the transcript later. read the feature list for other cool things like 3-way and transferring to a new phone in the middle of a conversation.

i may use something like this if I need an automated script to notify me when its fallen and cant get up.

if you want to forward to google talk or something, try GroovyTel. I saw it, haven't tried it yet.

WolframAlpha names

2009-06-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

has anyone else tried the new modern day equivelent of 'googling yourself' on WolframAlpha? this whole terribly burdeonsom task of choosing a name has me looking at any and all possible sources for a mathematical maximization to the quality of a name, and the better half disagrees what that criteria is.

check out our good buddy on WA, the cool thing is it shows you the distribution by age! it really is quite fun to look at the different distributions by age.

WA requires you to cite the source, as if it wasn't obvious so the graph is from WA.

Guns Germs and Steel

2009-06-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

I had a debate awhile ago with a fellow engineer. which is better, to specialize in a very specific area.. focus, devote all your time and become the worlds best at the most microscopic of tasks, or to diversify a little, take the Swiss army knife approach so you can apply basic skills to a vast array of work? this show may help you answer.

Halo Ballooning

2009-06-08T22:04:00.000-07:00

over at natrium42 they have a nice little home project, with electronics tied to a personal balloon. this should be our T-day project some year.

MBA!

2009-06-07T17:19:00.001-07:00

I need to print a T-Shirt that says MBA on the front, and then on the back says 'been there, got the T-Shirt'. 2 more classes this summer, and i'm DONE! I'm in the bulletin for graduation, but am not planning on marching. no time for that nonsense with the kid coming and all. See the posting here

bump up

2009-05-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster?currentPage=all

wired has a fun read about a dude committed to cracking locks for over 40 years.

I've often wondered what the big deal is all about. It seems like a cutting torch could go many places too.

water battery

2009-05-30T16:21:00.001-07:00

watch the freaky haired physics teacher (that gives him added credibility) demonstrate his water battery.

2B2B2B41544829

2009-05-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

turns out, a nice little ping command can be used to hang up a good old fashioned modem. (no, my modem days weren't 45 years old)wow... I wish I had known that awhile ago! my AOL days would have been even more entertaining.

my new computer

2009-05-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

shocked arn't you?

Some awesome friends snagged one for me from a university that was restructuring. a 20" aluminum Imac, 2.00ghz due core duo, 2Gig-ram, 128meg ati, 250gig HD, usb, FW400, FW800, gig-ethernet, HDMI, 802.11N, bluetooth, webcam and mic. (and integrated speakers that arn't half bad). S/PDIF that I'll have to convert from optical back to coax to run my old speakers.

They felt sorry for me upgrading the old P4 to win7. For the record, I did get it running, sound, video --64-meg Geforce2-MX (a miracle). As I was finishing my upgrade the friends stopped by and drop this monster on my desk. dual booting win7 and leopard. a sight to behold.

ohh, by the way, if you install win7, goto C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT to see the rest of the wallpaper for different regions. the elephant for (ZA = South Africa) is particularly impressive!

shockingly, the MSDN blog has nice primer on windows 7 secrets.

An Interesting Read

2009-05-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

keith and i routinely have odd conversations...

one recent conversation was regarding how much the banking system isn't designed for the modern methods... or well pretty much anything.

i was clicking around cleaning up my amazon wish list for not good reason other than adding a vacuum attachment to clean my keyboard and was reminded of a book that i want (i should just get it on my next amazon order instead of wishing for it... yes, i shall) anyways the author (have you totally forgotten how i started this post yet?) is a really smart guy that i admire and so i went looking at his web page. the web page is ugly, but has a lot of good stuff. including this rant about the modern banking system and also how he rewards people for finding errors in his book.

