I've been using Mastodon for some years now and I can't praise it enough. I believe mainstream social media has become a cancer on our society, but not because being social is inherently bad, but because people have allowed themselves to be herded into social spaces controlled by for-profit comp...
I've been listening to the 1968 BBC radio dramatization of The Hobbit and wow is it a bit jarring. Having grown up with the music from the animated 1977 Rankin and Bass production, hearing the poems and songs performed with different melodies and cadence is an "uncanny valley" level of weird.
G...
The Discovery Age
Western historians refer to the period from the late 15th century through the 17th century as "The Age of Exploration" or "The Age of Discovery". These terms are obviously ethnocentric as they refer to the discoveries made by western Europeans primarily on the seas during the "A...
I started using Discord in early 2019 mainly because most of my gaming friends were already using it and quickly recognized it as a fantastic platform for collaboration. I started to write about using it for organizing a project and never finished that post. I ended up creating and maintaining a...
Some years ago I was gifted a used Synology DS713+ NAS (Network Attached Storage) device with dual 3TB Western Digital Red WD30EFRX NAS drives. The friend I got it from had upgraded because this setup was "too slow" but its worked well for me for many years. Mostly I use it as just a backup serv...
For 30 years I have been generating digital computer files and storing them in various ways. Over time I created heirarchies of related information, much of it overlapping and without any formal naming convention. Methods evolved over time as did my interests and eventually I found myself search...
Now that baconreader no longer works on reddit due to steep price hikes for third party apps to use reddit's API, I have deleted my 11 year old account there. I did not typically read the site in a browser and I hated the official reddit app so if baconreader won't work anymore I won't be usin...
Why does this post exist?
I try to never comment on a Youtube video unless its a positive comment for a creator. There's literally no point in angrily replying to some random keyboard warrior about US economics on Youtube. Same with FOX News comments, and I guess really all social media. Most o...
The Yì Jīng or the “Book of Changes” (often spelled I-ching in English and I will use that form here) is based on an ancient Chinese divination system which by the late 2nd century BC became associated with the philosophy of Confucianism. Much of the commentary in the book perhaps posthumously ascri...
Google, in what might sound like hyperbole claimed in a recent court brief for Gonzalez v. Google that if the Supreme Court chooses to limit the scope of Section 230 that it would "upend the internet". They are probably not wrong. Such a decision would certainly disrupt the internet as we've k...
Chromebooks, introduced in 2011 initially for the Business and Education markets found quick success in schools mainly due to lower cost of purchase and ease of maintenance. Google Classroom released in 2014 raised the proposition even further but it was probably Google's planned obsolescence f...
First, if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this. This post is not an in-depth discussion of what cryptocurrencies are, how they work, or why you might want to care.
If I had stuck with it then I'd be rich now
The first time I tried my hand at mining for cryptocurrency was back in 2...
A friend at work gifted me an old Nexus 7 (2013) which originally shipped with android 4.3, but had gotten official updates up to 6.0.1. I knew when he offered it that it was very likely I'd be able to get a more recent version on there since the official Google devices are very well supported an...
The biggest change since I last wrote about making music videos in 2018 is that I've largely gotten away from tracking tunes and creating finished videos and more into looping music live while streaming on twitch (see the link to my twitch channel at the bottom of any page here). I've also spent...
This is a subject that I like to research from time to time. Occassionally, as I run across a resource I may update this list. If you wish to contribute information, please include source and email nate at this domain.
Electronic mail was first "invented" in 1965 by Tom Van Vleck, and implemente...
For a complete parts list with up to date pricing for this build visit:
The last PC I built from purchased components was in 1994 (a 486 DX266 :) so needless to say I was a bit intimidated to even attempt this, but this site was a great help. As an aside I...
I enjoy listening to non-commercial radio. If you don't know what that means, its radio supported by donations and not commercials. If you are hearing commercials for local businesses every few songs any time you tune in you are listening to a commercial radio station. One of my favorite stations...
I've always enjoyed canoeing. As a kid my dad used to take us out in rental canoes when we were camping in Vermont or upstate New York. Once when we were horsing around on Emerald Lake in Vermont we flipped his canoe and the car keys fell out of his pocket which would have been a horrible mess h...
update 200203 I have since moved this server to an old Dell Optiplex 3020m (Intel i5-4590T 2.0GHz with 8GB Ram) under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which runs 1.13.2 spigot without issue. The Raspberry Pi was sufficient for 1.12.2 (with occassional lag) but after upgrading to 1.13.2 it was essentially unplay...
note: this post was never finished and was never made live in 2019. I had intended to add some screenshots showing how I set up various servers, documenting permissions settings and describe all the servers I was running but just got bored and didn't finish it. Since I deleted my account this w...
One of my kids uses an older Alienware M11x R2 hand-me-down (running Linux) but its hard drive up and died. I had a spare SSD and went to install that and discovered the laptop had developed the same exact hinge problem I recently saw in a much newer high end ASUS (sometimes copying another man...
Getting ready to record
When I decide to make a video for a tune the first thing I do is fire up my computer on the desk in my music room. I pull up a copy of the sheet music and watch a few youtube videos of people playing the song if I can find any. Depending on the tune I either learn the g...
I occassionally need to post a link on Facebook back to a Wordpress site. Even though almost every other social site seems to be able to handle this simple task sanely, Facebook demands that you format your page with "Open Graph" tags or it will stubbornly refuse to show any image or if it will s...
When I first set up a twitter account sometime in 2007 I did it just because it was the new thing and I wanted to ensure that I secured my "twitter handle". I never posted anything on it, and then forgot about it. Sometime in 2011 I was having a discussion with my office mate about the service and...
It had rained so much in May that we didn't have a chance to get all the plants in the ground but finally after a break in the weather on Sunday the 20th there was an opportunity to get outside. The area we have cordoned off with chicken wire to keep out the bunnies and groundhogs is pretty small...
Why Amateur Radio?
I've been listening to scanners since I was a young teen, first at my grandfather's house outside of Philadelphia (which was a lot busier than where I lived) and later at my own home where the scanner is now non-stop police calls 24 hours a day. In High School and for at leas...
I've used dd-wrt on many Linksys WRT54G routers over the years at work and at home. These blue routers, first released in 2002, became classics and in large part because Linksys allowed the open source community to develop replacement firmware for them. The additional capabilities and enhance...
Back in 2010 when I deleted my Facebook account it was mainly because I didn't like the way the company was constantly changing their policies and privacy settings. Things I knew I had turned off would be mysteriously turned on again, and they were manipulating how I saw the content posted by u...
Lugging a laptop down to the conference room
I thought I had solved our safety officer's problem a couple years ago. He had a bunch of videos he needed to show during his training classes but it was a pain to lug a machine in and set it up before each class. I set all his videos up as private vid...
Cheap digital video production and free (or very cheap) internet-based venues for them has resulted in a wave of niche-interest low budget web video series. Fan-made productions are certainly not new and someday I might catalog all of those fan films based in the Star Trek universe which I loved, b...
This site has undergone a fair amount of change over the years. I've tried to keep a changelog of sorts every time I've moved the furniture around. See the Site History page for more details about the various software I've used. Most recently I was using a self-hosted Wordpress install. While...
We created a Win7 ghost image in July last year which I was using to roll out to machines directly. Recently I wanted to have a Virtual copy of this image so I could snapshot it before installing some new software to test and quickly get back to my prior state from my workstation. While we use VMwa...
When the Constitution was written a well trained militiaman could load and fire his musket 2 or 3 times per minute. Obviously unsuitable for personal protection beyond a single shot before an attacker could close with a knife, its main use was in a battle line where many other similarly armed men w...
The remains of a man who died 10,000 years ago were found in a cave in England in 1903 and a tooth from the skull was recently DNA sequenced to reveal the individual's dark skin and blue eye colour. The man, known as Cheddar Man was a member of Haplogroup U5. While other older skeletons found in...
TIL Pixar makes movies in Linux (RedHat and CentOS) and has open sourced their animation software.
https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD
Real-Time Graphics in Pixar Film Production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9ikzGQW0ys
Starfleet Order 104: Section C – Should it be proven with admissible evidence that the flag officer who had assumed command was medically or psychologically unfit for command, the starship's ranking officer could relieve them on that basis. However, such an action was required to be supported by a...
As the nor'-easter passes over the pressure is definitely dropping. The brass pointer shows the lowest pressure observed on it during Sandy. I wondered how accurate this old barometer I got from my grandmother might be so I compared it to a digital barometer I have mounted outside which read 28....
