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Which is kinda great. Phones and cameras let you turn off the location tagging, but considering the lengths that people went to for location tagging when it was not a built-in function, why would you? You're not a terrist, are you?

Nevertheless, if you want all of that info removed, you can use jhead -purejpg *.jpg

Here's how to build your own Wasp Sucker: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/built/wasp-sucker.html. It's a really simple and clever way to deal with them that doesn't involve spraying neurotoxins around your house.

But these things are so big, you'd need a larger diameter hose - and maybe a stronger mesh screen!

This could've saved you some time ;)

You can easily get rid of the data in the images you publish.

Indeed. Using e.g. jhead, it's as simple as saying jhead -purejpg *.jpg, or even find . -name \*.jpg -print0 | xargs -0 jhead -purejpg or so.

ProFTPd, while great when it came out in the early 2000s and had many features, was always plagued with security issues, and many places I worked at stopped used it even though it was relatively easy to setup and was feature rich.

vsftpd was at one point the most secure ftpd I could find. Not sure how good it is anymore.

If you need a simple Windows FTPd on a small LAN for quick file transfers check out ftpdmin which is really minimal (free and source available!). I use it all the time for quick ISO transfers on my personal LAN. Does the job. Much better than HTTP transfers, that's for sure.

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead is a nice Exif Jpeg camera setting parser and thumbnail remover. Try it and get scared. Geotags are new, but the problem has been there for years. The "hidden" parts of images give away camera model, camera time, camera serial number and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Always open and save images in some editor such as GIMP before uploading them to the Internet(s). This is a good idea anwyay as viewers will generally be more happy if you crop the picture, perhaps adjust the color balance etc.

Couldn't find the whisker fix for NiZn.

But there is one for NiCad.

http://www.sentex.net/~mec1995/gadgets/rejuv.html

The ZAP-Adaptor, rejuvenates DEAD NiCads

More on NiZn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-zinc_battery

interesting limitation: Currently, only Sub C and AA NiZN cells are available

Wonder why?

I never publish photos with any EXIF.
There are tons of utilities out there to remove it, I use this: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

I still have to silence the cell phone camera. It is annoying.

Corrected via behaviourism? Nonsense.
http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_aba.html

I have a Nikon D80 and it has a lot less noise than my friends Canon G9 which has more pixels.

What I really want is a wider range of sensitivity. Both higher sensitivity for photo in the dark, but also a lower sensitivity for some cases where I actually would like to have the blur of motion in bright sunlight.

For the latter cases there are of course filters available, so it's possible to work around it. But there is no way to improve the sensitivity the same way.

As for megapixel race - you can buy a 50 megapixel camera today if you like. It's just a question of money!

And then you can build an extreme camera yourself using a flatbed scanner.

Bruce Lund, the company's CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet.

A bit like this pipe cannon then?

I've heard great things about Sentex in the KW area. Prices are very reasonable compared to Rogers/Bell.

He is a busy genius - I stumbled across his site when I was told someone mapped the tunnel network below the University of Waterloo. And he did.

IMHO, the coolest thing he ever built was converting a scanner into a digital camera. People, if you have a few free minutes, check his site out. Lots of cool stuff there!

Being in Southern Ontario, I'd highly recommend you check out any local ISP. The two that come to mind are http://www.sentex.net/ and http://www.execulink.com/. I've had nothing but golden experience with the former, and have no experience with the latter. Why not Bell? Largely due to upstream connections. It's a Sympatico policy to do no private peering whatsoever, so your latency is more dictated by their upstream providers than by anything else. Though Sentex is relatively small, they're a pretty active member of http://www.torix.net/, and you can really notice a difference -- especially when it comes to something like streaming CBC. The other great part? Sentex doesn't just bow to DMCA takedown notices. Ignoring the fact that they're Canadian, and the DMCA is an American law, they do the Right Thing^tm: they respond to the takedown notice, requesting verification and validation. And, as we all know, nobody ever responds to the DMCA response, so there's never any real action as a result of it.

I guess you missed the part where Islam preaches that Jesus lives in, and rules, Heaven (or at least one of the seven heavens.) Kind of like claiming Alabama and California have the same leader, isn't it?

