The thought has occured to me, actually.:) My stuff is at www.nike.com/techlab - we designed the Triax.
I'd like to whip up a new case design; take the guts from an M500 and encase it in an injection molded magnesium case. Problem is, I don't have access to the design files; I'd have to do everything the hard way which is hugely inefficient, and expensive. Plus, I don't have pocket change for the ~$100k it would take to set up the molds.
Hm, maybe I should offer my services as a contractor to Palm?:) I'd gladly spend a huge amount of time testing it in skies and rivers of my backyard, the Canadian Rockies:)
This just underscores a long time bitch of mine - when the heck are we going to see reasonably tough electronics? Every watch I've ever owned has been waterproof; why the heck can't they start building other stuff that way?
I understand that a PDA is a bit tougher to waterproof than a watch (I design waterproof electronics for a day job), but it's about time somebody made an attempt. I've just started using my Palm as a flight log for my paragliding - my old logbook was stolen along with my truck; the advantage with the palm is that it gets backed up all the time. And it's smaller than my old logbook. Plus a whole lot of other good stuff - navigational programs, books to read while I'm waiting for conditions to improve, etc. I use an aluminum case, and it has survived several violent crashes so far (no paragliding related ones yet!), but it certainly wouldn't have surved a drop in the creek I had to ford last weekend.
So come on guys, get with the program. Not every pda user lives in a cube.
/rant
Re:Titanium wedding rings = more torn off fingers?
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 1
On the plus side, these iron rings are tops for ripping the cap off a bottle of beer. Blows peoples minds when you do it - very loud "POP" and the cap goes riccocheting around the room. Gotta build up those calluses though - first few times I tried this I ended up with blood all over my freshly opened beer.
Never used to wear my iron ring till I found out this...:)
Dude, check out that www.pocketlogger.com that I was talking about - I just bought one for my DSM, but they claim to have an ODM-II version as well. I haven't received mine yet, but they're pretty popular for DSM's - when I was shopping for my new car, I kept seeing Talon's for sale that came with their own Palm and pocketlogger. At first I was like "WTF?", but now that I have the car and see it's potential, I understand. It's really just a converter that swaps that ISO 9141-2 interface into an RS-232. That's what you're looking for, right?
Check it out - www.pocketlogger.com - they make some palm software and line level converter cable so that I can hook my palm directly to my ECU. It'll log all the important stuff at about 20 Hz, and display it in realtime with fancy graphs. I can output things like RPM over time to a csv file, so with a little logic, total vehicle weight, gear ratios, tires sizes, and the assumption that my AWD is hooking up, I could even plot approximate hp and torque curves for each gear after a run.
I can play with the injector settings and various solenoids too, but can't actually reprogram the ignition or fuel maps, but that's OK. On these 1g DSM's, all you have to do is mess with the wastegate solenoid line in order to increase the turbo boost. Very fun car - can't wait to try some rallying in it!
Plus, imagine how cool it'll be to have a Palm velcroed to the dash beside the Empeg, happily churning out graphs of engine data!
One more thing - engine size is one thing, but induction is another. This little 2l 4 cyl turbo makes 195 hp stock. Double the boost pressure, and it makes a lot more - can you say four wheel power slide? I like it. Plus the car is a Laser - it doesn't look like much to the rice boys, at least until the turbo spools.:)
but faster. I used to be into SF2 a lot too, spent way too much money on it. Then I got back into martial arts - taekwondo. Wow, talk about chess! Chess where you get to make your moves as fast as you want, it's full on 3d surround sound, and it hurts when you loose. What could be better?:) Chicks dig scars.
Even better, you just use a few thousand antiatoms to set off a microfusion reaction - all of a sudden you've got enough specific impulse to get a probe to Alpha Centauri in 10 years! Very cool!
Hey, if this is real, and the guy really did spend 27 years on it, I think he should get to profit on it. You don't like it, you want free energy? Go spend 27 years of your own - you know it's possible now (assuming this guy isn't full of !@#$), get to it.
