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Re:but... by Rei · 2007-06-28 03:34 · Score: 1 · on Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back to Oil

You'd be surprised.

I've actually built one... not a very good one, as I skimped on construction, but it was enough to at least soften the copper :)

Re:Implications are obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2007-04-05 07:17 · Score: 0 · on The Modern Ease of 3D Printing

Note that you can make a domestic microwave into a handy micro-sized metal casting facility: http://home.c2i.net/metaphor/mvpage.html

Re:So help fight it with your family!!!! by smellsofbikes · 2006-06-01 03:28 · Score: 1 · on Home Chemistry An Endangered Hobby in U.S.

(As a side note: you can't play with liquid CO2, at least not on Earth. It's either solid or gas, coz you need about 5 atmospheres of pressure for it to be liquid.)

Dry ice is fun. If you buy a dewar from somewhere like Edmund or sometimes American Surplus And Science (amsci.com) you might be allowed to buy liquid nitrogen from a local welding supply place. There are scads of online instructions for making instant ice cream with liquid nitrogen. If you're *really* careful, there are lots of other fun things to do with it: blow up balloons and press them flat as pancakes in the LN2, then sail one like a frisbee and, if you do it right, it'll warm up and pop back into an inflated balloon in the air.

I used to work at the Litle Shop Of Physics and they have lots of suggestions about silly projects you can do, that illustrate basic science, or weird science. A lot of them use things like 2L bottles with aluminum foil wrapped around them, filled with salt water, as Leyden jars, charged by putting aluminum foil on TV screens -- you can get 30,000 volts from that and load up 50 Leyden jars and have a big chunk of power for some exciting projects.

Scitoys has lots of neat projects. I built a set of Franklin's Bells (Ben Franklin invented them to warn of oncoming lightning storms) that are functionally identical to the scitoys version (tho' I'd thought it up on my own) and that's a quick, funny project. Actually, looking around on their site, you could spend the rest of your life just building and playing with what they have. I think someone wrote a book called Gonzo Gizmos that's based on what they've done, and it's fantastic. The audio-via-laser-pointer is really easy to set up (hint: use the smallest solar cell you can find or a photodetector that the laser pointer beam nearly entirely covers, to get a better signal/noise ratio) and a lot of fun to play with.

You'll notice I'm not talking much about chemistry. There's some superb stuff to do there (speaking as a person with a degree in chemistry) but it is, simply, more dangerous, and it behooves you to know what you're doing before you let your kids do stuff. My dad made seriously dangerous stuff, like stuff that left pieces of copper embedded in some of his friends' internal organs, and while that's great fun and all, wait until your kids are a couple years older.

Did I mention how much fun you can have with microwaves? Particularly if you don't care about them very much? Neon bulbs are cheap. Put some in the microwave and turn it on. Microwave CD's. Microwave marshmallow peeps. Have grape races. Butterfly a grape to form a dipole antenna and watch it vaporize. You can even melt silver in a microwave (tho' I have yet to actually try this.)

Re:Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Quote by Derek+Pomery · 2006-03-13 02:33 · Score: 4, Informative · on 1001 Islamic Inventions

http://home.c2i.net/greaker/comenius/9899/indiannu merals/india.html
Numbers is a poor example.
Credit where credit is due.

Re:Remove the government ... by Eunuchswear · 2006-03-07 00:28 · Score: 2, Interesting · on SpaceX Developing Orbital Crew Capsule

And, suprise suprise, it turns out that private armies are much more expensive than publicly owned ones.

Whoda thunk it.

(N. Machiavelli maybe?)

Re:Next week... by WormholeFiend · 2005-07-05 13:47 · Score: 0, Redundant · on Hacking the Motorola v265

How to hack your intentionally crippled toaster so that you can achieve temperatures upwards of 1000 degrees Farenheit

holy shit I cant wait! sounds much safer than playing with microwave ovens"

Re:I WOULD worry about the laptop by sonamchauhan · 2005-07-05 01:18 · Score: 1 · on Measuring Microwave Output From A Laptop?

Are you wilfully keeping yourself from understanding? Let me repeat - certain points in microwaved food may reach temperatures never reached outside (i.e. hotspots) - you have no simple way of telling. Contrast this to conventional cooking, where there is a straightfoward upper bound on temperature that _no_ part of the food will ever cross.

> The temperature of your flame is much, much higher than you will ever attain in a microwave.

No, wrong

Take a look here: a domestic microwave oven can be used to melt metal at 1000 degrees Celsius.

Take look at the other interesting reply to you by an AC that I echoed - he claims a plain grape generates a plasma.

Take a look at this paper: it describes a witches brew of "oil fractions produced by microwave-assisted pyrolysis of different sewage sludges". Interestingly, it describes different products formed when heating the sewage conventionally, v/s heating in a microwave. Why? A webpage on their research also states "800-1000C to be attained with microwave power of 1 kW and frequency of 2450 MHz." - the same power level available in many home microwaves.