Joule Thief

2009-04-21T08:32:00.001-07:00

I've been looking for an ultra low forward voltage drop diode to use for a little project I've been working on (in my head) and so far, the best candidate is probably a mosfet-- DS junction. doing design work in your head eventually needs practical (working) designs to give motivation, check out this Joule Thief circuit to steal the last bit of juice from your battery, down to about 0.35V to power an LED. pretty snazzy huh? you can see if hooked up to a Peltier (called a seebeck when used as a source) at instructables. I miss the days of having the time to actually do fun stuff. we have alot of these TEC (thermo electric cooler) junctions at work, so I'm going to start harvesting out of scrap units for projects at home.

climbing

2009-04-17T20:24:00.001-07:00

work update

2009-04-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

I was reading over at postsecret.com and this post from them inspired me to NOT say anything about a possible change at work until its complete. I'll give everyone an update when the smoke clears. not that I would bad-mouth anyone at work, but other changes...

April Fools

2009-04-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

Google has another new feature for gmail... autopilot.... hahahah i could really use this for students =)

randsinrepose

2009-03-31T12:43:00.000-07:00

I do a little reading for my lunch ~~hour~~ time. I read the usual gadget blogs and tech news. I want to share with you my latest finding, http://www.randsinrepose.com. This software developer is a superb writer! for starters, check out an old article The Larry Test which talks about the underpinnings of an engineers mentality to never ever really be done. its well thought out, and straight forward, but when you get to the end I was left with a realization about myself that I had truly never considered. Randsinrepose may just be so good as to get a permanent link from nerdy.

check it out, I bet ALL of you will like it.

the icing on the cake? a nice little review of cloud computing and dropbox

better off ted

2009-03-25T21:23:00.001-07:00

Have any of you guys seen better off ted? a new show over on ABC. the show is pretty hilarious and I had major flashbacks of my time with General Electric. ABC is TOTALLY making fun of NBC with this one. I particularly enjoyed the part of the into that makes fun of pretty much ever business arm of GE (you can almost see the Enron wind in one shot), and made reference to the very thing I had hanging on my wall for a while while employed there. for a time I had the slogan 'we bring good things to life' next a picture of the 1946 vulcan gun. for all my old friends still employed by the collective... check out better off ted.

gave in to a deal

2009-03-22T17:43:00.001-07:00

after eyeing dad's 10" acer aspire one netbook over christmas and not thinking too much of it I saw an MSI wind this past weekend and was quite impressed.

Then I saw a craiglist spokane ad for a 'new in box acer aspire one 8.9" with 8gb sshd, 1GB ram' for $200.

Turns out it was a model about 3 months newer without linux, but with a 160gb HD and XP HOME

It was not only in the box, it had never been opened. the ~1" smaller screen is noticible, but does not detrack too much from the functionality. cheapest I think I could get this elsewhere would be before tax referbished at tiger direct for $240 or costco $300

I beleive the touchpad is aware of multiple fingers, as you use two fingers spreading or joining to zoom in and out (webbrowser) - pretty cool. and draw a spiral from top right to middle of pad to activate scrolling from the pad. I actually with is was more like a mac (GASP!) and it just had two finger scroll - mayber there is a hack.

long term, 20$ to boost the ram to 1.5 gb (max MB supports) and to a 32GB SS HD wiht 90MB read and 55MB write a second may be intersting. I'm not in too big of a rush. Really only thing it's missing is bluetooth and a tv tuner. I've even got wireless mice and keyboard sets already that work just great (usb) and the tiny usb mouse that came with it works great.

specs AOA150-1555 black chasis

mechanical > chemical

2009-03-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

I love having guests, it forces you to get the place in order and presentable! it really is a good thing, or i'd revert to my slobish ways like a college student.

I was put on bathroom detail.. i'm sure it was so I would be forced to come up with a solution to the hardwater ring. they sell all kinds of junk for this in the store. wimpy little things, and harsh chemicals that NEVER EVER work. I believe the only intent is to poison the family cat, and to challenge you to surviving chlorine fumes while cleaning.

I devised my own solution - the electrical engineers toilet brush. ok.. it really is more a mechanical solution, but since i'm an electrical engineer i get to take a little credit. I gave my wife a hard time (a chemist) that today... mechanical is greater than chemical.

sci fi = syfy

2009-03-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

yeah, I didn't make that up.

the press release announcing the change confirms that SyFy is "phonetically identical" to Sci-Fi. Honestly, that was actually pointed out.

nerd name

2009-03-20T19:31:00.001-07:00

head on over to the nerd name generator my favorite is so far from my bro - k1h = Guido, the Wii Collector

recession central

2009-03-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

My employer let 25% of the workforce go today in the classical way. take the management team send them out to the effected employees at 9am on a friday, tell them to put their crap in a box and walk them to their car. very few in the business had any advanced warning, and those in the know were guessing a few people, maybe 5 tops. but almost 20 employees?!!!!! nice..

it happened so fast I only got to say good by to a few.

welcome to the recession.