I mean come on here - I was trying to get my funky (old) linux laptop to tell me what the signal to noise ratio was on the wireless card, and to get it to work it turns out I have to recompile the kernel, just to set a single flag. WTF!? Install the source, make and compile an entire operating system, all just so I can get a stupid little program to run? That's more than a little counter productive, and a royal pain in the ass. It was literally easier to install win95 and use the default dos program to monitor the link quality. What a pain in the butt - something's smells rotten there.
Hey, you guys remeber those two armored bank robbers in the US a few years ago? They wore the modern version of plate mail; kevlar suits with hard plates in pockets over top. These two guys just walked around shooting cops with impunity with their assault rifles while something like 100 cops were shooting at them with pistols and shotguns. They'd get hit, shrug it off and dump half a clip at whoever shot at them. The video was pretty impressive - but there was a chink; I think both of them eventually got shot in the face by snipers. Looked absolutely nasty though!
Aaahhh, all of a sudden that funny pose she did in the suit at the beginning of the movie makes sense - the one where she twirls one wrist after stopping in mid stride. It's a classic weightlifter pose! Too funny!
Absolutely. If I hear a broadcast from Iran, or any one of the countries that have told the ITF (I think that's the acronym, can't remember right now) that their citizens are not allowed to talk on my ham radio, I'm legally required to not listen to it. I guess I'm supposed to plug my ears, or pull the radio plug out of the wall as soon as I hear a callsign from one of the blacklisted countries. Pretty silly, no?
Ok, so doing good things is a good thing. However, I take issue with your attitude of "have faith, go to heaven, be happy". First off, a lot of us don't believe in any of that religious bull!@#$. Secondly, that's precisely the attitude that prevents us from progressing - "oh, don't worry, you'll go to heaven anyway." Sorry, but umpteen different conflicting religious theories have convinced me that they are all full of crap, and I'd rather spend my time trying to improve the world rather than devoting my short life to the study of some medieval dude's theories on the (at that time) unexplained.
So, we can blow up whole cities in a single shot, sometimes we can shoot missiles out of the sky. Put the two together, and we can make a difference. Maybe we have to insert the bomb a ways into the asteroid - that what they were playing with NEAR for. Maybe we need a bigger bomb - but I doubt THAT will ever be a problem.
Detection is the big thing though - a small nudge a few years early is a lot easier that trying to move the entire asteroid a few days before impact. Yeah, there are problems, but motivated people will work out solutions to those problems. Fatalistic, religious apathy disgusts me to no end.
Hm, that's called "opt out", and most people consider that about as nice and fluffy as spam. Just uncheck the box, sure, the one box on 15 pages of install crap. Hey, I saw the stupid uncheck box, you can bet that the slimeballs that wrote the software are counting on the fact that a good percentage of the users will miss that checkbox.
Wow, invading peoples privacy for money - those guys are real kings!
Yeah, a couple of web cams for target acquisition and tracking, two torquey servoes to aim the Nerf blaster, one more to pull the trigger, this software to track the perps, and whammo! I could even calculate trajectories for the nerf darts (within their uncertanty, which is large), and give the target a few seconds to yell out the password in case they don't want to get shot. Very cool. Automatic cubicle defense systems - I could make a fortune here!
The point is not to return resources to Earth - it's way cheaper to just go and dig up someone's back yard and find stuff there. The point is for exploration - instead of taking everything with you, you build it when you get there. Ie, send a "seed" ship to an asteroid, and use the resources there to build a really big ship, out of a gravity well, and use it to get to a place further away. The benefit is that we didn't have to lift all the resources out of Earth's gravity well.
The danger is that this type of system, if it was automated, could easily over-run us.
Hey, why bother with a railgun? If your projectile is not in a gravity well (ie, like an asteroid), all you have to do is drop it on somebody's head. Small grans of sand - nice fireworks. Suitcased sized chunks of iron - take out some cars (good luck with the guidance). Asteroid sized stuff - ever hear of that crater near Yucatan? Seen any dinosaurs lately? Nuff said.
