gave in to a deal

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

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

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

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

recession central

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

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

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

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

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

Jonah

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

civics

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

read about its creation here

Embedding Fonts in PDF using OpenOffice.org

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

Chance
by titounetsan

from laughlines via stumbleupon

gps coordinates from google maps

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

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

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

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

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

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