Flutterby™! From 2009-11-01 to 2009-11-30

Bury the Co2 in crop fields and get good crops. - Living things and energy use (most of it, anyway) create's CO2, plants use it to thrive. That he's apparently not using any fertilizer is a plus. Long term results (there are other things than CO2 being exhausted) and some testing of the food crops for bad trace elements may be interesting, but could also be good news.

[ related topics: Food History Current Events Gardening Global Warming ]

Just finished watching War Made Easy to help Charlene with a project for one of her classes. Norman Solomon makes the case that the media complicity in the Dubya administration's push to war wasn't anything new, that since WWII the assorted media have been complicit in selling wars to U.S. citizens, and has continued to sell those wars long after the public support for them has waned. I believe it goes back a lot further than that.

You can watch it for yourself here, I'm guessing there isn't too much new there for most Flutterby readers. One question I did have: There's a bit in the video where there's a shot of tanks in a parade, a cut to a close-up of a tank in a parade setting with an American flag emblem visible, and then a cut back to a long shot. Since we were watching with a critical eye, this leaped out at me: I don't know enough about military hardware to identify the various vehicles, but I'm pretty sure the close-up was not of the same sort of tank the long shots were, making me suspicious that there was some editing for effect.

[ related topics: Politics History Journalism and Media Video ]

NY Times article on the health care bill points out that in 2019 12 million citizens and legal residents and 6 million illegal residents will still be uninsured. So all this kerfluffle will cover half of the currently uninsured? Probably the half that don't need insurance as badly, either.

Since we get the real benefits from universal coverage when people can get preventive care, somehow I'm getting the feeling that this whole thing is one big give-away to the health care industry.

A side link on that article lead to a report on a study that showed that children who are hospitalized without insurance are more likely to die than those with insurance.

In addition, uninsured children were in the hospital, on average, for less than a day when they died, compared with a full day for insured children. Children without insurance incurred lower hospital charges — $8,058 on average, compared with $20,951 for insured children.

and now I'm coldly wondering if universal coverage really will drive down emergency room costs.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Health Law Journalism and Media ]

I'm building an organizer for Charlene. It fits on top of an existing piece, which is made of white oak, but white oak is about $10/bf, so I'm using veneer. I finally did a test of the heat method, and it seemed to work, so:

Titebond II, spread on both pieces, the veneer and the substrate, and allowed to dry thoroughly. Iron the pieces together, and the veneer sticks nicely!

I now have the main pieces drying out in the shop, hopefully the technique scales up. I did use a slightly thinned glue on the stuff in the shop.

Other realization: This well dried white oak has lots of internal stresses, and changes dramatically as I cut it. I haven't seen twists and saw kerfs closing up like this since I was ripping construction grade "two-by"s. Almost wish I had more of it to work with. Almost.

[ related topics: Fabrication Woodworking ]

A participatory meme: Now This asks "what things are excellent?"

So, in Facebook parlance, I tag anyone who reads this. Post about some Excellent Things and why you like them. And you can post 1, 5, or 25, it really doesn't matter.

So, in no particular order and with no real forethought:

• Fairfax Scoop ice cream, especially the Vanilla Honey Lavender.
• Festool tools. My Festool notes. Yeah, it has at times seemed silly to spend $500 on a circular saw, until I've shown it to a friend in the context of making some cut for them and they say "wow, why would you buy anything else?" And the idea that I can pack up most of a capable woodworking shop and carry it in a car is really cool.
• The APT package manager, as used in the Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux distributions. Ubuntu has gotten to the point where it's at least as easy to install as Windows, I've heard several relatively unsophisticated users talk about how much easier Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop is to use than Windows, but the technology underlying much of that, and the bit that Windows has had almost a decade to get right but keeps failing miserably at, is the package and installation management.
• Brifters, the combination brake and shifter assemblies on a modern road bicycle. I happen to use the Shimano variants in the Ultegra (on the tandem) and Dura-Ace (on my solo road bike) lines, although I'm sure the Campagnolo ones are equally impressive, but I grew up with down-tube shifters being the bees-knees, that materials technology improved to the point where we can get indexed shifting on the handlebars that doesn't drift when we're steering is amazing.
• Pull saws. Thin kerf and control.
• That moment when you're making mayonnaise, pouring the oil into the yolk, sugar, salt and lemon juice mixture, and it turns from a yellow and runny into white and fluffy. Always amazes me.
• Tomatoes off the vine. I no longer buy fresh tomatoes in the grocery store, 'cause even the "heirloom" expensive varieties disappoint.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Invention and Design Food Bay Area Automobiles Marketing Pedal Power Race Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem Woodworking Festool ]

The Boston Diaries: The map is not the territory, a little introspection on hate for control panels, dynamic languages, GPS navigation,[1] and user groups.