My mentioning microwaved cheese tasting funny IS pertinent to this discussion. The funny taste may indicate high temperature products formed during microwaving, but not formed when cooking pizza in a normal oven (Consider: by definition, cheese in a normal over goes through the entire range of temperature - from room temperature, to oven temperature - yet microwaved cheeese tastes different - why?)

Re:To small? by roadrunnerro · 2005-04-03 12:11 · Score: 1 · on Cell Phone as e-Book Reader (in Japan)

you do realize that the j2me apps probably load .txt, .html or whatever, no?

here's an ancient but perfect example: MicroReader - I've been using it for ages.. btw: lowest font size gets you about 14 rows - very usable at ~12 rows...

Re:Learn to spell by orzetto · 2004-06-20 09:58 · Score: 5, Funny · on Skolelinux Project Releases Version 1.0

Du får nok lære norsk, din selvopptatte engelsksentrige tulling!
This is all the Norwegian you need to know (download the wav file!).

Re:slashbot by no+longer+myself · 2004-03-25 01:06 · Score: 1 · on New Documents Shed Light on Microsoft's Tactics

Please explain how pocket, portable computing would have been possible even ten years ago.

OK, here you go: Pocket Computer circa 1980-something... I had one. Still have the Tandy PC-6 as well. Built in BASIC programming language. Sure, it's not as nifty as the MP3 playing full color screen gadgets you've got today, but is was a real computer. It interepreted lines of programmed code. It even had a printer and a cassette storage device, and you could develop your own applications for them without having to synch it with a desktop computer.

Yeah... Argue how underpowered they were, but those pocket computers were just as powerful as their full sized cousins less than ten years earlier, and quite frankly I'd rather have my Tandy PC-6 on a desert island than a Palm, beause the battery life is a heck of a lot better!

I'm not saying MS killed the pocket computer market, but there's always been a demand for it, and no one's really ever been able to pull it off in spite of the fact that the technology really does exist and has existed for a very long time.

Re:Water is responsible? by scorp1us · 2004-02-11 07:25 · Score: 1 · on Danger Of Strong Electromagnetic Fields

I should have posted this a long time ago:
The Microwave Foundry

But the answer is no. A blob will not arc. THe problem is keeping the inside from melting.

Re:Chording for tablets (OT?) by kps · 2003-07-01 06:09 · Score: 1 · on Keyboards for One Hand?

The Microwriter Agenda (1989) did this.

Disabling Arial by Brian+Hatch · 2003-01-06 17:40 · Score: 5, Informative · on Best Fonts for Linux Browsers?

In a recent slashdot post (I forget where) there was a reference to a Customizing Mozilla page that has a bunch of cool tricks to add to your user.prefs, etc. One of the things they noted was the problem with bad Arial fonts being installed on your machine. Here are the relevant snippets:

Various Linux distributions have problems with fonts; in particular, Arial, used in many web pages, may map to a font that looks blocky and is smaller than the requested size. A full discussion is in bug 46415, but an easy solution for Redhat users is this:
mv /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 and then log out of X and log back in again.
You can always undo this, if necessary, with the command:
mv /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2
It's also worth reading this excellent discussion on fuzzy Linux fonts.
Or, add things like this to user.js in your .mozilla/.... directory:
// X font banning: see bug 104075. // Ban all arial fonts, because abiword installs an ugly one // and there doesn't seem to be a good one available: user_pref("font.x11.rejectfontpattern", "fname=.*arial.*");
// Some alternate forms for rejectfontpattern: //"fname=.*arial.*;scalable=.*;outline_scaled=.*;\ // xdisplay=.*;xdpy=.*;ydpy=.*;xdevice=.*"); // "fname=-zz-abiword.*;scalable=false;outline_scaled =false;"); // Alternately, reject font if accept pattern does not match it: //user_pref("font.x11.acceptfontpattern", ".*");

Book about hacking by Joohn · 2001-11-28 00:05 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Books on the History of Hacking?

There's an excellent book about hacking and hackers by Linus Walleij, called Copyright Does Not Exist .
In the preface, he explains why this book is published on the Internet and not through a publisher. Basically, it's because he is a hacker and thus, making money on the book would be double standards. Maybe that is why so few books on the subject exist?

Plot Speculation by Alien54 · 2001-11-16 02:21 · Score: 3, Interesting · on New Star Wars Episode II Trailer Out

I wonder if Lucas is going to steal a page or two from Wagner's Ring Cycle. (Others have seen some connection)

I am thinking specifcally thinking of Sigfreid. This raised all kinds of uproar at the time of it's premier because of the way that it it went counter to the morals of the day (regarding forbidden loves, etc).

palm pilot / hanspring / some sort of palmos by StandardDeviant · 2001-10-20 02:43 · Score: 3, Informative · on Hackable Christmas Presents?

I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.

