little guy

this micro computer as a lot of potential.

google base

anyone seen or heard of google base. it looks like a mediocre attempt to take on craigslist. weird.

lizzy's life

after almost a year, lizzy has come back! read lizzsy's life. she dropped a quick note on my blog to let me know she was back. hurray!

something new

two weeks ago I spent about 2 hours late one night watching my windows xp computer primarly used for downloading torrents DIE because of a virus, despite the fact it had real time virus scan and frequent full scans by Avast! - which, I still think is pretty good.

I was angry enough to change something in the equation, and instead of stacking antivirus, figued it was time to raise the white flag to windows and install something a bit more cumbersome.

Ubuntu 6.06 looked easy enough to install, yet after two days I decided I was in the elite few that need the alternate disk (no live cd here) and it installed flawlessly.

I tried Azureus and about 5 other torrent clients, but none of them had the speed of uTorrent in windows. so, why not uTorrent in Linux?

I went all out and installed the newest 1.06 release candiate of uTorrent, and WINE. Well, the standard wine seems to have some problems with network in uTorrents context, so a quick upgrade to a derivitive and some command line garble (my college class of 1 week in linux is coming back to me now, no, seriously - i must have learned something)

so, check my screenshot, and just remember Ubuntu tries to be a cross over OS so hard, that it refers to VNC as remote desktop; this only took me 20 minutes of installing VNC to determine it was already there as a alias.



this was a nice boost. Ubuntu seems to have a lot of interest in their community.
I am wondering if gentoo would be faster, though.

got sand?

board stiff or want to be? relax with a little falling sand. or maybe you want it with stick guys one similar game, slug slayer straight from bablefish translator.

Got Wrinkles?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM4sKMCpgYo&search=funny%20dog

offroad?

"never taken offroad" on craigslist

is a dirt road off road? because really gnarly offroad is still on a 'road'

what's your library got?

MORE Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius is an intersting book.
By the 13th project, is has gone into great detail on how to take appart your microwave and build a gun out of it (complete with math, geometry, and theory) on page 100, it has the following:



go ahead and pickout your favorite part of of the text and post it as there are some jucy nuggets of 'wisdom' is a carefully disguised 'nerdy' book.

gideon bible

jen and I were sitting in church today. jen picked up the bible out of the pew like the usually does to follow along with the sermon and find even more intelectual things than what the pastor covers. I look on the front cover and low and behold....... its from the Gideons! what have you guys found in the pews?

I bought it on eBay

Hoorah hooray, buy it on eBay!

Sounds Easy

this morning i figured out, sorta, how to get excel to pick out multiple maxima on a graph. it sounds pretty easy and i am sure there is an easier way to do it, but it was interesting to learn a few more things in excel.
first: i took the first derivative of the data. this is the change in y-value over the change in x-value. technically with a continuous function the value of 1st derivative at the peak is zero (it is also zero at the minima, ie troughs between peaks). my data is discrete so i don't usually hit the zero mark, but there is a change in sign of the first derivative.
second: i wrapped up a way to spit out if i was at a regular data point (false) or a minima or maxima (true). check for the sign of the current value of derivative to be different than the sign of the last value using SIGN using NOT. so if they are the same sign it spits out FALSE and if they are differnt signs then TRUE. added in an AND to make sure i only got the maxima by requiring the value of the current to be less than the previous (on the way down). and added a couple more and statements to adjust for noise in the signal and a threshold for peaks.
third: i used this web page for the basics of picking out values where there was a true and then just manually incremented for my max 5 peaks per graph that i needed.

overheard

"you psycho nutbags"

micron 8-meg sensor

so dan, tell us about microns 8megpixel sensor were you invovled with this baby?

tecno babble

this has some awesome analogies about marriage, including

"
Some have tried to install Girlfriend 7.0 or Wife 2.0 but end up with more problems than the original system. Look in your manual under "Warnings - Alimony/Child support". I recommend you keep Wife 1.0 and deal with the situation.
"

reader busted

reader is busted, but it points to this cool clerihew page. I wonder who wants to do a contrast comparison between a limerick and a clerihew. thats an exercise for you avid readers. all I can do is point you the to the path!

homemade toys

growing up, it seems upon reflection that the best toys were of the homebrew variety. Ok, dan's sumac shooting bbgun was good too, but i remember:

• the rubberband pea shooters with close pins
• shovels
• ropes
• nails
• needle darts
• bathrobe tie throws
• parachutes
• dirt-clod-in-a-bag throwies
• potatoe cannons
• air compressor darts made from range golf balls
• aluminum can launchers using a blackcat firecracker
  
• and rock at the end of a board catapults (going over the neighbors roof).

this remade bing bang bong game seems to fit the bill nicely.

additions by k2h

• golf ball w/ a tennis racket over the back fence
• gasoline bombs
• lye / tinfoil pressure bombs
• playing card houses
• forts made with computer frames and old doors
• shovels for underground additions to the fort
• the old car battery for LIGHTS in the fort
• tree house nailed directly to the tree
• ball-tag
• sling-shots, of the rope and leather patch variety
• a few renditions of homemade cross bows
• homeade throwing stars and spikes
• the battle-axe (where is that anyway?)
• kevs bike trailer for dumpster diving and trash days
  

second life

the game second life had a funny write over at wired.
it's worth a read.

MasterCard TOS

I got a little something in the mail today at work, a change in the terms of service for my corporate Mastercard account.

basically having to do with currency conversion rates, and that the rate may not be converted on the day of the transcation.

but the big one: a 1% fee will be charged for each transaction that you make in a country other than the Unites States WHETHER OR NOT THE TRANSACTION WAS IN FOREIGN CURRENCY.

catchn' release

in case you don't have a cat

resist, V for victory.

"
Can you 'create' your own resistors? Sure thing, and not difficult. Here is how to do it: Draw a line on a piece of paper with a soft pencil, HB or 2HB will do fine. Make the line thick and about 2 inches (5cm) long. With your multimeter, measure the ohm's value of this line by putting a probe on each side of the line, make sure the probes are touching the carbon from the pencil. The value would probably be around the 800K to 1.5M depending on your thickness of the line and what type of pencil lead is used. If you double the line the resistance will drop considerably, if you erase some of it (length-wise obviously!) the resistance will increase. You can also use carbon with silicon glue and when it dries measure the resistance, or gypsum with carbon mixed, etc. The reason for mentioning these homebrew resistors is that this method was used in World War II to fix equipment when no spare parts were available. My father, who was with the Dutch resistance during WWII, at that time made repairs like this on many occasion.
"

link