In the end he boils it down to "the culture is totally alien to my way of thinking", but I think there's a little bit more in there: Much of what he's railing against is a layer of abstraction that removes functionality, that takes a conceptually clean underpinning and says "here's a way to accomplish this tiny subset of the functionality".

It is, in a way, what iTunes is: To me, MP3 files are just that: files. We put 'em in folders, we make lists of them in playlists, but I see no reason I can't just treat my MP3 player as a detachable drive. And yet people rave about iTunes and talk about how that's what made the MP3 revolution happen. Me, I'd be a lot happier with my iPhone if I could take iTunes off my Windows machine and just deal with it without that goofy slow abstraction layer.

And today I'm dealing with COM objects and Windows shell extensions, and I'm wondering what the hell was wrong with dlopen and dlsym and why I'm digging through "the registry", an unstructured hierarchical key-pair database that contains lots of crap it shouldn't, for umpteen digit hexadecimal numbers.

[1] I gotcher Oxford/Harvard comma right here.

[ related topics: Microsoft Sociology Maps and Mapping iPhone ]

100% Awesome TV commercial for Cullman Liquidation second hand mobile homes:

A bouncer in Birmingham hit my face with a crescent wrench five times, then my wife's boyfriend broke my jaw with a fencepost, so if you don't buy a trailer from me it ain't gonna hurt my feelings.

Honesty in advertising. Brilliant send-ups of movie and camera work clichés. Self-aware in just the right ways. I tip my hat. Via SE.

[ related topics: Humor Consumerism and advertising Television ]

Dear every store I shop at,

I will happily give you my email address, read email you send to me, and use a "loyalty card" or other such program that allows you to tie individual store trips together into a customer profile, if you'll email me my receipts in an easy to import into a spreadsheet format. Say, comma delimited ASCII.

I'd love it if this process can be fully automated, so that I can sort and search all purchases later without having to save individual receipts from email, but however we work it out: I want my receipts in machine readable form. You want customer loyalty information, and more of my eyeball time for marketing.

Let's make a deal.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Software Engineering Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Marketing ]

As I get a few more scraps out of the shop, one of the things I wanna build for the kids (probably, actually, a whole bunch of kits for several different sets of kids) is a trebuchet. Given some options for where to put the lever and how to do the release, there's a lot of physics to be learned in mucking about with such a mechanism.

But there's also been the fantasy, at least when we lived in raccoon country, of inflicting the pests on the next county over. Here's some video of a squirrel launcher.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Video ]

Why we need more choice in what coverages we choose to insure ourselves for: Healthcare provision may require insurers to cover prayer:

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

I've no doubt that prayer can be a powerful healer for those who believe, but, just like I'd like to opt out of psychology coverage, I'd like a little more choice on what I do and don't end up paying for.

[ related topics: Religion Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health ]

Among other things over the past year I've been playing with Linux on a couple of different ARM processors in some fairly large dev kits, and as an exercise I've been thinking it'd be fun to lay out a small ARM based Linux machine, something like the Gumstix devices. The problem is that the chips I'm most familiar with are BGA parts. I've seen lots of notes on soldering surface mount devices with leads, have friends who've done it, but I know that even commercially it's hard to get BGA devices soldered right (and one of the reasons I know this is that some of those dev kits had flakies that went away when I pressed on one of the BGA devices...).

Anyone know anything about soldering BGA devices at home? In a toaster oven or on a hot plate?

And while I'm asking for the impossible, I know that two layer boards are fairly cheap, I was thinking that I could do four layer by just doing two two layer boards and running traces through holes between 'em. This would also let me put components on both sides. Yeah, the overall assembly would be thicker (two boards plus a gap for insulation in between), but it'd be cheaper than a 4 layer setup. I think. Comments?

[ related topics: Open Source Embedded Devices Fabrication Embedded Devices - Linux ]

EEVblog with David L Jones: Exploding capacitors (direct YouTube link). For years I've heard "don't hook up your capacitors backwards, bad things will happen", so I haven't. It's cool to see what happens when you do.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Some time before I read Michael Pollan's excellent look at agriculture in the United States, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Charlene and I were taking a slightly long route home from Fresno and drove by the Harris Ranch stock yards. I've been to the Amarillo stock yards, I've driven by slaughterhouses in the midwest with the stench extending for miles, I've seen beef being raised before, but that experience put me off beef for quite a while.

(Previous to that, I'd also eaten at the Harris Ranch restaurant, as anyone who's driven from LA to SF and vice-versa a number of times probably has, and wasn't terribly impressed, but that's neither here nor there.)

And as I've educated myself a bit more, I've decided that it's worth paying a bit extra for meat that I know wasn't raised in conditions like that.