Here's some programming-palm linkage:
Lisp (scheme)
waba -- micro JVM (~71k), quite cool if you're into Java
extra classes and tools that work with waba, really nice data storage classes for example
a ui gen program for waba, written in waba :-)
super waba, a bigger derivation of waba
waba community site
[yeah, I've been having lots of fun with waba :) ]

All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.

Re:Daisy, Daisy... by gorilla · 2001-05-08 04:56 · Score: 2 · on Bell Labs, Preserving Delicate Sensibilities

Or a sense of history. It was chosen for 2001 because it was the first computer synethised music, in 1957 at ... Bell Labs.

Here is a link to a reference: The first time a computer played music was in 1957, at Bell Labs in the United States. The song was called Daisy, which is the same piece that the intelligent computer HAL (in Stanley Kubrick's film version of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction novel 2001) starts humming as it is being disassembled. Naturally, this is not a coincidence, but rather the intention of the director to return the computer to its "childhood state" (in a double sense) as it loses its advanced electronic identity

Re: A Mirror URL for DeCSS Source by estranged · 2000-01-25 06:06 · Score: 1 · on Jon Johansen Indicted by the MPA(A)

it's here:

DeCSS Source Code

Estranged

European mirror by RPoet · 1999-11-17 20:27 · Score: 1 · on KDE 2.0 in Action

here

Re:I would... by RPoet · 1999-11-17 20:26 · Score: 1 · on KDE 2.0 in Action

I noticed after I posted! I also put up a mirror here in Norway!

Mirrors again ooops by Anonymous Coward · 1999-11-17 02:40 · Score: 0 · on deCSS Listed On Download.com

This site contains some good technical documentation as well as more source code that the DVD consorium's lawyers would rather you not see:
http://crypto.gq.nu/

Semi-broken Mirrors
(These mirrors sometimes work and sometimes don't)
ftp://134.173.94.44/

Broken Mirrors
(These are listed here for the notification of the people who run them)
http://members.theglobe.com/avoiderman/css-auth.ta r.gz

Mirrors shut down by The Man
(A moment of silence, please.)
http://www.rhythm.cx/dvd/css-auth.tar.gz and http://www.rhythm.cx/dvd/DeCSS.zip
http://dvdcracked.tvheaven.com/index.html

Mirrors - Now more than 70!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 1999-11-17 02:38 · Score: 1 · on deCSS Listed On Download.com

Oh yeah

Visit Humpin! (No, it's not what you think!)

Explanation on legality of this information:

The software (source as well as binaries) offered on this site can be freely redistributed because it was published under the GNU General Public License. The purpose of this software is not illegal copying of DVD disks. It is meant to provide information necessary to be able to program a DVD player for Linux. To do this, the CSS system needs to be incorporated in the player. Recently the (very weak) DVD content scrambling system was deciphered, freeing the way for a Linux DVD player. The CSS system is not a copy protection system, since it does not prevent copying of the disk. Writing information about the way an encryption scheme functions is completely legal. The source code and binaries on this site are completely legal too, since they contain no code from the DVD consortium or its members. The sources and programs on this site were written by third parties using clean-room reverse engineering methods which are (ready?) completly legal.

Attention

www.rhythm.cx was hosting a list of mirrors for these files. That list of mirrors has been replaced with a page reading "This site has been taken down for legal reasons." Here's what the maintainer put on the site the day it was shut down:

NOTE (Thu, Nov 11, 12:17pm EST): I've recently been informed that a law firm which is likely to be one that would try get these mirrors taken down has been visiting this mirror site as well as others. With that said, there is a possibility that I may have to remove this site in the near future because like everyone else, I can't afford to go to court to fight it. Luckly, it seems fairly unlikely that any law firm will ever be able to get rid of all these mirrors at this point (there are currently 41 in 8 different countries and this list is growing every day). However, I have only seen very few mirror _lists_ like this one anyplace. If anyone has the resources, it might be wise to mirror this list of mirrors as well so that the right people will still know that these mirrors exist.

UPDATE: Here is a 2600 story with more details on how rhythm.cx was shut down.

I have taken it upon myself to mirror the mirrors. So until such time as the hounds of hell come a-knocking at my door, I present for you this list:

Page last updated: Wed, Nov 17, 2:33pm EST

Current Mirrors
(Numbers are only for the maintainer's convenience)

This site contains some good technical documentation as well as more source code that the DVD consorium's lawyers would rather you not see:
http://crypto.gq.nu/

Semi-broken Mirrors
(These mirrors sometimes work and sometimes don't)
ftp://134.173.94.44/

Broken Mirrors
(These are listed here for the notification of the people who run them)
http://members.theglobe.com/avoiderman/css-auth.ta r.gz

Mirrors shut down by The Man
(A moment of silence, please.)
http://www.rhythm.cx/dvd/css-auth.tar.gz and http://www.rhythm.cx/dvd/DeCSS.zip
http://dvdcracked.tvheaven.com/index.html

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Domain: c2i.net

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