Perhaps this is why I compulsively stick my neck out all the time, whitewater kayaking, paragliding, motocross, etc. I hope I don't get eaten by a cat...
Yeah, I just did a search for hp emulators for palms - I only came up with a 12c emulator. I've already replaced the built in palm calc with a rpn version. I use my palm more these days, but you just can't beat the old 48GX for built in dimensional analysis and all that. The roms are there; the ram is in the palm; I wonder if it'd be possible to do a complete port?
I want full 3d, laser scanned on to my titantium sunglasses. I want lowly text windows superimposed on my vision, placed wherever I feel like looking at them. I want head tracking so I'm not limited to staring at one little box. I want to see navigational data, likely thermal triggers, and past successful climbs hilighted for me as I'm cruising around the mountains on my paraglider. I want the radar detectors on my motorcycle to feed strength and directional data into my HUD, and automatically compare the data to the stuff I saw last week and whatever anyone else noticed on this stretch of highway lately. I want to see my mechanical designs in glorious 3d, not projected onto some crappy flat plane. I want to be able to wander through the circuit I'm designing, poking and prodding and pushing traces and components into place.
And while I'd dreaming, I want to be able afford this too!
Hey, we're all infested with nanites. Power sources? Solar, sugar. Mobile? You bet - flagella, amoebic feet, cillia. Self replicating? Check out the bread you left out for a couple of days - it's now turning into grey goo.
Really, I think nanotech and genetic engineering will evolve into the same science.
I feel the same way about PDA's - I never would have bought one, but I ended up borrowing a palm III from work. I never use items 1 through 7, except perhaps to look up phone numbers occasioanlly. But, I drag the thing around with me everywhere now! Here's what I find cool about it:
Ebooks. Gutenburg Project or otherwise, I love to read, and it's hard to beat fitting 10 books in your pocket. Plus I can read at night very comfortably, without turing on the light and pissing off the girlfriend.
PDF's. I read Podkletnov's latest paper on my palm one night. I still don't know if the guy is for real, but it was a cool read!
Avantgo. I get Space.com (including a nightly guide to the sky), all the latest Routers and AP news bites, some Canadian content, and what movies are playing where in my town, with reviews!
Planetarium. I never new !@#$ about the night sky till I tried this. Now I can look at any celestial object in the sky and positively ID it in a few seconds with my palm. Very cool around the campfire on those whitewater kayaking weekends. I'm even learning to do rudimentary navigation using the stars. I just wish the Palm was waterproof.
Collins French-English Dictionary. Full on, 100,000 definitions, and instant lookup. Kicks ass on any paperback dictionary I've ever seen, and with graphiti I can find words very very fast.
Actually, colonizing a new planet isn't going to solve any problems. They'll just get twice as big. We reproduce exponentially right now - double the habitat, and it only takes a few generations to absorb the new resources. Look at North America, for instance. If we want to survive in the future, we need to learn to work with what we've got. Either we learn to control our population, or it gets controlled. War is a pretty effective retro-active birth control. Do it now, or do it later - we choose.
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The thought has occured to me, actually. :) My stuff is at www.nike.com/techlab - we designed the Triax.
:) I'd gladly spend a huge amount of time testing it in skies and rivers of my backyard, the Canadian Rockies :)
I'd like to whip up a new case design; take the guts from an M500 and encase it in an injection molded magnesium case. Problem is, I don't have access to the design files; I'd have to do everything the hard way which is hugely inefficient, and expensive. Plus, I don't have pocket change for the ~$100k it would take to set up the molds.
Hm, maybe I should offer my services as a contractor to Palm?
rant/
This just underscores a long time bitch of mine - when the heck are we going to see reasonably tough electronics? Every watch I've ever owned has been waterproof; why the heck can't they start building other stuff that way?
I understand that a PDA is a bit tougher to waterproof than a watch (I design waterproof electronics for a day job), but it's about time somebody made an attempt. I've just started using my Palm as a flight log for my paragliding - my old logbook was stolen along with my truck; the advantage with the palm is that it gets backed up all the time. And it's smaller than my old logbook. Plus a whole lot of other good stuff - navigational programs, books to read while I'm waiting for conditions to improve, etc. I use an aluminum case, and it has survived several violent crashes so far (no paragliding related ones yet!), but it certainly wouldn't have surved a drop in the creek I had to ford last weekend.