Anyway, yesterday Charlene forwarded me What's So Scary About Michael Pollan? Why Corporate Agriculture Tried to Censor His University Speech, about a kerfluffle between CalPoly and David E. Wood, chairman of the aforementioned Harris Ranch and a university donor. Today at Food Politics, you can read the original letters, including this gem:

For too long now, those intimately involved in production of agriculture have silently allowed others (academics and activists) to shape their future. Not any longer! The views of elitists’ like Michael Pollan can no longer go unchallenged. Agriculture cannot allow the Pollans of the world to shape societal expectations (and ultimately policy makers’ decisions) regarding the production practices that can or cannot be employed by those whose livelihood depends on the continued development and adoption of modern agriculture practices.

In other words: God forbid food consumers should become aware of the processes that feed them, or we might not be able to make so much money by hiding the externalities of food production!

[ related topics: Politics Food Consumerism and advertising California Culture Education Economics Michael Pollan ]

Some fun reminiscences about bicycling time-trialing, John Frey's U.S. National record set back in 1990, and the course in Moriarty NM.

... Oddly, and almost unbelievably, as at least it seems to me, these marks are way more obtainable than is the one at the bottom of the list. In 2003, the man whose physiology should be studied by scientists the world over, a dude named Jack Pardee pedaled a bicycle 40 kilometers in 57 minutes and six seconds, to set the U.S. national mark for men who are at least 85 years of age.

Be sure to read the first comment, too.

[ related topics: Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Fantastic essay by Laura Cumming in the Guardian exploring the difference between art and child porn:

Not far from the strip joints of Soho is an image of a child having sex with an adult that can be seen for nothing any day of the week. The child is a boy of about 10 or 11, completely naked, his backside raised and partially turned to the viewer. The adult is a young woman, also naked. She is slipping her tongue into his mouth; he is squeezing her right nipple between his fingers. Not only is the boy clearly underage, but this sexual abuse of a minor turns out to be incestuous, too – the woman is actually his mother.

Via Eros log

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Sociology Art & Culture ]

Sean Leather linked to Google Code Blog: Introducing Closure Tools. Tools for JavaScript, including a type checker and compiler (Including a FireBug plug-in that decompiles your "compiled" optimized JavaScript for debugging purposes), and a widget library.

[ related topics: Web development ]

If you're into infidelity... uh... no, wait, that came out wrong... If you're into tales of interesting relationship issues, may I strongly recommend This American Life: Episode 393: Infidelity. I just listened to it while I was working on some stuff in the shop, and I'm going to save it on my MP3 player for our next road trip.

[ related topics: Sociology Marriage ]

If the prospect of building your own sailboat appeals, you might want to check out a Pocket Yacht, easy to build shallow draft sailboats up to 24 feet long. If that seems like too much of a project, one person made Paper Pocket Yacht, print and assemble your own paper models of the aforementioned sailboats, so that he could get a feel for the relative sizes of each.

[ related topics: Boats Model Building Woodworking ]

Utiliflex has hired a real fully Web 2.0 compliant programmer, on purpose. While Chris CAN actually code he's also into Behavior Driven Development and all the kewlest shiny buzzword things. I've learned a lot working with him, we're now using Subversion for code version control, and Redmine for project management and bug/feature tracking. But what I have learned most of the power of TLA's and buzzwords.. He is very infected with them, and if an idea has a TLA or kewl buzzword, it has more weight. So I am tossing out a new TLA and buzzword:

Polymorphic Jenga Block aka: PJB

Code that behaves differently depending on where or how in the stack of code it is used.

If it gets some weight, maybe he won't laugh so much when he talks about my coding style.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment California Culture ]

6 year old with a weapon - of a cub scout camping knife.. You know the one, the knife, spoon and fork that fold out, and the knife barely cuts butter. He's been suspended and is going to go to reform school for a while.

There is a good line in the article:

For Zachary, it is not school violence that has left him reluctant to return to classes.

They just yanked the wonder and magic of learning (at school) out of a 6 year old kid, that's the real crime.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Guns Education Clowns ]

A study in The British Journal of Criminology suggests that "drink spiking" is a fear far more prevalent than actually occurs:

The research team, led by Dr Adam Burgess from the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent, set out to investigate why there was such a pervasive belief when systematic police investigations have found no evidence that drink spiking is commonly implicated in sexual assaults. The researchers surveyed and interviewed students in three UK locations and one in the USA about the threat. They discovered that female students regularly judged certain 'bad-night-out episodes' (loss of memory, blackouts, ill feeling and dizziness) as likely to be related to tampering of drinks rather than the quantity of alcohol consumed.

So if you think your drink was spiked, there's a good chance you've simply been drinking too much and can't hold your liquor. Telegraph rewrite of the press release, Via Sensible Erection. And the article, which I haven't read.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

I found this kinda cute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...PGeh2K9k&feature=player_embedded

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices ]

Congrats to Steve Bogart on his role in creating the blogosphere!