I'm glad to say I was not effected and thats the scary part. maybe my number is up next friday? I waited for my boss to say something reassuring to me, and give me some hope about my continued employeement, but his reply was a little weak.

bottom line, i'm glad to have a job, and so should all of you.

VR6

2009-03-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

kevs little post on the OPOC engine (from the 50's look it up) got me to again wonder why VW keeps lying about their W engines. turns out I just misunderstood how they were put together. not quite as cool as the OPOC, but really nice writeup of how the VR6 technology was developed.

see a straight 4, and how it results in an offset 6 in a single block. genius. www.autozine.org

tire fire

2009-03-14T19:38:00.001-07:00

We went and watched a fire burn a few blocks from the house for our saturday night activity. We presume it was a tire shop, cause the fire was so black. the fire got way huge, probably 30-40 foot flames but by then the battery was dead in the camera, so these shots from earlier in the fire will have to hold you 'all over until some better ones come out in the paper.

Big Buck Bunny

2009-03-02T20:00:00.000-08:00

I know I need a new video card when my Geforce2-MX-64meg just can't render streaming HD. now thats so sad. you to can test your video card with this entertaining little short animation... its funny, you'll like it.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

magic / more magic switch

2009-02-27T19:51:00.001-08:00

This is a nice little tale about a magic switch. the EE side of me really enjoyed it.

Jonah

2009-02-21T19:24:00.000-08:00

you can watch the 'traveling buddy' worm on hulu jonah

civics

2009-02-10T22:28:00.001-08:00

how many of you would have passed your 8th grade civics exam in 1954 if it had looked like this? I know I wouldn't have.

euro coin

2009-02-03T20:43:00.001-08:00

read about its creation here

Embedding Fonts in PDF using OpenOffice.org

2009-01-22T12:16:00.000-08:00

i am at a workplace where i can afford to use a non-mainstream product for things that i want to do. because, well i don't get paid enough to tow the line to standardization and i have enough power to control the destiny of my job to some extent. one of the products that i choose to use is openoffice.org for my word processing needs (for small documents, large or complicated documents get LaTeX). i still use excel and powerpoint because well excell rocks and powerpoint doesn't but at least powerpoint works really well with the tablet.

but back to openoffice.org writer. last week i wrote a lab for organic chemistry that taught students to draw chemical structures and also to embed them in microsoft word. i wrote the lab in openoffice.org because it is so much easier to control various things like outline format and picture layout in openoffice.org. one thing i didn't anticipate is that embedding the drawings in writer and then exporting to pdf meant that the fonts in the drawings were still fonts in the pdf. this is a good thing in many ways probably but it had one unintended consequence. one student opened up the pdf and printed it (good thing) but in the process some piece of equipment (either computer or printer) didn't have the symbol font. (i know... what doesn't have the symbol font?) so my letter pi curiously turned into a q (not sure what alternate font it chose). so i went looking for how to embed all the fonts in a pdf and yup it is there. writer does rock. so the way to do it and i'll probably do it with all pdf files that i post from now on given the variability in people's computers, is when you click on export to pdf it pops up a menu. one option is PDF/A-1. this is an archive format that anticipates that someday everyone will have different fonts so it forces the fonts to embed.

as luck would have it

2009-01-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Chance
by titounetsan

from laughlines via stumbleupon

gps coordinates from google maps

2009-01-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

it looks like you can get google maps to tell you the GPS coordinates of a location. just center it on the page, and then put the following in the address bar and hit enter.