One of the founding members of Facebook is saying everything I said about it when I quit using it. Social media is programming you and destroying civil society.
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.
h...
I have been changing the default search engine back to #Google on all installs of #Firefox that I do (and since I push it out via Active Directory at work its more than a few) since #Mozilla made the deal with #Yahoo years ago. It wasn't so much that the quality of the search was poor as it was t...
Everyone loves the Firefox 57 (Quantum) update which made Firefox feel like a contender again, but on the hardware where that speed increase would really be a great benefit - low end arm devices like the raspberry pi or in crouton on arm based chromebooks - it won't run. In fact, Firefox version...
Markdown isn't one of the Languages supported by notepad++ so if you find yourself reading those kinds of documents frequently you might want to know about this project. Just pick your theme of choice (I'm using default most of the time but the screenshot is from zenburn) and download the .x...
For many years I have been pushing out Firefox through Active Directory to 150+ Windows machines. Currently all the machines are running Firefox 55.03. One user who runs the Professional version of Malwarebytes for additional security noticed a strange detection appearing yesterday. Malwarebyte...
Folks in the US honor Veterans this weekend. While we're on the topic, lets not forget those Veterans of the Psychic Wars. The first reference of the term appears to be in Jim Morrison's poem Far Arden, 1969 (ref starts at 2 min 50):
A constant theme in Michael Moorcock's Elric novels (1972) w...
There are hundreds of potentially fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit which do nothing but re-tweet pro-Trump and anti-media messages all day, every day. They provide the graphics and slogans which hard core politically right folks in turn re-tweet to their followers. Who is actually...
Apple hardware used to be great. I had three Mac laptops (and still use my 2008 Macbook all these years later although I run Linux on it now) and we still have a bunch of iPods around the house. I have to support countless iPhones at work (though being a BYOD company, I had nothing to do with buying them). The hardware quality has definitely gone downhill over the years - one particularly egregious example was chargers (2011-2012) with wires separating leaving exposed bare wires and there was no way to use any other kind of charger you have to buy a new $80 Apple charger and they only have the one that breaks. I could go on about bending iPhones, and now in iPhone 8 batterys apparently exploding.
But this rant is about iOS. There is a myth (much repeated) that iOS is "easier" which sets me off every time I hear someone repeat it. What they mean is -
iOS is more like the iOS that I'm used to than something which isn't iOS
Its not "easier" by any real measure. What is a real measure? Here's one: Try to use the operating system to get various tasks done and measure how long it takes to get them done, if you can get them done at all.
update 2024 - some years later I was able to switch back to Linux at work. I'll have to look up when I did and see if I have anything documented about it.
I won't get into why, after 10+ years I've switched my work desktop from Linux to Windows 7, but suffice to say its been painful. I stil...
Bought on a whim, this tiny chromebook quickly became my go-to device mainly because it was light, turns on immediately, and I could get 90% of my work done on it. I've been using an ASUS C201 Chromebook for a full year (see original post) now as my daily driver personal machine. I got mine u...
I was cruising around Saratoga Springs, NY on Google Street View tonight checking out the area around Union Ave. by Congress Park to see what the pink palace was looking like these days (thats what we called the Skidmore dorm Moore Hall in the early '80s when I was there over the summers) and I ju...
It being so close to St Patrick’s Day, I decided to finally deal with the non-working music on hold at work since it gave me a good excuse to put Irish music on. Many years ago I had set up an ancient PC running Damn Small Linux (DSL) with mp3blaster running in shuffle / repeat mode connected...
I use my Arch powered bootable USB drive on lots of different hardware, but most often on hand-me-down laptops from work. I recently moved into a newish laptop (a Dell Inspiron 13-7352, P57G) which came with an Intel 7265D wireless card. Its a really nice 2 in 1 laptop where the screen folds b...
update 2024 - this is still happening but not just bing or yahoo search. Google has also been letting these float to the top of results for years now. I'm not sure how anyone can use the modern web without blocking ads and javascript.
The top sponsored ad on the Microsoft search engine for th...
A dangerous and incorrect statement I've heard from some pundits lately is that people that are in the country illegally have no rights under the Constitution. This is not true, and in fact has been litigated by the Supreme Court many times over the last 130 years.
There was another time when the...
I've listened to Rich Conaty most Sunday nights for maybe 25 years now. He didn't know me, but I feel like I knew him some. He was always there as the week came to its close when I knew I'd have to be getting up in the morning and doing it all again soon. Sadly, Rich won't be getting up anymore...
A musical Christmas card with good wishes to you for the New Year from The Berry Family String Ensemble, performing Joy to the World as arranged by Lowell Mason at the homestead in Vermont for Christmas, 2016
The sheet music is freely available here:
The default privacy settings for Windows 10 anger me. Hiding the fact that you will be collecting everything a user types, says, or searches for on the Internet behind a big, obvious "Express Settings" button (which most users are likely to click during the setup process) and providing only a tin...
JPL co-founder Jack Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist who was also a follower of Aleister Crowley. He became a leader in Crowley's religion in the US and was later conned out of a huge sum by L.Ron Hubbard who made off with Parsons' girlfriend in the deal. Blackballed during the Red Scare,...
A recent job reminded me of why I no longer buy Apple products. The client calls to say they just got a new iPhone and are having problems getting a custom ringtone onto it. OK, sounds simple so I run over on lunch. Client had gone to a local AT&T store when their old phone gave up the ghost. AT...
If you have older machines that are running Windows 7 you may have run into an issue where Windows Update gets stuck at the Preparing to install screen (seemingly forever). I've been able to get past this issue just by stopping the Windows update service, then applying the "July 2016 update rollup f...
I frequently boot Arch Linux from a USB3 drive in various Intel based machines which I've discussed here before. Recently I was using the drive in a Dell e7240 which is a fairly nice, if older, Core i5 based ultrabook and although the drive was inserted in the USB port marked SS (USB3) performan...
Ever since I first got an android based ASUS Transformer model TF-101 back in 2011 I've been a fan of the tiny netbook sized laptop form factor. The Transformer could be separated from its (optional) keyboard but I never used the Transformer in tablet mode anyway, and the few times I did it was...
OK, so forgetting about the fact that the Windows issue that I was searching for info on today (Windows Updates) hasn't been fixed since 2008 when this "temporary solution" was posted on Microsoft's site, I find it pretty funny that the oldest comment on the Microsoft community blog page (obviousl...
Almost three years ago when I first set up a Minecraft server for the kids (and never wrote more about it as I had originally intended to do), I imagined it becoming a frequent haunt for the kids and their friends and cousins to build stuff together. I didn't realize that the lure of real mi...
I read the email and smiled - all that work I do trying to get users to reach out to me when they are confronted with something suspicious pays off! Bob (not his real name) had taken a screen shot of the strange error message and sent it to me asking how to proceed. He had been using Chrome, the...
I was running Cyanogenmod 11 (android 4.4.4) on my Samsung S3, using a SNAPSHOT from Aug, 2015 and not getting any more updates. Finally looking into why it turns out they had moved on to developing for Lolipop (5.x) so to upgrade I'd need to wipe and install from recovery. I decided to go with a...
I was first introduced to D&D in 1979 by some friends in school and was soon addicted. I spent inumerable hours creating maps and dungeons for my buddies to explore, and rolling up characters to populate my own worlds or to play in another kid's campaign. I played straight through high school bu...
Caveats
I don't use Microsoft Windows at home. I did at one time - I ran Win3.1 and 3.11, Win95, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT4, WinXP, and still use Windows Server and Win7 on occassion at work, but in 1997 I switched over at home to running Linux, then in 2001 switched to OSX, then FreeBSD briefly, and...
The wife asked innocently, "do you think we can get this to run on solar power?" Leaving aside the relative merits of the product or why I would want to run such a thing on solar power considering the fact that we have two perfectly servicable camp stoves for a moment the question does provide...
I went out last night with my youngest for a meteor shower watching party which had been scheduled from 9 to 11 up at the school. It was colder than its been all season, but the sky was clear and the moon was last quarter and hadn't risen as yet. We bundled up really well, brought out some camp c...
While still enjoying the holiday with my family I found a recent story in various online forums strangely compelling. It concerned Ian Murdock, an icon in the open source and Linux community for his contribution of Debian (Ubuntu is one of the many Debian derivatives) in 1993 while at Purdue Univ...