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html :)

There's also a program called "jhead" which can do this for you (jhead -ft *), as well as other fun things involving the EXIF, like auto-rotating your images (jhead -autorot *) if your camera keeps track of the position it was held when the shot was taken (I know both my Canons do). Linky here.

I think that the people who are most willing to blog in the first place are demonstrating personality traits more suitable to employers who will focus on soft skills, interpersonal skills and being youthful and trendy

For example, marketing, retail and sales

People who blog about personal aspects of their lives should be kept seperate from those who blog about technical aspects of their lives only, if I am hiring and I google someone's name and they have a personal blog page that is full of wicked technical hacks (http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/ for example) then how good does that look for them? Very!

But if I google their name and it comes up with something less savoury, or even slihtly unpleasant, well that looks bad. And by the way, it doesnt matter whether the people you worked with last were horrible or not, if you posted about them on your blog, you might post about me if you think I am horrible, I dont want that, so I wont hire you.

If you have a Mac, the board to get is, hands down, GoBan.

Check this out. The guy built exactly what you are looking for. Here is another one.

Home built CD changer contraption

CD-changing Lego® robot

I just remembered this home-made CD changer that could be used to rip your CDs automatically.

Of course it's an ugly hack and uber-geeky but hey, this is /. ;-)

For the hardware side you could make one of these:
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html
or one of these:
http://www.redfrontdoor.org/cd-changer.html

Software would be some bash scripting, and a few short programs.

On the other hand, it will probably take more time to make one of these than it would take to do the cd changing by hand.

Dude, you should let me be your slashdot dupe checker. I'm pretty confident that this was on Slashdot the last time it happened. I was a bit impressed by this guys contraptions so I guess I remember the URL, here you go. http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html

Why have a chip on your shoulder about non-elitist equipment?

I don't. I have a chip on my shoulder about people claiming something as artistically and/or technically new when it has been done numerous times before, and often better.

Here is one link. Here's another one. There have been a number of other variations, including leaving the scanner in the film plane of a LF camera.

This is a pretty cool hack, even though its usefulness is debatable. Still, that's the spirit of hacking. It kinda reminded me of this guy who made a scanner for his C64 with a photocell and lego blocks...

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/tech.html

Even today, that's neat. He even turned a scanner into a digital camera.

There are a few shareware apps to help this process.

Unfortunately, that's also the only way to maintain active iPhoto libraries across multiple disks. You can stick a library anywhere, even on a subfolder of an iPod, but since iPhoto doesn't allow "import in place", you can't have photos from multiple drives show up in the same library. Inserting burned media with albums on it works great - the keyword assignments and dates all merge nicely together with the current library and un-merge when you eject the disk - but of course those are archives, not active libraries, so it's not the same thing.

As an aside, if you're interested in making more meaningful filenames from your digital pictures automatically, check out "jhead".

I invoke it on everything I drag off the media cards, like so: "jhead -exonly -nf%Y%m%d-%H%M%S-%f *.JPG"

Not mindstorms, but you reminded me of this home made autochanger

Links on that page link to a lego version

frequency analyzer

caesar cipher cracker

some other tools also available here

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Trolling is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Troll community when IDC confirmed that Troll post share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all postings. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Trolls have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Trolling is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by faaling dead last in the recent net spelling test.

You don't need to be a Geller to predict Trolling's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Trolls because Trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for Trolls. As many of us are already aware, Trolls continue to lose first post share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

anti-slash is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core Trolls. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Trolls timecop and Seth Winklestein only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Trolling is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

anti-slash admin Seth states that there are 7000 users of anti-slash. How many GNAA members are there? Let's see. The number of anti-slash versus GNAA posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 GNAA. GNAA posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of anti-slash posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of that other site Kuro5hin. A recent article put GNAA at about 80 percent of the Troll market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Trolls. This is consistent with the number of troll Slashdot posts.