Cloud of Atlases:

Maps without legends may not be immediately informative, but determining what they represent is extremely fun. If you’re into that kind of thing, THE EDITORS have a game for you.

[ related topics: Games Maps and Mapping ]

Video of a rock slide in the Ocoee gorge. Wait for it:

Well we had one rock in the road... now we have no road. The mountain has came off. It was unreal what come off.

And the long dormant paddler in me wonders how different Grumpy's is now. My ancient pages on the Ocoee.

[ related topics: Current Events Chattanooga Whitewater Video ]

Ricoh GXR camera system seals the CCD in the interchangeable lens unit. Interesting to think about the economics of that...

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Economics Dan & Charlene's July 2003 San Juan Trip ]

Seems like a good day to thank a veteran. Also seems like a good day to take a little effort to make sure that politically we stop using our military quite as much.

I've been playing about a bit with Python again, and again I'm having the "what niche does this fill?" issue. It's not anywhere near Perl's whipupitude, and its constructs are such that I end up prematurely thinking about optimization. Every time I dive into Python I start wondering why I'm not using C++ for the task.

Yesterday, I read this thread about Google possibly deprecating Python for internal projects, courtesy of Rafe, which seemed kind of weird given that the Google App Engine started and was wrapped around Python, but all of the comments about why made sense.

Today I ran across the Go systems programming language, which is apparently evolving from some internal Google projects. It's optionally typed, syntax looks like a mix of Python and C++, and has an emphasis on concurrent execution.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Python ]

An awesome semi-obvious idea that will take over the world and that I have no idea how to monetize.

Over on Twitter, Eric asked:

Watching Google Go video: http://bit.ly/3NUeUW Like what I see so far - but will there be library support?!?

I looked at Google's Go (as distinct from Francis McCabe's Go! programming language) and had a similar thought: I want to see what this language can do, I've been playing with Python and SDL recently, let's port that code to Go. Oh. Wait. No SDL bindings...

However, another realization: Processes are great ways to compartmentalize, and interprocess communication via pipes can be relatively cheap if it's implemented right. Why not make the GUI front-end one process in a language I'm familiar with that's fast and cheap, and write the back end that computes the (in this case) physics in Go? I could set up a pipe to pass data structures back and forth and... How should I serialize the data structures?

Back at Pixar I wrote a system for image output that had an API for image output. One side would say "the pixels are coming down the pipe as (signed|unsigned) (double|float|int32|int16|char) in (little|big)endian byte order" (the endianness was either defined, or native), the other would say "I want them in this format", I think quantization happened upstream anyway though there was probably some of that, and the library figured it out.

It could take multiple inputs, via network or pipe, the senders could even say "I'm sending this XY chunk of the image" and the receiver could say "buffer it and give it to me in scanline order." So you could be processing one portion of an image on a little-endian machine, another on a big-endian machine, and writing a driver for a format TGA was a matter of saying "give me scanlines in Red Green Blue Alpha order, throw out everything else", RLE compressing them and stuffing them to disk.

The flaw that I know of in it was that Tom Lokovic was, at the very time I was writing this, working on deep depth buffers, and my system only handled a fixed number of samples per pixel. But I think it got everything else mostly right (I'm sure Mark or the other Tom will drop in here to point out ways that it's been a beast, and given that the latter has used what I think is my code for a critique of coding style, I'm prepared for that).

The world needs a similar standard for interprocess calls. It's not XML, I've built a distributed system using it and that's way too expensive to parse. It might be JSON, but I rather think it's something binary. I also think it handles fairly complex data structures and has a notion of mirroring structures and persistence of objects at the other end.'

It is both a wire format and a set of libraries that provide an API that someone would recognize whether they were working in C, C++, C#, VisualBasic, Python, Ruby, Perl, Lua, or Google's Go.

And I think it'd be fun to write, but I don't have anyone to pay me to do it and I think it'll also need some names and/or applications big enough to push it so it becomes a standard. You listening, Google?

[ related topics: Pixar Language Interactive Drama Web development Books Content Management Animation broadband Perl Open Source Software Engineering Writing Law Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Graphics Boats Video Python ]

How People Are Fooled By Ideomotor Action:

Hare carried out several more such experiments with similar results. Apparently he never fully understood the key aspect of Faraday's results -- that honest, intelligent people can unconsciously engage in muscular activity that is consistent with their expectations.

One of the things I respect about the "New Age" movement is that parts of it are consciously looking to leverage our subconscious behaviors and desires. And if the placebo effect really is getting stronger (formerly), then there's lots of untapped potential in our beliefs. The problem is that in order to be effective we have to believe that fooling our minds works, so riding the ragged edge of belief without falling headlong into the fallacies is extremely difficult.