I've had a Raspberry Pi2 since earlier this year when it first came out. I had gotten it in a package which included a see-through plastic case, a miniSD card pre-loaded with Noobs on it, a wifi USB dongle, USB power supply, and HDMI cable. Since I already had a wireless keyboard and mouse I...
Albert Einstein once wrote:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of sm...
Its been a while since I've written anything here. I've written plenty on various social media (G+, twitter, reddit mainly) but these places aren't under my own control and eventually whatever I write there will likely be lost as these companies grow, change, acquire and get acquired and their pr...
One thing I need in a vehicle is a working radio. It doesn't have to be flashy, or even have bluetooth or a touch screen - I just need it to be able to tune in AM and FM radio and have a clock in it. The Van of Doom didn't have a radio. It was supposed to have had a radio, but when I went to pi...
Its been a while since I've posted anything here so just as an excercise for the fingers I thought I'd post an update about my current machine.
I've been running Arch on an old Thinkpad T410s for almost a year now ( journalctl says logs started on June 23, 2014). Its an Intel i5 M560 2.67 G...
Using a small laptop when you're on the road is a great idea, they're lightweight and easy to pack. You can quickly pull it out and work almost anywhere you can find a seat and get some work done with its integrated keyboard and touchpad but when you're back in the office, using that same laptop...
I've been using Arch more often than the Ubuntu machine lately and since I know that my Canon printer is not well supported under Linux I was putting off trying to get it going under Arch. In Ubuntu I was able to use some .deb packages that were hosted on a European Canon website to get the various...
This is just a snippet of text I got from here which I keep around and paste into my crontab on any new machine I set up. If I forget to do this I invariably end up googling it again... every time.
I was getting stuff together to visit family this holiday and last minute I received an email from my brother with a picture of a bunch of Lego minis arranged as shown entitled “My Army Awaits”. His kids are still very young, and since he’s running after them all the time I didn’t think he’d want...
Back in February I wrote about setting up a bootable USB stick with Arch Linux. At the time I was using it with a Dell laptop, but since then have been running it mainly off an old Thinkpad T410s (with a now totally non-functional power cable and a cracked palmrest) that had been retired from w...
Bardic Circle was invited to play at the SCVF Emerald Society meeting last night which was hosted by Ridge FD, but since 2/3 of Bardic Circle couldn't make it on such short notice, I ran out by myself. I usually don't do solo gigs and I certainly missed Cate's great harmonies and mandolin as...
I ran down to the Grey Horse Tavern in Bayport again to see Luke Powers and Bernadette Fee make the rafters roar once again, but also to say good luck to Austin who will be heading down to start his new life with Raleigh FD. I met up with Chief McKenna and the Honorable Kate Browning and a couple...
I use PSI, an open source desktop chat client to connect to a jabber server I run at work, and also to connect to Google Talk (aka Google Chat, Google Messenger, Google Hangouts - whatever they are calling this XMPP based instant messenging service this week). I've used this setup for years, PS...
I met up with John Corr yesterday to play Irish music at Kings Park Day. This street fair is kid friendly and has a wonderful small town America vibe. I found this picture of us in the Kings Park Notebook gallery [note: login required, 2024] of the event. I got to play a bunch of fiddle tunes...
While I certainly have been enjoying running Arch on usb on the Dell, my main machine is still the old MacBook running Ubuntu. I had some extra time today and thought "hey, I should install steam and grab FTL and Kerbal Space Program" but then promptly decided Id rather do upgrades?
Im runn...
I've been down to the Grey Horse Tavern in Bayport the last two months in a row to see Luke Powers on Uillean Pipes, Bernadette Fee on fiddle, Pat Coyne (and last time, Tom Falco) on guitar, Jerry Miller on accordian and others at their traditional session on the last thursday of the month. T...
I recently got a new laptop from work. Its a refurbished Dell Latitude E6330 with an Intel Core i5 processor, a 13" screen and a 120GB SSD drive that came with Windows 7 Pro. I haven't used Windows regularly in quite some time (I've been using a WinXP VM on the rare occassion I need to do someth...
Several years ago the transmitter for my car alarm died. Before I got around to changing the battery on it the plastic loop by which it would hang on my keychain broke. While my car has an alarm, I had put it permanently into valet mode a long while back because it was just a pain. I would use...
I bought this amp from my brother a long time ago for $50, quickly blew the speaker which I replaced, but then left it languishing in the basement after concentrating more on acoustic music. Now that one of the kids has an electric guitar I've found myself playing my Gibson SG more often as well...
The wife has an older LG Optimus S (LS670) (late 2010 vintage) which she got when we first signed up for Ting.com service (phone service based on Sprint run by the Tucows folks in Canada and their pricing is great compared to the major carriers). Its an old phone as android phones go, only sp...
A while ago I created a virtual machine (VM) under VMware 5.1 with Ubuntu as the guest OS. I wasn't giving the task my full attention and I made a couple choices without thinking when setting this one up. The problem I ended up with is that I only allocated about 10GB to the VM which, while certai...
Call me old school, or out of touch (pun intended) but as big a fan of tablets and the touch-screen enabled operating systems (OS) that run them that I am, I just don't see these devices replacing laptops. I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and I recognize the tablet form factor as the classic PADD from...
This is a pet peeve of mine so I hope you'll forgive this rant. I found the following image in my G+ stream, and was digesting the quote and noticed it was attributed to Plato. I subscribe to the idea that quotations should be properly sourced, and there wasn't any mention of what book this was f...
Back in early June I developed what I have self-diagnosed as tendinitis. I had started off the season's mountain biking hard, switching from the easier trails to the more technical ones earlier than usual and going much harder on them then I usually did. This is my 7th season riding since buying...
It was just an image with an interesting quotation on it, an internet meme like any other but the author was purportedly Cicero. Being interested in ancient history, I knew there would likely be a better story around the quotation than the sugary sweet sentiment of the sentence taken out of cont...
Its been a long time since I've written about anything here! There are a couple reasons, not the least of which is that I hurt myself and developed some kind of tendinitis. This was probably because I ignored some early warning signs and kept mountain biking despite pain and weakness in my elbows....
The more I learn about Microsoft's new Xbox the more upset I become. An internet connected device sitting in my house pointed at my family armed with cameras and microphones which can't be shut off? And when you shut it off, it's actually in a power saving mode where the microphone is still on (...
This message replaced all site content today:
iN8sWoRld.net has gone dark from April 21, 2012 at midnight until April 22, 2012 at 8:00 pm to protest CISPA and the Gutting of Existing Privacy Laws.
Remind your legislators who they are supposed to be representing.
"This bill undermines t...
Not actually my first since I did go out with my youngest for a short trip around some of the main trail last weekend, but the first serious ride. It's been so much colder than normal for so long now and I usually don't start taking the bike out till its at least 50F (I never got a winter kit toget...
I was looking into getting a minecraft account for the kids, and not knowing much about the game I started out on wikipedia just to see what the hype about the game was all about. I know what the game looks like of course and in my mind it was just virtual lego, but I wanted to learn a bit abou...
editor's note: I've updated this story many times since I first posted it. For the current status, scroll all the way to the end of the story as I've appended update notices to the end each time I upgraded or switched Roms.
Back in December, 2011 when I first got my ASUS Transformer TF101 it...
Recently one of my monitors at work was refusing to go on in the morning. I've got two: a Samsung SyncMaster 940T and an HP L1950. Its sort of a wierd setup in that the (now quite old) PC I'm using came with a single VGA output, so I ended up buying an add-on DVI card, but I usually end up with wh...
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press c...
Installing Ubuntu on the MacBook recently, I knew there would be a bunch of OSX programs I would no longer be able to run but I was pretty confident that I'd be able to get some Windows programs going with wine. Having had good luck with Temple of Elemental Evil on the Elitebook last December,...
Last year when I got an HP EliteBook for work I thought my days with the old MacBook were numbered. The MacBook isn't that old, its a 2009 Core 2 Duo aluminum body 13" model, but the EliteBook's iCore 5 was is faster. The Mac screen is better, but not by very much. Both processors support V...
We still have a couple months of hurricane season left on the east coast and we recently lost GOES-13, the geostationary weather satellite that used to provide high-quality satellite images of the Atlantic. There was only a 21 hour period of no coverage, but it should serve as a wake up call abo...