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

I found it over on gpsreview.net

pasties

2009-01-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

did you guys see that the device driver that crashed the zune 30s was posted over on pastie.org? the driver was only mildly interesting, but I do like the context highlighting.

script language performance

2009-01-02T12:39:00.001-08:00

There was a study done in 2003 to test the 'efficiency' of scripting languages. efficiency in terms of program execution speed, time to write the program, etc. the study, a tad informal, is still very interesting and concludes that since the number of lines of code a person can write efficiently is independent of the language, the denser script languages can be more optimal and depending on the task, the performance hit (speed of execution) can be small enough it really doesn't matter.

hottrends

2008-12-31T20:15:00.000-08:00

have you guys seen the hottrends over on google labs? i've always wanted to know what the current interest is of the internet dwellers. now I now, minute by minute. you can look back to different days as well. if i needed a way to do very specific targeted advertising, i think this might play into that.

rainbow table

2008-12-13T23:03:00.000-08:00

crack a windows password, up to 14 characters long in a few minutes. it just doesn't get any more nerdy than that. see project rainbow crack. i'm sure theres others, but this had a nice writeup.

Sirds

2008-12-13T22:15:00.001-08:00

I loved the stereo view things (you know, the ones where you cross your eyes and then it turns all 3 dimensional). I made a special one for the nerdy crowd. don't be stupid and try to see the small one above, click on it for a full screen view.

Some dudes over at cornell did a project with an FPGA and a TV. ahhh.. the good old days involving fun projects for projects sake, not just profiteering innovation for the investors

it is interesting to see that you can do this with plain text. I Haven't figured out how this is done, but over on hidden-3d they have an ascii generator tool you can use

peeler guy

2008-11-28T08:39:00.001-08:00

from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2006/05/grafter200605?currentPage=all

The Gentleman Grafter

By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.

by Howard Kaplan May 2006

In the early 90s a man named Joe Ades began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.

crazedlist.org

2008-11-27T13:05:00.001-08:00

it looks like you can search alot of craigslist at once if you used crazedlist.org.

HD failures

2008-11-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

over at datacent.com they have a nice listing of the sounds of failed HD's. there are some nice writeups on particular failure modes for specific manufactures and models. If you suspect a crappy drive, I would check these guys out for ideas of what to do (or to confirm it is now worth the sacred opening and harvesting of the ~~eggs~~ magnets)

fire glass

2008-11-13T21:32:00.001-08:00

handheld printer

2008-11-13T21:09:00.001-08:00

did you guys see HP's new handheld printer? looks like its being used for shipping receiving, with a scanner / printer all in one.

pdf import

2008-11-05T21:47:00.000-08:00

hey, has anyone seen the pdf IMPORT coming for open office? i'm going to have to try that one and see if it has any potential or not.

other cool open office plugins

check scare

2008-10-31T21:01:00.001-07:00

slashdot links to a nice little article telling the story of how an author has offered small checks to readers that find errors in his [technical] books. for reasons of check security [or lack there of] he is no longer doing checks.

based on that, these are my uninformed recomendations
1) don't use a checking account as a savings account
2) don't tie an overdraft from a checking account to a savings account
3) keep only what you need in the checking account
4) if you invested in getting rid of global poverty, you wouldn't have to worry about losing money in your checking account.

...oops had the throw that last one in there. i'm in global poverty this fall at school.

heywhatsthat.com

2008-10-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

I was browsing over at the google map directory and found a nice little tool that warrants much more playing with. heywhatsthat.com is a tool to plot the horizon (and name the peaks) from a location of your choosing. you can account for the curvature of the earth, and will also predict how far you can see from a particular location which makes it an ideal tool if... say.... you wanted to build a communications tower. check it out, you'll be impressed.

after you have picked your point, be sure and turn on the 'visibilty cloak' so you can see where you can 'see' on the big map. so cool.

I took the time to add in the view from Mount Rose for a friend.

wallstats

2008-10-25T20:09:00.001-07:00

White Castle

2008-10-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I saw Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a film that makes up for its lack of morals with increased laughs, and was totally convinced White Castle was a fictitious place. I was on business travel again this last week (Saint Louis this time) and we actually found one of these places.

Now picture with me the best fast food burger in existence (arguably In-n-Out here on the west coast) and prepare yourself as I did for the White Castle experience.