[ related topics: Drugs Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality ]

Alas, they've changed the headline before I could catch 'em in the act, but recently David Nutt, of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, was forced to step down after he criticized the government drug policy relating to marijuana. CJ tells me that the original headline was "Drug Adviser Nutt Sacking Was 'Humiliation', Says Colleague"

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Current Events ]

CJ continues his attempt to get me into large format photography: Midway down this page is photographer's A&B flash powder, perfect for that outfit involving a fedora with a "press" card in the hat band.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Ah, remember those heady days of the late 90's, when we were assured that civilization would fall when the Y2K bug destroyed all our systems? Wired looks at whether or not it was effort wasted. The concensus, however, is that there would have been some trouble, but we caught it in time.

I think we can also look at some of the social fallout from the whole affair. It is interesting that Y2K caught the imagination of the truly paranoid, and we heard claims that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00 the prison doors would automatically unlock and the streets would be full of desparate criminals, while the telephone system and electrical grid were destroying themselves and nuclear reactors would merrily melt down. Hmm isn't there a movie being released this weekend that sounds like this?

The other issue is that Y2K ruined the right-wing militia movement. I've seen claims that they bankrupted themselves laying in k-rations and ammo while building bunkers against the starving hordes. When nothing happened they looked like idiots. Well, at least they had some textured vegetable protein to eat.

[ related topics: Movies Food Heinlein Conspiracy ]

A few more from CJ:

• Mason Williams: Tummy Gummers/A Major Thang (YouTube video), more to Mason Williams than "Classical Gas".
• Times Online claims that (UK) middle class shoppers are stealing expensive food in record numbers in an attempt to keep up their standard of living.
• A really cool Wired look at the making of an astronomy photo. I'll justify that 5D MkIV yet...

And from Eric:

• USGS The National Map beta.

Somewhere else:

• Free Culinary School.com
• Frets.com home shop tech articles, including lots of notes on metal working.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Movies Food Space & Astronomy Astronomy Current Events Work, productivity and environment Earthquake Maps and Mapping Video ]

From page 129 of Shop Craft as Soulcraft:

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the expansion of higher education beyond labor market demand creates for white-collar workers "employment in substandard work or at wages below those of the better-paid manual workers." What's more, "it may create inemployability of a particularly disconcerting type. The man who has gone trhough college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

But that's okay, because organizations like Starbucks spring up in order to utilize that new labor pool.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Education Race Economics ]

Equasy - An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

"Significant amounts" of water found on the moon.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Today's XKCD seemed particularly apropos given that I finished Shop Class as Soulcraft last night:

[ related topics: Comics iPhone ]

Brilliance: Matt Bors looks at what Lincoln could have faced in the context of the current health care debate.

[ related topics: Politics Health ]

One of the notions of some of the health craze folks I have trouble with is the concept of "cleansing". It seems to cover way too much territory, and is often couched in terms that trigger a whole bunch of my BS alarms. However, maybe there's something underlying the concept: Washington University's Center for Genome Sciences researchers claim junk food binge alters community of microbes in the gut in less than a day, and that transferring those microbes to mice fed a healthier diet makes even those mice gain weight.

Bonus food link: AlterNet: Who's Really Behind Organic Food Brands Like Amy's and Odwalla? As I've mentioned, I'm a fan of Amy's.

[ related topics: Health Food Education ]

CJ forwarded The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster, first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909:

Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. ...

Unconnected whatsoever, have you heard that Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, is finding that teens are starting to prefer the artifacts of MP3s?

Berger then said that he tests his incoming students each year in a similar way. He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality. He said that they seemed to prefer "sizzle sounds" that MP3s bring to music. It is a sound they are familiar with.

[ related topics: Music Chocolate Education ]

The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock, or, Why We’re All Out of Good Songs. A good look at innovation and resource consumption.

Zack sent this page on basic ultralight gliders with an "OMG! OMG! when can we build one?" sort of message. I told him not 'til after I built my shop...

[ related topics: Aviation ]

I generally try to stay away from the trolling for hits that is the mainstream computer press, but I'll make an exception: Cringely in PCWorld: AT&T: Ignore Verizon's Ads and Fix Your Own Woes:

Coverage is abysmal. I watch people all around me chatting on their T-Mobile or Sprint Nextel or Verizon phones when I'm getting zero bars. "Voice quality" is an oxymoron. As for 2G or 3G data speeds, roll the dice and take your chances. Customer service? I'm sorry, I can't talk about that right now, I just ate.

I can't speak for 3G coverage, but I've got 4 out of 5 bars right now, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the little 3G icon disappear several times today. People who call me regularly know to try my land line as well because some days the calls come through, and some days they don't (and the iPhone doesn't register them as missed, so AT&T must just be dropping them silently).

Some of this is Apple's fault, there was a point release of OS 3 that wouldn't hold 3G long enough for me to web surf, as I walked over Olive Street and downtown I had better luck turning off 3G and just falling back to the old network. I'm pretty sure I didn't have this many lost calls before I got the iPhone.