Derek Warfield called my buddies Kevin and Nick up on stage to finish their set at St Margeret's Church in Selden where he was playing as Derek Warfield and The Young Wolfetones. They even pimped our gig the next day at the Hauppauge FD to the crowd (Thanks!). Damaris Woods was absolutely awe i...
Looking for a way to extend the power of Google Apps I reviewed a bunch of in-the-cloud CRM apps recently. Easily the biggest shortcoming of Google Apps is the fact that it doesn't offer a shared contact database of any sort other than basic LDAP on your own domain. Sure, that helps - you can ea...
Right before I left tonight a consultant we work with on occasion was in and showed me his Win8 tablet and some of the stuff he's been working on. The software doesn't look terribly different from his older stuff just formatted for the touchscreen, but what I was interested in was his tablet. Alth...
I was shocked to find its been almost four years since I last wrote about seeing Buddy Merriam play. When Tim was more active in Bardic Circle we'd try to squeeze in a "field trip", as we called it, every so often to see some live music both to just have a good time and to try to learn how...
The weather was stunningly beautiful with highs of only 70, a cool breeze and clear skies. I started off with a morning ride at Glacier Ridge (PDF map) where I finally was able to get in the entire track (including all the black diamonds). I was pretty slow, it took me nearly two hours but I sto...
In our never ending mission to educate our kids about all things geek, tonight we enjoyed a Star Trek marathon (of sorts). My eldest (a faithful Dr Who fan) has steadfastly refused to get sucked into the Star Trek universe - until tonight! My secret weapon was of course, Trouble with Tribbles wh...
I was spending a lot more time playing D&D when this board game came out, but it was a big deal back then. All of the accounting for the game was handled by the tiny computer in the Dark Tower which was placed in the center of the board. The fact that the tower was actually a full up computer game...
What is the Book of Song?
In late 2008 I was getting tired of lugging around the thick three ring binder that held all the songs my little troupe of folk musicians had learned up to that point. Over time the lyrics to the songs we did, complete with chords and sometimes with some of the history b...
Luckily I really haven't had to go shopping since I got married many years ago. I hate it, and usually avoid stores, malls, etc. at all costs. Needless to say I'm a very happy Amazon customer and a big fan of UPS. Today I had a few extra minutes after hitting the bank and I knew that the company...
OK kids, make sure you have python installed so you can fire photons in this python remix of the classic Fortran Super Star Trek classic terminal game from the mid 70s. I played this game (poorly) in High School and had gotten frustrated trying to run the original Fortran version some while ago. T...
OK, so I'm not a sports fan, but I admit that I did try to watch the superbowl since its supposedly the American thing to do. Since I don't pay for cable TV at $100 a month, I don't get any of those cable channels showing the game, but thought I'd be able to get it on broadcast NBC but no. Appar...
There are many reasons so many folks who work the web are opposed to these bills. Beyond the fears of enshrining government sponsored censorship (ala China) which could easily kill your access to non-American news media (especially important in a crisis) and stifling innovation (by creating a preca...
Just discovered these guys tonight, but so far every video I've seen has been absolutey brilliant. As an acoustic guy, I'm probably a bit biased since they do a lot of that - but really, this is special.
These are just my notes on how to install Atari's official Dungeons and Dragons game Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE) using wine in Ubuntu 11.10. This old game has been on my shelf since 2004 and with the kids' recent interest in D&D I thought it was a good time to see if it would install on the...
I originally posted this to the G+ app on the tablet, but have rewritten large parts of it here.
I was reading an article linked below on the tablet when I clicked a little "sharing" icon in my browser which passed the link to another application (G+). According to a recent ruling, you won't be ab...
I have boxes of audio cassettes that I can no longer play because all of my cassette players are broken. A lot of these old cassette tapes were just recordings of LPs (those were big black discs that look like oversized CDs, kids) which I've since replaced with wonderfully re-mastered digital ver...
The way I read this, either a or b is true:
- a) FBI is investigating Carrier IQ and the manuals and information about how it works will reveal that Carrier IQ is guilty of illegal wiretapping or
- b) FBI has been using records from Carrier IQ (or carriers themselves as Carrier IQ denies giving th...
A few weeks back I got an ASUS transformer which is ostensibly an android (3.2) tablet, but with the "optional" docking keyboard its more like a netbook running android. It was shortly after testing an Acer Iconia A500 for work that I decided I couldn't live without one of these things and ran...
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Buy Nothing Day. A day to protest the hyper-commercialism that has led to people being trampled in stampedes at Wal-Mart for deals on video games that glorify mass murder or any of the tons of plastic crap imported from China. This year the protest against...
An argument against the Occupy protests in NYC which a co-worker frequently makes is that they annoy the residents with the constant drumming. Speaking as someone who considers camping where there are all night drum circles *vacation*, I can understand that argument - incessant drumming can get to...
I don't pay for TV. Right now I pay for a cable connection to the internet which I really have no reason to complain about. It goes down sometimes, but for the most part Cablevision provides me with a fairly decent (speedy) connection, and they offer pretty good service to boot when things go bell...
In the first week of July I received in a bunch of machines off my company's UPS technology subsidy. The story of the subsidy is probably worth a post all its own, but suffice to say, UPS basically gives the company a bunch of PCs every so often based on how much we ship with them. One of the ma...
Its been some years since I've flown a kite, but I used to do so all the time. Not a Charlie Brown kite, I'm talking about a stunt kite - the kind with two lines so you can control the flight, do figure 8s and loops and such. The wind this weekend was just too perfect, blowing pretty strong al...
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of ever...
I wonder how Hitler would have responded to the following. Dark skin is well adapted to tropical, unforested regions where ultraviolet radiation is particularly intense. Lighter skin makes a person more susceptible to skin cancers from this kind of radiation, making them less likely to survive and...
Today's APOD (Astronomy picture of the day) is of Vesta, a rocky asteroid named after the Roman goddess of home and hearth. Vesta is the second most massive asteroid in our solar system, but the first to be visited by the Dawn spacecraft which finally arrived there in July after launch in 2...
Freshly back from open house at the Jr High I was tickled at first by some of the needless nomenclature changes. Studyhall is now called an "academic preparation period" (thankfully referred to by its more obtuse acronym, "APP". Home Economics (Home Ec) is now "Family and Consumer Science" which,...
If you've ever been struck dumb by a Story Corps interview, you might appreciate these animations. Recently they've been trying to do at least one interview for every life lost in the 9/11 attacks. This one was particularly good.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were horrible, nearly 3,000 people perished in the planes and on the ground. The memorials made yesterday on the 10th anniversary of the tragedy to the familys' loss and the individual's untimely passing were both heart breaking and moving. While the attacks on th...
Getting home late tonight we stepped out of the car and looked up Southward to behold the ominous (and luminous) sight of the Moon almost to the full against a backdrop of wispy clouds directly over the house. I quickly made plans with my eldest to meet in the backyard with the binocs for some im...
I was rifling through my top desk drawer when I chanced to spy the CD case for an old copy of Quake II. My mind raced back to years ago when my brother and some friends would frag each other for hours in the dark on our makeshift home LAN yelling and laughing in Deathmatch games. GoodTimes! So,...
Had to stay really late fixing up some server issues after the storm so decided to go in a little late this morning and ride instead. I don't know what I was expecting to see back on the trails after the hurricane, but it was pretty bad. In places you couldn't tell the trail from the underbrush, i...
I was having a small meeting at my desk at about 5 minutes before 2 when I felt my leg wobble. I thought at first that I was having a muscle spasm and shifted weight in my seat. It didn't stop, and I lost track of the conversation when I noticed my monitors swaying. Mentioning it to those nearb...
Installing Google Earth in Ubuntu 11.04 turned out to be as easy as downloading the latest version from here and double-clicking it, but not until I had already tried to download the source and build an install package manually. I'm not sure how this would have worked, but I gave up when Ubuntu...
Theres been a lot of talk on G+ lately about Google's supposed ban on "fake accounts". Anecdotal evidence of otherwise worthy folk who have gotten their free Google+ accounts shut down for violating the terms of service which disallows participation using a false identity have raised the ire of man...
Not allowing folks to customize their default stream is forcing some devs to take matters in their own hands to offer workarounds. A Chrome extension by Micah Wittman (I haven't tried it yet but can't wait to install this) promises to provide some of the obviously missing functionality like: setti...
If the quality of the conversation that takes place in the comments to stories you find on the web are any measure of the quality of the content to which they are attached, I would advise you not to read stories posted on CNN or FOX News. Both of these sites serve as outlets for the most sensationa...