Due to the troubles of anti-slash, abysmal rants and so on, GNAA is going out of business and will probably be taken over by anti-slash who sell trolling software. Now anti-slash is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that GNAA has steadily declined in market share. Trolling is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Trolling is to survive at all it will be among a handful of dilettante dabblers. Trolling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Trolling is dead.

Fact: Trolling is dying

Take the linear CCD array from it, add some mechanics, and with some luck you can get nice (in the range of megapixels) images.
These guys did it already: here and here
Better than a webcam, and pretty good for understanding how digital imaging works.

What's needed is not a volume duplicator, but a robotic CD/DVD archive device with CD and DVD burners instead of readers. Load up the first half of the slots with disks to dup, and the other half with blanks. Then just run a script to dup disks and log any failed burns.

You mean something like this?

Just for the heck of making a huge image, I once scanned a palm leaf on my flatbed. It was big, so I scanned it in two sections and stitched it.

My scanner scans at 2400 x 2400 dpi without interpolation, and it's 8.5" x 11.75", yielding two uncropped images, each at 20,400 pixels x 28,200. Cropped, my final image was about 30,000 * 28,000. OK, only .84 GigaPixels, because I intentionally scaled it to work in Photoshop. But it would be a piece of cake to make images way bigger, when you can capture 575 Mega Pixels at a time with a sub-$200 scanner. Someone else out htere must have done this already, right? Even if not, I don't see it as such a big milestone, since many thousdands of people across the US have the equptment to do this at their fingertips. Sure, it only works for flat images, but actually, you can turn your scanner into a camera- see here or here.

Additionally, I would like to argue with him about the potential of film to match this. I scan 35mm slides shot on films like Ektachrome 100. It's worth scanning a good sharp image on this film at 2400 ppi. The image size on 35 mm film is 24 x 36 mm, or about 1 1/3 square inches, yielding about 7.6 MegaPixels.

100 speed films are commonly available in 8 x 10 size, which should yield 460 megapixels.

But wait! We can go higher than this. Konica Impressa 50 should be much finer grained than this. There's a reason drum scanners go up to 4,000 x 4,000 ppi- to suck the resolution out of really fine-grained films. So an 8 x 10 scanned at 4,000 x 4,000 ppi can yield 1.28 GigaPixels- more than this image. And that's not even getting very exotic yet.

Polariod used to make a viewcamera that took 16" x 20" negatives. If you special order uncut sheet film from Kodax or Konica and cut your own 16 * 20 negatives, this could take you into the 5 GigaPixel range. The two issues that aren't clear here are 1. if any lenses have high-enough resolving power to deal with this, and 2. how the hell you scan it. Scanning it probably will boil down to cutting it, scanning it, and re-stitching it on the computer. Still, the image would have been captured all at once, probably in a lot less than 13 minutes depending on the maximum aperture of your lens.

In terms of affordability and portability, the digitals are really nice, and it's mostly the way I've gone. I still shoot 4 * 5 black and white negatives sometimes, and they make great 16" x 20" prints, but that's mostly for the fun of it. Digital panoramas are great. I'll not deny that digital is where the future is.

Oh, and about printing, per the question on his site. For the highest quality image per inch, hire someone with a Durst Lambda 130. It can make continuous photographic prints up to 60" x 164' (yes, that's feet) in a resolution equivalent to 4,000 x 4,000 dpi in inkjet terms, and continuous tone.

A ColorSpan Displaymaker Mach12 can get you up to 72" wide by effectively unlimited length, and it prints with a 12-color ink set. Not as high quality as the Lambda per square inch, but impressive.

And if what you really want is just plain big, HP DesignJets go up to 96" wide now. The quality's still good.

Where do you find people with these kinds of machines? Here are a couple of suggestions, but there are lots more: Harvest Productions or Design Image.

exhilaration wrote:"Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements links to this page"

WOW! Very very cool. But this hack is more ambitious than I had in mind. I'm talking about putting a flatbed scanner in the film plane of a large format camera, rather than extracting the CCD from a scanner.

Thank you very much for the link, I must have been offline when /. ran this one.

Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements links to this page

I don't know if any of you remember the slashdot article where some guy modified his scanner to be an (odd) digital camera.