Of course there have been suggestions that the 3G network congestion wasn't that point release, it was just AT&T incompetence in running a network. I don't know who to believe there.

All of which has me at the "I really like having a web browser in my pocket, and the iPhone is kinda cool, but I wonder what it'd cost to buy out of that contract" stage.

Thanks to Flurry, makers of a tool that smart phone developers can use to track application usage somehow, for the link (via Flurry's twitter feed) that started this ramble.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Wireless broadband iPhone ]

Phil just showed me imphoto from imsense. I was very impressed. Load a photo, it has a "how much" and a "toggle between the original and the how-muched photo" option. Also has some curve adjustment, but the "click this button and your image looks better" was surprisingly good.

I could very much see this fitting in the "I've got a bunch of vacation snapshots and I don't have time to individually tweak them" part of the photo workflow. I'd do manual tweaking for art shots, but for the pictures left in the directory after I've extracted the ones to make look really good this could be a nice tool to round out the photo album. Very cool technology.

[ related topics: Photography Art & Culture ]

Gliffy - Flow Charting and More - I've been playing around for a couple of weeks (free) and just signed up for the premium package ($25/mth for 1-10 users). It's not Visio, but it's not Dia either. In a world where you need to flow chart something out really quick, with people in different places using various OS's it's amazing.

Yow! Ouch! In Santa Rosa, a crane attempting to remove a tree stump has tipped on to a house. The picture is worth a look.

[ related topics: Machinery Real Estate ]

Bradley's Jade page has a new page, and I've got a new vacation destination: How to Find Big Sur Jade At Jade Cove.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Feeling old day: last night, helping Charlene with her astronomy homework I was reminded that the theory of plate tectonics is only a little older than I am. And now we're looking at those mechanisms on other planets. Every time I pick up my iPhone I'm reminded that when me, meuon et al saw the future of the Internet, I think this device was beyond our horizon, and now I whine about it's limits. And a thread about fonts over at Columbine's place has reminded me that I once weilded pieces of cast metal to do what my $89 scanner/copier/printer does at close to ten thousand DPI.

Screw the flying car, I really do live in the future!

[ related topics: Aviation Theater & Plays Space & Astronomy Astronomy Net Culture Automobiles Graphic Design Woodworking iPhone ]

Just got back from seeing the cheerfully destructive 2012, which is big, dumb and a lot of fun. The premise is that a solar cycle is producing so many neutrinos that it is heating up the Earth's core with unpleasent effects. Then I wondered about how the Mayans knew about neutrinos. But one of my favorite sites, Lilek's Bleat has the real skinny on how 2012 came to represent the end of history.

[ related topics: Religion Astronomy Earthquake ]

Made some speaker shelves for the living room:

[ related topics: Dan's Life Woodworking ]

Don't fall into the poverty trap, you might never get out, a quick look at how U.S. government subsidies and aid fall away such that going from $25k/year to $35k/year will cause a fall in your standard of living.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

Remarking on Anil Dash joining Expert labs, Theresa D. Singh tweeted:

.gov is the new .com

and I couldn't help but think back to a New York Times article which mentions Henry Chung, formerly an assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch, now a NYPD patrol officer, and another officer who formerly worked for WaMu:

“I was making a lot of money, and then not making money,” he said. “As the economy got worse, the investments dried up and I needed more stability. The police offer a pension that’s unheard of.”

And I shudder at the notion that ".gov is the new .com" is completely plausible.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Enforcement Currency New York Economics ]

Jeffrey Tucker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute: If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others?, some nice musings on some of the current struggling in academia over the reproduction of classes and class derived materials, including some words on how that relates to some of the struggles Ayn Rand had over her dissemination of her ideas. Hat tip to Chris in Florida.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Objectivism ]

Two entries over at Brainwagon that I want to explore further but don't have time to right now:

• A couple of links on a 288 kilometer non line-of-sight optical communication
• Some links and video on home-made electronic components

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Embedded Devices ]

We've moved the TV out of the living room into the bedroom, and I think I'm going to get a swing-out mount, and build a cabinet to hide it when it's not in use (which is most of the time). We don't have any broadcast or cable reception on it, it's just used for playing movies. Even though we still have a VHS player, that's pretty much fallen out of use, only gets pulled out when we want to watch a movie that hasn't made it to DVD yet and I'm willing to hook it up on an as-needed basis, and we have a DVD player that I think cost us $45 (or may even have been something given to us for filling out consumer satisfaction surveys), the tray sticks, but it still works.

However, the stupid DVD player is 19" wide and 10" deep, and if I'm going to get the TV in a little wall-mounted cabinet, it'd sure be nice to do the same thing with the DVD player. And, if the prices have come down enough yet, get something that'll do Blu-Ray at the same time since that seems to have taken over a fairly large portion of the video store (and will probably be obsolete shortly).