I am aquiver with anticipation.
Part I
Part II
I got a new laptop for work today (an HP EliteBook 8460p). I've never used an HP laptop before (we usually get Thinkpads for work) but we had a subsidy to use up and it was easier to get everything from the same vendor. The idea was to get a laptop I could use in meetings and elsewhere around th...
No, this isn't a Google+ story. First a little history...
Unless you were in an Ivy league school in early 2004 into 2005 or in high school for the 2006 school year, you probably hadn't even heard of facebook before 2007. Opening to the masses in late 2006 (much to the disappointment of those s...
Gizmodo points out this image of the wrecked ship World Discoverer in the Solomon Islands on Google Maps. The wreck occurred in 2000, details on wikipedia. Take a look at the trees just to the left of the ship - very suspiciously like they were cloned in Photoshop. What's being hidden here?
Pandora certainly aren't the only folks to offer a streaming music recommendation service on the web (I had accounts on reverbnation and last.fm for awhile myself) but services like this generate lists of music programmatically in some way, either by simply sorting on the "genre" tag on the mus...
As far as I can tell from some quick research, there are still no true Mac viruses, a friend's recent comment that there is a virus that can be installed on a Mac without user intervention does not appear to be correct. While the software in question can run automatically, if a certain option is en...
On August 1st, Google plans to drop support for older browsers. This is a good thing! Using an older browser makes it much more likely that you'll get a virus on your machine (at least if you run Windows), or succumb to a nasty javascript attack to steal your passwords (a browser on any OS is vuln...
Oh Joy, O rapture! Today is the day that Harold Camping claimed the world will end!
I have but one thing to say on this topic: Matthew 24:36.
There was a time when my friends and I would recite this incantation from the movie Excalibur at the slightest provocation (in my own phonetics):
Anhaal nathrak Uth vos bethod Dothial tienvay!
I've come to find that this line was constructed from Old Irish:
In Old Irish:
Anál nathrac...
Wired has as story running about AT&T's decision to institute a bandwidth cap for its broadband customers and what that might mean for you even if you don't use AT&T. The move follows a similar action by Comcast which placed a 250GB cap on downloads (with a $10 per 50GB over) ostensibly designed...
I am sick of "Political Correctness." I know a lot of black people, and not a single one of them was born in Africa; so how can they be "African-Americans"? Besides, Africa is a continent. I don't go around saying I am a European-American because my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfath...
Bill Clinton on the Daily Show discussing how he would approach the problems in the economy. I hope the Dems are listening because everything he said makes sense. I definitely had a "Miss Me Yet?" moment watching this.
- Focus on where the jobs are: small business, manufacturing, and clean en...
Ever since getting my Gibson SG back from the shop (Sean brought it to the guy he uses to set up his guitars - thanks, Sean!) I've been playing it every day. I had mostly given up on it since I could never get it to stay in tune, but for the most part its pretty good now, despite the normal prob...
I was discussing the perceived "problem with pensions" the other day with someone at work and realized I had to do a little more research to understand the topic. I found this post by John Maudlin explains the situation pretty well. (see the "problem with pensions" paragraph which starts a bit do...
I finally got out to Cathedral last weekend. I was pressed for time and had to go earlier than I might otherwise have so when I left it was still only about 50 degrees F. I haven't done really any work on the bike which is now 9 years old (I didn't get it new) but I was able to inflate the tires a...
One of my daughters friends has been getting into anime and manga of late, so I asked her to write down some of the titles shes been reading / watching so I could check into them. As often happens this has caused a bit of a problem because after a quick investigation it appears none of them are app...
At my last show I got to play Cate's new octave mandolin (known as the "Tenor Mandola" in Ireland) and I wondered what the tuning was supposed to be on it having never played one before. This led to the following investigation:
The 'cello (and viola) as well as the violin (and so, mandolin) are t...
Oh, the scams and lawbreaking is positively endemic. Now there's reason to believe that defense and security contractors colluded to use tax payer money to create fake documents and plant evidence to make political attacks on union leaders and Democrats!? And the only reason we even know about i...
update 2024 - this guy has continued to con folks since I posted this in 2011 including debunked claims that he could prove the CIA was conspiring against Sherrif Joe Arpaio (even Arpaio later described Montgomery's invesigation as "junk"), illegal surveillance of Trump and others by the feds, and...
The protests in Wisconsin have been on the front page daily as the new Republican governor there backs legislation that would remove collective bargaining rights from public sector employees in that state. With so many private sector folks out of work or without a pay rise in years there seems to b...
A couple months back we heard 2012 presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee call for whoever leaked those diplomatic cables to Wiki Leaks to be executed. The cables were an embarrassment to many authoritarian leaders around the globe that the US is friendly with, but despite the negative press run main...
Roleplaying used to be a bigger part of my life and I really miss it. There are a bunch of excuses I regularly use to explain away why I don't play that much anymore, but the main reason is pretty much what I've heard from a lot of other people - the gaming group I used to play with don't live ne...
The number of "confirmed assaults" on government computer systems are on the increase, and its becoming more and more likely that some of the more serious threats to US and allied interests are originating in China. An attack on computers in the Canadian treasury (described at length in a NY Times...
I don't regularly carry a cell phone, but I've been reading about all the great new smart phone models coming out for the last couple years with great interest. As a recovering palm pilot addict, its not that I don't really dig playing with gadgets, its mainly the cost thats keeping me away. I don...
OK, we're finally getting closer to the creepy merging of biology and technology that I've been speculating about for so many years. In this quick video, Scientists at the University of Reading describe how they are connecting neurological material (via bluetooth!) to a tiny robot with sensors to s...
Had a great time playing a game of Wizwar with the girls tonight. Well, I had a great time - but that might be because I won ;) Every time I play it usually gets me thinking about making that most perfect DIY wizwar board (my current favorite is here) though I haven't gotten around to that as...
Topographical and magnetometry surveys are being completed today at a site in Sherwood Forest which a 200 year old document identified several years ago to be the ancient Thyng assembly site known as Thynghowe. References to Thynghowe go back to the 1200s in Nottinghamshire but its location was unce...
While I've always kept little lists of things "to do" in a spiral notebook on my desk, I've never used PC based todo (task) lists. Even when I was using a PDA constantly (back when we called them "palm pilots") I don't think I used the tasks app even one time. But lately it seems like the number...
It isn't often anymore that I run across a story which can elicit in me that special willingness to entertain a wondrous (and maybe preposterous) explanation for otherwise unexplained phenomena. Of late I find those moments of wonder few and far between with most inexplicable events quickly explain...
The family celebrated New Years in our annual New Years, GMT fashion. To my mind its only really the New Year when it is midnight on the first day of the year at the prime meridian at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Every other time is only relative to that time, and while just as arbitrary, t...
This year (lucky) folks in the US get to watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special on Christmas Day just like the Brits. I took advantage of my virtual proximity to Cardiff to watch it on the BBC iPlayer with the family several hours before it airs on BBC America (a station I don't get). Michae...
I wholeheartedly appreciate and endorse Adele Stan's essay entitled How I Gave Up Christmas and Saved My Sanity which I would highly recommend to anyone feeling overwhelmed by the familial obligations and rampant commercialism that constitutes the typical American Christmas. Driving anywhere on C...
Hardly surprising, but I thought this article [link dead 2024] (see the archived version) by Stewart Meagher summarized one researcher's findings about Facebook's tracking methods and explained the methodology so well that it was worth posting a link to it.
By now everyone and their Grandmot...
Since the puppy is still a bit too unruly to visit Grandma, and since we didn't get him a reservation at the local puppy hostel our Thanksgiving was of the quiet, stay at home variety, mostly. I didn't get a turkey from work this year - they offer a choice of 'Turkey' or 'Other' and I opted for 'o...
I kept my promise to bring everyone in to see King Tut at the Discovery Center on 44th street today. We had a fantastic time carefully investigating all the artifacts. One of my favorites included the Ostrich feather fan (which depicts a tiny animated Ankh with legs running behind King Tut's...
Perhaps one of my favorite television shows when I was a bit younger, The Wonder Years was simply brilliant. It captured the essence of growing up in an American suburb in the late 60s to early '70s and presented it in a beautiful and nostalgic way with off-screen narration provided by a grown up...