I should have known something was up, in-n-out is bright colors, happy, fast paced, where as White Castle is dull, drab, mundane, and slow (ok, it wasn't that slow, but the comparison sounds better). Burgers (without cheese) were 59-Cents or something, that too should have been a clue.

My coworker actually finished one, I could not (its only about 5 bites). I am convinced (and later told my wife) that dirt tastes better. When we returned the rental car across the street, we actually made a comment to the rental lot girl and she said "oh.. but did you get the ones with cheese? you have to have them with cheese, their the best that way". we politely informed her that no amount of cheese could have possibly made any difference and when we asked her if she had ever had in-n-out, she actually had the audacity to compare it to not being up to snuff with White Castle. wow.... to each their own.

If you ever run across a White Castle, just keep on moving. There is a nice little story of starting in 1916 with an iron griddle, and old shoe store, and a smashed meatball. to bad it looks different almost 100 years later, but still probably tastes about the same as a shoe store and a smashed meatball.

TinEye.com - image search

2008-10-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

Visit TinEye.com and login (use http://www.bugmenot.com/view/tineye.com for a nice 'trial' membership) - to link/upload an image and have this beast search 1,000,000,000 images and show you 'similar' images.

I tried it with an image on a corporate website that had an image that appeared doctored from stock photography, and what do you know. it was.

biology diesel

2008-10-16T21:54:00.001-07:00

man..I was just getting use to the idea of bio-diesel, now it looks like we are going to be turning to the biologists for our next form. you read it here first, i'm going to call it biology diesel. (sugar cane + yeast + gene splicing )

paint

2008-10-16T17:44:00.000-07:00

I don't watch TV, I Just watch internet, so I don't really see commercials any more. you'all have probably already seen this one, but if you haven't, here it is in the original sound. if you like this one, the bouncy ball one is pretty good too.

reliablility

2008-10-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

yup.. windows may be MORE reliable than the last, but anything less than 100% is still rubish in my book. I have no idea if this is real or not. someone needs to fire up the internet time machine or find a really old copy of nt4 and see if its on there.

scripting languages

2008-10-15T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get a reputation at work for solving problems with the crudest of tools. i'm not sure if thats a good reputation or not. I hate the idea of smashing an ant with a freight train, in my opinion a smallish bus is more appropriate. I firmly believe that everyone has a super-computer on their desk and refuses to acknowladge the power we all have right in front of us. you do not need to spend more money and time to release the beast, just open up a comand shell.

I read an article over on slashdot about 6 new[ish] scripting languages (well, some are really compiled) and theres all kinds of fun things, like other languages that compile in java byte code (groove) and ones that take pride in being compact, with a slogan, do it in 1mb, not 200mb. (Rebol, its not in the list of 6, but in the worthy mention section)

FPU in your GPU with CUDA

2008-10-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

I read a little summary over on toms hardware of the cuda interface to nvidia graphics cards. i was intrigued by a post over on gizmodo about the GPU being used by -russian- hackers to break WPA and WPA2.

if you don't want to read all of it, i'll summarize: for certain things, a GPU can be at least 10x faster than the CPU.

Melodyne

2008-10-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

Melodyne is software I got very excited about. It allowed us to take source material from anywhere, in our case from the natural world, and turn it into MIDI control data that would allow us to manipulate musical instruments, so we could have birds playing cellos or horns, or the wind playing strings. This is what we did in the film Rabbit Proof Fence [aka. The Long Walk Home]. I still think there is a lot more that can be done with it.
Melodyne is a wonderful piece of software. It allows me to do things I'd always dreamed of.

Peter Gabriel

The music from the video is from ninadeli

NAS backup

2008-10-05T00:20:00.000-07:00

I was reading over on slashdot at some ideas for backup software, and it looks like bacula may be pretty high up there on the useful scale. I'm not sure if I could set it up to work on a network attached storage, but maybe we could set it up to mirror across some of the nerdytales computers? anyone interested? 500gb is what, $50 now?