So I guess this is two questions:

1. Is there a small cheap DVD or even Blu-Ray player out there?
2. How can I design a small cabinet that doesn't require rebuilding every time the generation shifts? Used to be you needed 19"x12", but in this era of TVs being 6" deep including the wall mount, that seems to be over.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Television Home Improvement ]

Life imitates bad porn: CIA secret prison found in upscale Lithuanian horse riding academy.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Hey, have the Google search results recently gotten a lot worse for anyone else? I went back last night to work on sussing out more info for designing the building that will become my shop, and found that I was regularly digging through more than 3 pages of crap for sale to get to the information I wanted, no matter what terms I was adding to my searches. I'm fairly sure last time I did this I was getting stuff on the front page.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

I was exploring information on home roasting (thanks to Dan's ravings). CoffeeBeanQueen has a "What kind of coffee are you" quiz:

(sorry, the hyperlink was overritten by PicasWeb's embed HTML)

[ related topics: Sociology Graphic Design Coffee ]

Courtesy of Whump, Smart Bitches Trashy Books informs us that Harlequin is now doing self-publishing. The pricing for the packages is here, I'm not sure how much editorial help they can give you for $200, but given that so much of that level of push-it-out genre writing is being given away for free on the internet, that a big name would put some effort into figuring how to monetize that energy seems pretty smart.

Relatedly, MJ Rose points out that SFWA is no longer accepting Harlequin for their "you've been published" requirements.

[ related topics: Books Writing Net Culture ]

Playing With Fire And Water is yet another blog of food ideas. Via MeFi.

[ related topics: Food ]

I'm not sure how you actually get one, but the Bigshot Camera is one made for kids to assemble and use, ala OLPC.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Photography Fashion ]

I've mostly started ignoring the couple of police abuse of power articles that I stumble across daily, but this one's beyond the pale: Ten year old girl is tasered by a policeman in Arkansas:

Police report calls it 'very, very brief' stun to get her into patrol car

Offers of candy, apparently, didn't work.

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Automobiles ]

a set of astronomy photographs Charlene and classmates took, on Flickr because we used the Astrometry bot to identify them.

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy Astronomy ]

From 1952: Robert Heinlein's dream house. Apparently the secret of future living will be built-in drawers and couches. I suppose after a century of fussy wardrobes and armoires built-ins must have looked so streamlined. The problem of course is adapting to new realities, like improved technology or deciding on changing the upholstery. It also doesn't mention what I would put in my dream house of tomorrow: lots and lots of grounded electrical sockets and conduit into every room so I can wire any conceivable connection coming down the pike. And no, not wireless. My neighbors are snoopy enough as is.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design Heinlein Real Estate ]

Worth watching, even at 1:20: Eric Mazur, physics professor at Harvard, on teaching physics and the difference between problem solving and understanding.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Yesterday, I went to Thunderhill Racetrack, near Willows, to see some of 24 Hours of LeMons. 24 Hours of LeMons is the endurance race for cars costing $500 or less, although brakes are "safety equipment", which doesn't come in that price, so by the time you get the roll bars and other safety gear and upgrade the brakes to handle a long road circuit the people I talked to said you were up to at least $5k, plus suits and gear for your drivers, etc.

Still a fun event in which keeping the cars running is a big part of the race, and because the cars are beaters there's a bit more contact and action than you'd find in a more refined road style race.

Last night I got together with folks who had some oak logs for growing shiitake, because I've got a bunch of plugs, so we drilled a hole bunch of holes. This afternoon I waxed the plugs and am soaking them now.

And this morning I went out I Street to Tara Firma Farms to pick up the turkey I won and take a tour of the farm. Ended up buying a bunch of produce, and I'll be exploring the farm further. They're very much trying to be a community hub, and to make the farm work on the basis of knowing their customers and vice-versa, and I'd like to be a part of that community. I forgot my camera, so just had the iPhone, but there are a few pictures of my Tara Firma Farms visit, and I've got the turkey brining in apple cider with bay leaves, cloves and juniper berries, for smoking later this week.

And they've got two cats, one of which got a broken, or kinked, tail. So the kids on the farm have taken to calling them "Straight" and "Kinky". And the adults are desperately trying to keep a straight face. I told you I like this place.

[ related topics: Food California Culture Sports Automobiles Community ]

Solving hunger in Africa with pies made from giant snails (Via CJ).

QOTD: Buffalo News editorial on controversy over a swinger's convention held in their area:

To which I say: If folks can stimulate the economy around here by stimulating each other, then let the recovery begin.

Hat tip to Shawn.