My more entrepreneurial friends shout that the Bush tax cuts must be extended so that business owners will feel comfortable enough to expand and hire! My more socially progressive friends shout that only the tax cuts for the rich should sunset on Dec 31 since they are less likely to spend money (th...
update 2024 Holy smokes this is an old post. Its likely that nothing in this post will help you today!
Backstory: The kids have been using an old and relatively slow (Celeron) IBM Thinkpad R60e running Ubuntu 10.04. update 130317: tested and working on 12.04 There have been a lot of conf...
Running a blog is very different from writing in a paper-based journal. You don't need to know anything about servers, domains, hosting companies, DNS, php, databases, html, sftp, site security, interface design, web design, graphic design, operating systems or really anything much more technical...
When I canceled cable TV earlier this year everyone told me that the kids would stage a revolt. Happily, that didn't happen, and in fact the opposite did. The house is generally quieter and calmer without the background din from a TV set left on at all hours even when there was no-one in the roo...
Lets not even discuss the fact that as a strip artist, Gary Trudeau the celebrated author of Doonesbury for 40 years, is facing the end of that career as print media dries up utterly and no one seems to have time for comics anymore with all the new media available. I just liked his response to Sla...
When you run an organization that is supposed to be impartial, and in fact by law HAS TO BE impartial (because it takes public money) you cannot allow employees to act (even on their own time) in a way that undermines that perception of impartiality. As Brian Stelter put it,
Like many other...
Why don't we just abolish the income tax all together since the only people who are paying it are poor working slobs anyway. As this Bloomberg article from May details, major corporations are using loopholes in the tax laws to avoid paying what conservatives like to call the "high US tax rate" (a...
I don't always catch Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me (WWDTM) because, frankly it isn't always all that funny. Granted, my sense of humor is a bit twisted, and I'm not really the target demographic of the show, but having George Takei (Sulu of Star Trek) on was a pretty big draw. If you missed him, che...
As a user of Google Apps for a couple different domains, I was elated to find that Google has FINALLY rolled out the ability to log into a Google Apps account using the standard gmail login page, as well as enabled lots more Google features for Google Apps accounts. You can't limit these new feat...
I don't comment on FOXNews very often, but this one has been "awaiting moderation" for most of the day already and it looks like "comments are closed" on it now - so I might as well post it here for the benefit of those few who may stumble upon it. The topic of conversation at lunch today revolved...
I'm starting to hate social networking websites in general. I enjoy using my computer a lot more when I'm the one deciding what to do with it without the constant unsolicited advice about what I should be reading or investigating from all of my "friends". Unsolicited messages are called spam when t...
I enjoyed watching Lawrence Olivier in Shakespeare's As You Like It tonight. Certainly not Olivier's best work (filmed in 1936 it was actually his first on-screen performance of Shakespeare) but having never read the play or seen it performed before I have to say that at the least it held my at...
The Vernor V. AutoDesk decision in Seattle just struck a major blow to consumers. Just as a spate of predatory lending in housing has probably ended the dream of home ownership in America and replaced it with perpetual rentership, this decision helps to remove a consumer's natural rights under the...
The land in Shoreham upon which Nikola Tesla's lab still stands is about to be cleared for sale. Tesla's "magic tower" (which at one time could be seen from New Haven, CT) is no longer standing but its concrete base is still there. There's a great article about the history of the property and Tesl...
This article sums it all up pretty well. Sarah's been touring the lower 48 railing against the evil socialist agenda for a while now, meanwhile she's the direct beneficiary of the biggest socialist state in our union! Thats right, Alaska has implemented a working model of socialism. The people o...
Soon after the 1993 bombing of the trade center, and for years after its subsequent total destruction in 2001 the issue of illegal immigration by members of Islamic militant groups was a frequent topic in the news. It became obvious that there were "sleeper cells" of anti-American activists who wer...
I've been running my own websites since 1996 and have used all sorts of hosting companies over the years. I've been with Dreamhost since 2007, and for a shared hosting company (where you're on a server with a bunch of other domains) they're pretty good. Unlike so many of the hosting companies I'...
Got this message from Google Voice today:
and received this handy transcription:
It's not a matter and I want to make a single. But I think the rest of the not. If you're not. You're gonna.
Unfortunately, Google Voice didn't recognize that the message had been left...
Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you'll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites.
...
A friend and I were kicking back in easy chairs in my home office recently, sipping some wonderful Cream Ale that my friend had brewed when the girls burst into the room pointing at the window. "Look! Look outside!" one yelped, "I see our next door neighbor with a camera!" said the other. A bit g...
Saw a powerful and thought-provoking film today on NetFlix called 180° SOUTH by Jeff Johnson which is a film record of his journey to Patagonia in the footsteps of his heros Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia, Inc. the outdoor clothing company) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The No...
My wife has been reading books on her palm pilot for years but when the prices began to fall on the e-ink e-readers recently I urged her to get one of those instead. The e-ink screens aren't backlit, so you have to read them in a lit room or outside but they're reflective (like real paper) so the...
At the top of Campsite (about 10 miles in)
The girls enjoyed their introductory ride at CP yesterday, but I still needed to get my own ride in. The skies were threatening, but the weather maps looked like I'd have at least a few hours before anything serious was to roll in so I suited up and he...
It's been almost a year since Adam and Nate (not me) of Roll2d6.com got together with some high school buddies to attend KublaCon 2009 and they've finally gotten the editing done on the podcast from that Con (and just in time for the next one!). I was listening to these guys pretty regularly fo...
Biked Cathedral Pines tonight again since it looks like rain may dampen any bike plans for the weekend. Odometer read 9.6 miles total with all black diamonds, and did it in 1 hour, 7 mins. That may seem slow, but its my best time this season. Perhaps that last ride at Glacier Ridge helped me ma...
update Nov 22, 2024 - I have been using gramps for many years as an open source locally installed application to read Gedcom files. If you use Linux its probably in the standard repos. I'm on version 5.1.5-1 on my debian laptop.
Original story from 2010 follows:
The other night I was hav...
It took me over an hour but I finally managed to manually remove every last photo, video, like, group, note, friend, list, and event from my facebook account. However, the experience was pretty liberating. I also remembered to change my password before deactivating so I wouldn't accidentally log i...
Since I haven't been moved to write very much of late, I have promoted last year's Memorial Day article to first post for this year instead.
Memorial Day commemorates those US men and women who have DIED while in military service. It is not a day to honor those who served and lived (Veteran's Day...
Glacial erratic on the White Ghost trail (6/7/10)
Left work a little early yesterday with some planned time off and faced a dilemma when I got home. Although my job isn't physically demanding, I usually come home exhausted. So the choice of stopping to pick up beer and sit on the couch and wat...
Left work a little early yesterday with some planned time off and faced a dilemma when I got home. Although my job isn't physically demanding, I usually come home exhausted. So the choice of stopping to pick up beer and sit on the couch and watch Netflix was compelling. Thankfully I decided to 'm...
I finished my ride on the bike trail in just over 1 hr, 10 mn last night (all told with every black diamond and optional trail its about 9.5 miles). As I rode around the perimeter of the central fields on the single track, it seemed that every inch of every open field in the park (every single fiel...
I think its an amazing coincidence that both of the candidates for president in the last election had serious questions raised about their American citizenship. To be president, the Constitution requires that a candidate be a "natural born citizen", but doesn't strictly define what it means to be...
I haven't been writing all that much of late, partially because of RL (real life) responsibilities, but also because I've been spending a lot of free time watching old Doctor Who episodes. My mom was the real Doctor Who fan and has most of the episodes that aired on PBS here in the states on a zill...
The health care bill makes it compulsory for all Americans to buy private insurance in the free market which in and of itself is an incredible irony. What's so free about a market where you are forced to buy something? There are many who don't think the solution that passed is Constitutional becau...
Having kids in the computer age presents a lot of challenges that parents didn't have to deal with years ago. Among them is the fact that hard core pornography is just a couple of clicks away. Depending on your operating system of choice there are zillions of programs you can buy to "filter web co...
I've been poking around a bit on Prison Planet lately, thats a website run by Alex Jones, a radio talk show host who has been described as a "paleoconservative" whatever thats supposed to mean. Paleo means old, so I assume it's being used to create a distance from the "neocons" (meaning New C...
I've been interested in Pompeii from an early age, ever since I first read about how the Roman town had been buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and that archaeologists were revealing it bit by bit just as it had been thousands of years ago. Images of the macabre body casts of the eruption...