German Qwerty

2008-10-02T19:16:00.001-07:00

Wikipedia has a nice little writeup on qwerty in which you can clearly see the trouble I had today when I went to use a 'laptop' from Germany. its close, but not close enough. check out the 'z', 'y', loss of the '+' and '-' (in the standard locations). you don't have any idea how much of the expanded characters you use in day to day windows navigation until you've tried to use one of these baby's.

couple that with my inexperience in vista (and office 2007), and the fact that vista lost the 'run' ability from the start menu, and hyperterminal is now missing in vista and that made for one exciting unusable computer. oh yeah, no com port either. its strange how modern machines become increasingly less useful.

The fact that the OS was in german was only a minor inconvenience given the rest of the problems I had with the machine, OS, and office.

Tetraphobia

2008-09-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

Your word of the day is Tetraphobia. I have no idea why cultures are so tied up in numerology. its the modern era, move on people!

At work, the main product has a developer logon PW with a lot of 8's. heres why

T-Day Plans

2008-09-27T13:37:00.001-07:00

Seeing as Sarah is planning on being about 37 weeks pregnant we are not planning on traveling (I'd rather not have to tell my kid they were delivered at mile post 382 on the interstate).

We are happy to host anyone who wants to visit though. Especially those who want to cook yummy things :) or go hiking.

electrocute your diesel

2008-09-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

some 'snake-oil' plate differential has claims of 20% increase in mpg or power. i say snake oil because it may have some validitity to it. it made it to slashdot, and was scoffed, but its actually been published on acs.org. and we know those guys are all snakeoilly. read the paper here

as a side note, now i don't feel so bad that i use paint for technical illustrations.

canada and back

2008-09-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

A week ago I had a discussion with my manager about my work responsibilities. The discussion didn't go so well. We weren't seeing eye to eye on much of my responsibilities. The next day I was asked to fly to Canada for a spur of the moment FAT (factory acceptance test) to conclude a 4 month demo. A Canadian customer had a unit and wanted some modifications made, and I was the best qualified that was able to travel.

This last week, I flew up and spent almost the entire week up with the crazy Canadians. (yes, I did ride a horse, and yes, the saddle fell off, and yes I did end up on the ground). The trip was an awesome success (mostly luck). I spent a day and wrote a report on the new configuration and sent it back to the factory. When I got back, the plant gave me a raise and a new job (doing more of what I want to do).

not bad for missing 2 nights of school. well worth it I think.

putty puzzle games

2008-09-18T21:05:00.001-07:00

weird little puzzle games from the maker of putty, which now has serial support so i'll be giving that shot. you guys can enjoy the games.

all the games appear to run in a browser window in java, so no need to install anything. i tried the tangle game and 'beat it' in a few minutes. it made me very proud.

Unscrewed Leg

2008-09-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

They took the screws out of my leg... Lots of fun, got to meet some nice people in the hospital. I really like the guy holding the mask right before the lights went out, it all seemed quite pleasant.

headtracking

2008-09-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

check out the video on head tracking. pretty interesting and you even get the 3d effect from a 2d video. the brain is so cool.

Acoustic Trigger

2008-09-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

I need to make an acoustic trigger for the cannon. (the big one). maybe one with a variable delay, you could go old school with a tunable RC network, or digital uP. I'd put a long cord on the pickup so I could put it near the impact point, and then adjust delay.

I wonder if you could use a piezzo electric? maybe just use a regular crystal, with no load, and then gain up the response with an op amp. drop the piezzo on the ground and out pops a trigger? tape it to a frozen jug, and use it for the trigger when the jug gets shot. so many possibilities....

found here

MPGuino

2008-09-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

the folks over at ecomodder.com have a nice little write up about using the atmega168 (thats the atmega8 with 16k of EEPROM) to drive a display and give you your speed and MPG. it specifically is targeted at older fuel injected cars where you just tap the injector signal, and the speed sensor, and your off and running.

It looks like a fun little project. i almost regret having a newer generation car where I fell pretty much obligated to reverse engineer OBD-II so I can read the fuel injector info directorly from the ECU. its so sad that is RIGHT THERE, but so hard to get to it!

ubuntu at wwu

2008-09-16T08:03:00.001-07:00

unfortunately the mirror is super slow. time for a new download site.