[ related topics: Quotes Sexual Culture Current Events Economics ]

Our Mini is in the shop for some body work after being rear-ended, and they rented me a nearly identical Mini for a few days.. Except for the automatic transmission it has, a 6 speed auto with a pseudo manual mode and paddle shifters. Driving back from Atlanta (nicely) the best I could get was 34mpg, instead of the 40-44 my stick can get. It barely made it up my driveway. The delay in shifting if I tried to use manual mode made it frustrating, It will override you, shifting even when you manually stick it in gear, which doesn't allow you to engine brake coming down the mountain, or off-ramps. However, Nancy commented she liked the less jerky ride into work this morning, so I'm going to have to concentrate on smoother shifting when she's in the car.

But I have a theory: If more small-medium sized cars were manual transmission, we, as a country would save a lot of gasoline.

It's also harder to talk on a cell phone, drive, shift and eat/drink. I think that's a good thing: Hang up and drive.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Wireless Food Work, productivity and environment Automobiles Boats Machinery ]

Howdy all from Rancho Malario, my hilltop compound in North Florida. Dan has foolishly given me the ability to post topics directly, so perhaps something timely and appropriate would be suitable for my initial effort. Ok, what of this Thanksgiving holiday? In spite of everything, I myself can count on all my fingers and almost half of my toes reasons for gratitude at the present time. So, my question is: What say ye all? Stop for a moment........life ain't all bad. Ok, whaddaya got?

Fake chips sold to US Navy - Some people should be tried for treason on top of: "conspiracy and counterfeit-goods trafficking".

[ related topics: moron Conspiracy Government ]

Charlene has started grumbling about realized that there are cost and space advantages to switching to a post-CD music system, so I think it's time to switch. I'm trying to get the Chumby working with the My SqueezeBox server and I can (slowly) browse my music collection, but nothing is making it play. I know I had this working at one point, but it's a royal pain in the tail.

What's the right device for this? I have all the music on a Linux server that can easily share the data via NFS, Samba, or any server that wants to be run on it, but the bloody thing has to work. I can also easily run a network cable through the wall to that device.

We'll want a solution with playlist management. If it wants to have its own storage I'm okay with that. And it can't be an Apple product, if I have to deal with iTunes any more than I do I'll slit my wrists.

Bonus points if that device has an amplifier to run unpowered speakers in it.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Interactive Drama Music broadband Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

We've had fun with audio grade power outlets and special cables, and then I found this: This $900 Gizmo. They recommend 3 of them, at $900 each. It might be worth it just to tell people what it does:

"addressing the interaction of your audio gear's circuitry with ambient electromagnetic phenomena and modifying this interplay. The Blackbody takes advantage of the quantum nature of particle interaction, and is therefore able to permeate metal, plastic, wood, and other barriers to affect the circuitry inside your components."

Ok, so it's an wide spectrum passive RF sink. There might actually be some measurable effect, maybe.

I'll contend that people that could afford this, buy electronics of a quality that don't have such issues, and then plug their lossy MP3 players or iPhone's into them.

Still, if you know an audiophile that has everything, and your pockets are flush with bank bailout bonus bucks, what else could you spend it on?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Nature and environment Woodworking iPhone ]

Copied from article: "On Earth it is known for its good value skiing, its Black Sea resorts and its proud Slavic culture. But Bulgaria’s fame stretches far beyond our own planet, it seems: the country’s space research institute claims it is in contact with aliens." ----------- I have some neighbors that aren't quite right, now I think I'm on to them...

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/8...-bulgaria-in-contact-with-aliens

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Sociology California Culture Sports ]

I've been following Tara Firma Farms on Facebook and Twitter, posted what I'd do to one of their turkeys on their Facebook wall (it involved apple cider, juniper berries, and a long stint in a smoker), and they sent me email saying "you won our contest, come pick it up!". So last Sunday I did, met Tara, got a tour of the farm, and came home with a whole bunch of additional stuff and a really good feeling about the place. We'll be getting a lot more stuff there.

Leah Lamb describes a visit to Tara Firma Farms with pictures and video.

[ related topics: Photography Food Video ]

Joe Harmon Design is building the Splinter, a (mostly) wood super-car:

We are building a high-performance, mid-engined supercar from wood composites as a graduate project at North Carolina State University. Wood will be used whereever possible, including the chassis, body, and large percentages of the suspension components and wheels. The car has a target weight of 2500lbs and a power goal of over 600 horsepower.

[ related topics: Automobiles Woodworking ]

I don't need more blog reading. I especially didn't think I needed more software methodology blog reading. However, Dave pointed to Proper Fixation and called out Extreme Programming Explained. I may put this blog in my reading rotation.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering ]

"Each year, more than 400,000 babies are born in Texas. State law mandates that before newborns leave the hospital, his or her heel will be pricked and five drops of blood are collected."

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/p...ment-taking-newborn-dna-samples-

Does this set off any alarms in your head? Or is this just another move towards the inevitable?

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events ]