Link

...he is also a very talented and prolific one:

1. Rather than buy a printer for his C64 back in the day, he elected to build a home made plotter and make several improvements along the way. It's quite impressive!

2. Before digital imaging was even remotely on the minds of personal computer users, he constructed a slow but functional low-res scanner That has to be a hallmark of a true hacker--his creations may not be practical and are of limited use, but they are fascinating and forward thinking.

3. Sometimes hacks really do save money, like this multi-megapixel digital camera made from a cheap $100 scanner at a time when most decent digital cameras cost 10 times that much. Sure, it took 30 seconds to take a pic, but it served the purpose for non-action photography and when motion was involved it could produce some interesting effects.

(bows down) I'm not worthy....

...he is also a very talented and prolific one:

1. Rather than buy a printer for his C64 back in the day, he elected to build a home made plotter and make several improvements along the way. It's quite impressive!

2. Before digital imaging was even remotely on the minds of personal computer users, he constructed a slow but functional low-res scanner That has to be a hallmark of a true hacker--his creations may not be practical and are of limited use, but they are fascinating and forward thinking.

3. Sometimes hacks really do save money, like this multi-megapixel digital camera made from a cheap $100 scanner at a time when most decent digital cameras cost 10 times that much. Sure, it took 30 seconds to take a pic, but it served the purpose for non-action photography and when motion was involved it could produce some interesting effects.

(bows down) I'm not worthy....

...he is also a very talented and prolific one:

1. Rather than buy a printer for his C64 back in the day, he elected to build a home made plotter and make several improvements along the way. It's quite impressive!

2. Before digital imaging was even remotely on the minds of personal computer users, he constructed a slow but functional low-res scanner That has to be a hallmark of a true hacker--his creations may not be practical and are of limited use, but they are fascinating and forward thinking.

3. Sometimes hacks really do save money, like this multi-megapixel digital camera made from a cheap $100 scanner at a time when most decent digital cameras cost 10 times that much. Sure, it took 30 seconds to take a pic, but it served the purpose for non-action photography and when motion was involved it could produce some interesting effects.

(bows down) I'm not worthy....

I remembered seeing this site featured on slashdot last year. It looks like Mattias Wandel is quite the innovator. Check out the rest of his site for all kinds of interesting inventions.

To actually try to duplicate this cd changer with lego seems a little impractical.

...that is, if the phrase `a little impractical' even has any place in discussions of this sort....

Check out his Lego machines then.

Be sure to check out the rest of his page. Fun stuff.

You're right : he's a genuine hacker.

I am however much more impressed by his organ as he does not only need some manual skills but also a good ear to set it up.

At the ISP where I work we offer fiber connections that allow for increased bandwidth for certain periods of time. For example, our burstable connections are usually around 1-3 meg for normal times, then burstable up to 10 megs. I'm sure you can find something suitable to you.

*blatant sales pitch*
If your buisness is near Southern Ontario, check out our website at www.sentex.net. We rock :-)

I've installed Opera 7.1 for both Windows and Linux, and am very impressed. Does anyone know how to create a note? I see the Copy to Note and Paste To Note options, but they don't do anything :-(

Also, Opera still doesn't display my ISP's homepage properly. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next release :-).

Actually, if you follow the link to megaprime from ARS, you'll find that the camera is called MegaCam, from the MegaPrime project...
http://www-dapnia.cea.fr/ ... /index.html (Link works, but Slashdot pushes spaces in words over 40
chars

Hmm... what I thought of instantly was the fellow that turned a flatbed scanner into a wide-field still image camera.
Building a megapixel digital camera from a flatbed scanner

And the later revisions in the concept by interested folks with science as their tool of genius.
Industry always begins with hacking existing toys Thus the ultimate reason the DMCA is a BAD BAD BAD law.
Improved Scanning Digital Camera

I see the article is about an array of the imaging sensors with one bigass lens. I guess they'll get a quicker image this way.

Seize is another weird one.

The improved i-before-e rule.

(Now, a rule with too many exceptions is useless, but hey, it's English.)

If you're convinced you're a champion speller, try this and this -- then post your results here. :)