Great article in the NY Times magazine today examining the question of Christianity in education as the Texas State Board of Education weighs various petitions for modifying the curriculum. On the one hand arguments are made that the 'separation' clause has been misused to totally remove any discu...
I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle (See my WFB Pics) lately and had a vague idea of adding in some roleplay aspects to the games (to flesh out the time between battles). The only roleplaying I've done recently has been some few D&D 3.5 games which have left me sort of flat and thinking ba...
Chaucer wrote The Parliament of Fowls in 1382 to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia (they were both 15 years old when they were married shortly thereafter), but it has become associated with the present day celebrated as Valentines Day over the centur...
So for those of you who aren't using Buzz (yet?) and in an attempt to keep stuff I write about in one place, I gathered up some of the posts I've made on Buzz for this story. I don't know if I'll keep using Buzz or not, and if I don't I'd like to have a copy of this stuff somewhere. I use my per...
I'm not quite sure why I became so interested in this particular case, but I did. I think it might have been because I have been to a lot of concerts and I never went to one with any thought that I wouldn't make it home again. I followed the story on several websites including websleuths, findm...
Several years ago I wrote a piece about my old GE portable radio. It was just a cheap portable AM/FM/cassette which got lugged around to keep me company while I was painting or doing chores. That radio eventually got relegated to the kitchen and was usually tuned (to the best of its ability) t...
We didn't ever watch that much TV anyway, so I don't see canceling cable TV as much of a loss, but there is definitely a feeling of isolation without any TV access and if an emergency were to occur it would be nice to be able to tune in. Well, TV is still being broadcast over the air though it re...
The Times Online (UK) mentions a series of articles the print version is running with excerpts from "Game Change" a gossipy book out today by John Heilemann (New York Magazine) and Mark Halperin (Time) about the characters who made up the 2008 presidential campaign. While some tabloids are repo...
So this is still a bit of a mystery, but its obvious that somehow someone has managed to get hold of the login account for the RUSH (the band) Facebook page. I first noticed strangeness yesterday, but it reared its head again today so I took a couple snapshots. I'm pretty sure we're dealing with the official Facebook page for the band because it's linked off the official RUSH website, but it's possible of course that the official page has been hacked and they replaced the link with one they control. The defacement thats been done is pretty lame - if I stolen the account I'm sure I'd be able to come up with something a tad funnier like a post about Geddy getting his vocal chords surgically shortened so he could sing all the good tunes again.
We recently decided to cancel our cable TV service. At $75/mo for what they consider BASIC service, it just wasn't a good value. We still have internet service through the cable company, and that product has been very good. After waiting for an hour on the phone to complete the cancellation, th...
Some of the sites I run are database driven and allow a lot of user interaction. For users to participate on these sites at some elevated level with rights to create, modify, or delete content I usually set the system to require email authentication. Since most of my sites are fairly low traffic dealing with new applications for user accounts hasn't been too taxing, but even with Captcha in place (which makes you type in the funky letters you see) there are still plenty of obviously bogus applications.
A friend coming back to the US from Europe this weekend snapped this photo for me on an Airbus 330 FinAir flight from Helsinki to JFK which shows the seat back monitors obviously booting Linux. It looks a lot like the RED Entertainment system which is a custom program running on top of Linux that...
Army Builder is a windows program that helps you build an army for use in playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle that conforms to the rules of the game. This simple program took all the pain out of building my little Dwarf army and got me playing much faster - I highly recommend it. As there is only...
Mostly on a recommendation by Wil Wheaton I got Dominion [buy at amazon.com] for Christmas this year. Luckily Ned was around and was into playing or I might not have opened it up right away! Dominion is a pretty good card game. I'm calling it a card game because the big box it comes in houses...
Last month news broke that hackers had illegally obtained and released to the internet about 160MB of private email correspondences between scientists at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The timing of the release was suspicious because it coincided with preparations for the Copenhagen...
OK so what Facebook DIDNT tell you about thir new privacy settings thing is that they have made a deal to sell all the information you have marked as public to the Google and Microsoft Bing search engines. That's right! Unless you're careful, everything you have ever posted on Facebook may soon ge...
The Mars rovers are now going on 6 years of crawling around the Martian surface looking for evidence of life. Of the two, Spirit has had the toughest time of it, losing the use of one of it's six wheels forcing it to continue its trek backwards since 2006. In April it got stuck again, and scient...
Though somewhat dated, this BBC Horizon special on Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) is worth watching despite a short interview about half way through with a guy who seems a bit cracked. Tesla was an enigma. Born in Serbia, he eventually became one of America's greatest electrical engineers and inventors (...
Consider this a private mental note to the idiot I talked to a couple days ago who argued that "Evolution is just a theory": Evolution as a process that occurs in nature is a fact. More than that, it is an historical reality, much as the knowledge that the earth revolves around the Sun is now consi...
We recently had a full physical for one of our kids at the pediatrician. It was a well visit (we get one free a year so theres no co-pay for that), she got two shots, we filled out a questionnaire, they took urinalysis, did a visual test and a hearing test. Oh yeah, they weighed her too. We had a...
Autumn is definitely my favorite season of the year. There are a few reasons, but among them are the cooler temperatures, the colors of the leaves, kids going back to school, the approach of Samhain (Halloween) where we have an excuse to set out all the skulls, pumpkin and apple picking, and the...
I gave a little thought to how I might proceed with my journal printing project, and I've spent a little time poking through the mess that is my digital life. Piecing together a log of what you did and thought about ten years ago from various disparate sources like emails, notes, documents and photos - even when you can be sure of the date on the files - is a lot like doing archaeology. I've started peeling away the dirt, finding clues in snippets of text files and bookmark backups, things I wrote and things written to me. The information abounds but its all disjointed and disconnected, located in folders here and there, and no simple algorithm exists to pull it all together and easily create a cohesive story. The job seems monumental even if I only aim to create a simple linear log of entries.
I've been using lulu.com to print a song book for the last couple of years now, and recently bought Wil Wheaton's latest book from there as well. The experience has been good - I'd definitely recommend their service if you have something you want printed up and bound in a professional way. All the...
I opened one of my old journals this morning and this loose typewritten sheet fell out. It is dated Sept 26, 1996. There are a bunch of errors and misspellings, but I'm pretty sure that fact only adds to the charm of this particular piece. There's nothing otherwise particularly notable about the...
Earlier this year I decided to finally put together a Warhammer Fantasy Battle army, get it painted and otherwise fixed up with the aim of playing against some friends who may also have hoarded boxes of these tiny figures around their house years ago. I never played very much of Games Workshop'...
The Act is supposed to prohibit most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-...
Hans Rosling, a physician and professor of global health from Sweden recently gave a talk at the US State Dept. entitled Let My Dataset change your midset illustrated by the free software he and his son developed called Gapminder. He explains how the data (which he thanks the US for compiling...
The big talk in the news over the last few days has been Obama's planned talk with schoolchildren. FOX's new Nazi propagandist Glen Beck called the speech "indoctrination" and warned Americans to "Stand guard... Your republic is under attack." But beyond the obvious divisiveness of statements li...
I've never been an avid reader of poetry, though I have read some and I've had some friends who were published poets. I see poetry as the very heart and soul of any good song. I like songs that tell a story, and while I find I really enjoy prose stories, the craft of condensing a tale into a few s...
Last year I posted here about why its not really possible to get a guitar in tune. I heard from a friend today about tru-temperment fret boards [link dead 2019] which may actually make it possible! Some anecdotal posts in guitar forums indicate that you can play barre chords all the way up...
It's fairly common knowledge that Google has been scanning in (actually photographing) entire books, converting the images to text (OCR) and storing the digital text in a database for searching for the Google Books project. Google claimed about a year ago that by that time they had scanned in ove...
I've been hearing a lot of rants lately about "Obama's Health Care Plan" (perhaps folks should do a little reading on how legislation gets written in the US since Obama hasn't written any of the several plans being discussed) and while the topic is vast and I have no time to delve into it in detail...
The New York Times has a story about how energy secretary Steven Chu says the US can easily save as much as 20% of our national energy costs for air conditioning. The solution isn't rocket science - just make sure that buildings in the south have white roofs. Since dark roofs absorb more sunligh...
Fans of JRR Tolkien already know that his love of language led him to seek the roots of his native English in Anglo Saxon verse and Norse saga. Many of his scholarly investigations were published. As someone who loves ancient history, works like Tolkien's 'Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment' 1...
