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First for my 15" Powerbook titanium:

http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/DSCN1562.jpg.html

and now for my 17" MacBookPro

http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/IMG_1318.JPG.html

First for my 15" Powerbook titanium:

http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/DSCN1562.jpg.html

and now for my 17" MacBookPro

http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/IMG_1318.JPG.html

It stores the password in plane text

There was a myspace user who was using an utterly huge image of mine (taken with a Kodak Pro14N 14 megapixel camera) as his background. It was a significant hit on my bandwidth, so I put the following in my .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.myspace.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/leech.png [R,L]

It made his page utterly unreadable, but I guess he and his friends still had the old picture in their caches because it took him about 6 months to notice and change it.

My daughter has a myspace account because her friends at college have them (and facebook as well), so she contacted this loser and made some vague remark about his "interesting" background. He didn't get it - he said something about how he googled for kayaking pictures and found this one and liked it.

When people use one of my images as their avatar on various web boards (which has happened three times that I've noticed), I redirect them to http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/leech.png

You can read about it in this blog entry.

When people use one of my images as their avatar on various web boards (which has happened three times that I've noticed), I redirect them to http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/leech.png

You can read about it in this blog entry.

I've been the "hero of the day" at Starbucks a few times when I'm on the road because I carry a power strip in my laptop bag. I'll plug in my power strip, and then invite anybody nearby who wants to plug in.

I have a picture on my web site of one night in a hotel room where between my wife and I we had plugged in two laptops, two PDAs, two cell phones, two digital camera battery chargers, a video camera, and an iPod.

Maybe if you looked past the marketing hype, Kodak has had a 14 megapixel professional camera with a full 35mm CCD for a couple of years now. I used it to take pictures at AirVenture 2003. (Unfortunately I got the CCD dirty before I took it out there, and didn't notice until it was too late.)

I've got cable chewing birds. Over the years, they've chewed through innumerable headphone and speaker cables. One of them chewed through a mouse cord and ruined the PS/2 ports on that computer - I had to use a serial mouse. And worse than all that, they give off tons of dust that clogs up power supplies and the fins of heat sinks.

I don't let them run around the computer desks any more, and I bought a large HEPA filter to try and keep down the dust. Unfortunately the cooling fans on my main computer seem to have more power than the HEPA filter, so the prevailing air currents go from the bird cage to the computer to the filter, instead of the other way around.

I've got cable chewing birds. Over the years, they've chewed through innumerable headphone and speaker cables. One of them chewed through a mouse cord and ruined the PS/2 ports on that computer - I had to use a serial mouse. And worse than all that, they give off tons of dust that clogs up power supplies and the fins of heat sinks.

I don't let them run around the computer desks any more, and I bought a large HEPA filter to try and keep down the dust. Unfortunately the cooling fans on my main computer seem to have more power than the HEPA filter, so the prevailing air currents go from the bird cage to the computer to the filter, instead of the other way around.

At Oshkosh, there was somebody showing a VariEze with a Pulse Detonation Wave engine. I didn't catch whether it had actually flown with it. I took some pictures here.
Don't be fooled by the USAF markings on the plane - I didn't see any indication that it had any sort connection to the military.

You cannot just sit in your room and hack those out.

No, but you can start with US Census TIGER data, and work with dozens of other sources of free data.

I'm currently doing a program that generates databases for a free palm pilot flight planning program called CoPilot. Getting the data and writing scripts to import it is the hard part, in part because new data comes out every 28 days. The only problem I have right now is that the FAA "order form" for digital data doesn't have any feedback, so two weeks after you filled in the form and you still don't see any data, you don't know if that's because they didn't get the order, or they're just really slow processing orders, or they are waiting until the next data update cycle. So I have some older less complete data from another source for now, but I think I know where to get the latest and best data cheap.

I've had two mice fail with cable problems in the last 6 months. As well as two sets of headphones. I'll tell you why - Cockatiels! They are the biggest chewers in the world. All pieces of paper around my computer desk have shredded edges. One time the cord was chewed so badly that the PS/2 port evidently shorted out - other PS/2 mice don't work in that port any more, so I had to start using a USB mouse.