I've been looking into getting a new amp to replace the old Peavey Backstage Plus that I've been "making do" with for almost 20 years. The old 35W Peavey looks like a 1987 model. I got it from my brother for pretty cheap sometime around then, and a few years back I replaced the original speaker...
My daughter was playing Legacy today (one of the few games I've bought lately) and wanted to know how to save a game. I was across the room and I explained what to click on. She shot me a puzzled look when I told her to click on the save icon "...you know, the thing that looks like a floppy d...
I watched the entire VP "debate" and was fuming through most it. A debate is supposed to be an argument between two (or preferably more!) people where their interactions are formally structured. At its most basic, to win a debate, a participant should at least answer the questions directly...
O...
So for a while in 2006 I had a myspace page. I saved a bunch of the stories about myspace that I had posted there and maybe I'll link them here one day. I've since deleted my account, and I only realize now that I never took a screen shot of it (I like to keep stuff like that) so I can't post t...
You may not be able to get that guitar in tune because it isn't possible. Most of us don't notice anyway, but it's comforting to know that you're not necessarily incompetent if you can't ever seem to get your guitar to play perfectly in tune in every key - since it can't really be done.
Let m...
Sundog: Frozen Legacy is by far one of my most favorite games from the 1980s. Originally written for the Apple II in 1984 by Wayne Holder and Bruce Webster and released by FTL games (founded by Wayne Holder in 1982), I didn't play it until version 3.0 was released as a port to the Atari ST...
Perhaps it's because I'm getting old, or because I stare at a computer screen all day but I just can't play modern computer games. At least not for a very long time at a stretch, and certainly not for long enough to learn how to play one of the several big multiplayer games that seem to have suck...
The Mars rover Opportunity will descend into Victoria crater despite the very real risk that it might not be able to get back out of it again. Rolling down into the crater should allow scientists to investigate progressively older rock strata, an opportunity :) whose benefits far outweigh the risks...
Update: Had another great time up at the Checkmate this month! Updated image.
I play Irish and Celtic music for fun. For about a year now I've been getting together pretty regularly with a friend to practice at least once a week. Occasionally we'll cruise out to another friends' place for a se...
I went on a field trip with my Structural Geology class (SUNYSB) in 2001 and Professor Davis passed out a collection of notes and diagrams for reference on the trip. Since I travel the Thruway often, I have carried these notes with me several times for reference to some of the more interesting road...
What a joke this site is. For one thing it's slow as hell, and for another - while most people are happily scrolling through the mass of flashy animated gifs and sexy advertisements blithely, I am bumping up against bad code and non-standards compliant CSS which doesn't render properly in a real we...
If you haven't checked in on the Mars Rovers lately, plan to do so again soon! Opportunity's long (boring?) trek to the rim of Victoria Crater is almost over, and when it gets to the rim, there should be some fantastic views. Check in on the Rovers at their homepage.
We used to quote a line in a punk song when we younger: 'you're only bored when you're boring' and it's proven to be a truism. I've had just way too much to do lately to spend very much time writing about any of it as well. This entry is really just a summary of several recent activities - altho...
In more mundane news, sometime in June I bought a mountain bike used from a guy at work. He's been into biking for many years and this was his 2002 Giant Warp DS-1 that he had put almost 600 miles on. He's about 12 years older than me, but our first time out together at a local park he squarely ki...
In 2002 I got what was then the still relatively new m500 Palm Pilot. This is a greyscale version based on the older Palm Vx series form factor, they also had a color one at that time (the m505), but I wasn't impressed with the screen I saw and I knew the battery wouldn't last quite as long a...
This embarrassing video showing a Microsoft Vista voice recognition feature demonstration gone awry brought me back. Microsoft is blaming 'ambient noise' for the snafu, but having personally set up and used Dragon Voice recognition software for my boss who used it for several years (and that was s...
The heat here earlier in the week was awful with highs around 94 and humidity as high as 90% which made it difficult to do anything, but finally a cold front moved through which has brought us back down to reasonable temps. When it rocked through, it brought with it a violent thunderstorm knockin...
This is a modified version of a post I just made to the TdB message board: The family was bummed that it wasn't really feasible to truck down to PA to see Ned's band, the Trespassengers play at the 2nd annual NewBerry bash, but we had a great time at the Slainte Irish festival for the short t...
The Bush administration has more reasons to rail against the New York Times (unfairly, I believe) because they are reporting about a recent independent study that the administration would rathar have us not hear about. The study, coined the Nation's Report Card commissioned by the Bush admini...
I played 'cello for many years and later, traditional Irish music on guitar with my brother on fiddle. I played in the Dowling Orchestra for awhile in the 90's after a friend had told me they needed Cellists. I was only starting to get my chops back when I dropped out (I don't remember why now - the...
Better known as 'The Fragment', what follows is a translation of all that is left of an (apparently) 5th century anglo-saxon lay that describes a saxon hero, Hengest. This may very well be the same Hengest who led the first Germanic invasion of Britain, and if so probably did so shortly after the...
iN8sWorld Logo Contest Rules
original URL (Geeklog, now dead): http://in8sworld.net/article.php?story=20040122063755243
Its hard to believe that I held this contest on this site 20 years ago!
I know many of the members of this site are "lurkers" (meaning that you have signed up and visit b...
Sometimes there's just no way to do something unless you know somebody. Seeing an advance showing of the Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King would have been pretty much a fantasy but for my buddy Seth. Thanks, man! Seth was kind enough to extend his extra tickets to my brother and myself,...
In 1999, I gave up on MS Windows entirely and actually purchased Redhat Linux. I went through a couple versions of the kernel, and learned alot about how to run the OS. It did pretty much everything Windows did, but never easily. I was searching for something more polished, and easier to use and...
The SCI FI channel is trying to force the government to release details about a reported UFO landing near the town in Western Pennsylvania where I was born. The event made local headlines just about 9 months before I was born. I always wondered why I didn't look much like my parents. Read on for l...
I have always been a big Star Trek fan. Besides the obvious allure of fast ships, bare knuckles, lasers and Klingons, I think at the very root of what I dug about the show was Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future. A future where man has done away with hunger and war and racism and eve...
update 2021 - The Sensation Mowers website was archived here.
update 2008 - If you have a Sensation mower, you might like to help maintain and expand the Sensation Wikipedia article or visit the Sensation-Mowers.com website for help with your old Sensation mower
For the first time in w...
iN8sWoRld has been transformed into a true weblog! For many years I've dealt with the (minor) annoyance of a modem internet account and hosting my pages within the measly parameters that AT&T afforded me with that account. No longer! Recently, I changed ISPs and being dazzled by the speed of my...
Do you remember those character based games where you were an "@" symbol and you adventured around in dungeons whose walls were lines of "###"s? Do you lust after slaying the evil "s" (skeleton) lurking on the other side of the "+" (door)? Well, get ready to adventure! These types of games are al...
Moved from the Message Board
I dragged out the guitars and an amp. I got some lyric sheets ready, and plugged in. My eldest was strumming on the acoustic, and I fiddled around on the Gibson for a bit, but there was nothing there. I thought about revisiting CORN, but it only sounds good when I...
reposted from Yabb Message Board
HOLY MOLEY!!
It was pouring, a fine Nor'Easter was blowin'. I had called everyone I knew that might be into going and here its Saturday night at 5 O'Clock and nobody had called me back! I had heard DTB on WUSB a bunch of times and they sounded like the funkie...
The previously reviewed Bela/Edgar concert inspired me to fix the fallen soundpost in my 'cello! Using the method Mr. Biava taught me, I was able to get it set correctly in about 40 minutes with a minimum of cursing. Certainly no speed record, but at least I didn't have to bring it someplace.Bas...
I can't remember when I had bought that old radio, a GE model no.3-5636A with dual tape decks. It says "1976" in the embossed plastic lettering on the bottom, right next to the Indiana customer relations address beneath the slightly larger "Made in China".Its certainly not that old. It has the re...
Left the house at 7:30 to swing by the bank and get cash, I was taking my time, because even though I knew it would be a better idea if I took the train in, it would be a lot more convenient to drive the hour or so to the city and I was purposely dawdling so I would get to the train station and miss...
I found the following links on http://slashdot.org tonight and thought you might find them interesting (as an aside, I found it interesting that the Journal Nature has a website and you can read it online)
Original Nature article [link dead, 2008]
Seth, Aron, Ned...