So come on guys, get with the program. Not every pda user lives in a cube.
/rant
On the plus side, these iron rings are tops for ripping the cap off a bottle of beer. Blows peoples minds when you do it - very loud "POP" and the cap goes riccocheting around the room. Gotta build up those calluses though - first few times I tried this I ended up with blood all over my freshly opened beer.
:)
Never used to wear my iron ring till I found out this...
Dude, check out that www.pocketlogger.com that I was talking about - I just bought one for my DSM, but they claim to have an ODM-II version as well. I haven't received mine yet, but they're pretty popular for DSM's - when I was shopping for my new car, I kept seeing Talon's for sale that came with their own Palm and pocketlogger. At first I was like "WTF?", but now that I have the car and see it's potential, I understand. It's really just a converter that swaps that ISO 9141-2 interface into an RS-232. That's what you're looking for, right?
Check it out - www.pocketlogger.com - they make some palm software and line level converter cable so that I can hook my palm directly to my ECU. It'll log all the important stuff at about 20 Hz, and display it in realtime with fancy graphs. I can output things like RPM over time to a csv file, so with a little logic, total vehicle weight, gear ratios, tires sizes, and the assumption that my AWD is hooking up, I could even plot approximate hp and torque curves for each gear after a run.
:)
I can play with the injector settings and various solenoids too, but can't actually reprogram the ignition or fuel maps, but that's OK. On these 1g DSM's, all you have to do is mess with the wastegate solenoid line in order to increase the turbo boost. Very fun car - can't wait to try some rallying in it!
Plus, imagine how cool it'll be to have a Palm velcroed to the dash beside the Empeg, happily churning out graphs of engine data!
One more thing - engine size is one thing, but induction is another. This little 2l 4 cyl turbo makes 195 hp stock. Double the boost pressure, and it makes a lot more - can you say four wheel power slide? I like it. Plus the car is a Laser - it doesn't look like much to the rice boys, at least until the turbo spools.
Hey, if they're travelling in my neck of the woods, they'd be right. The signs do say "beware of bears", and they better be scared! :)
but faster. I used to be into SF2 a lot too, spent way too much money on it. Then I got back into martial arts - taekwondo. Wow, talk about chess! Chess where you get to make your moves as fast as you want, it's full on 3d surround sound, and it hurts when you loose. What could be better? :) Chicks dig scars.
Even better, you just use a few thousand antiatoms to set off a microfusion reaction - all of a sudden you've got enough specific impulse to get a probe to Alpha Centauri in 10 years! Very cool!
Hey, if this is real, and the guy really did spend 27 years on it, I think he should get to profit on it. You don't like it, you want free energy? Go spend 27 years of your own - you know it's possible now (assuming this guy isn't full of !@#$), get to it.
I mean come on here - I was trying to get my funky (old) linux laptop to tell me what the signal to noise ratio was on the wireless card, and to get it to work it turns out I have to recompile the kernel, just to set a single flag. WTF!? Install the source, make and compile an entire operating system, all just so I can get a stupid little program to run? That's more than a little counter productive, and a royal pain in the ass. It was literally easier to install win95 and use the default dos program to monitor the link quality. What a pain in the butt - something's smells rotten there.
Hey, you guys remeber those two armored bank robbers in the US a few years ago? They wore the modern version of plate mail; kevlar suits with hard plates in pockets over top. These two guys just walked around shooting cops with impunity with their assault rifles while something like 100 cops were shooting at them with pistols and shotguns. They'd get hit, shrug it off and dump half a clip at whoever shot at them. The video was pretty impressive - but there was a chink; I think both of them eventually got shot in the face by snipers. Looked absolutely nasty though!
Aaahhh, all of a sudden that funny pose she did in the suit at the beginning of the movie makes sense - the one where she twirls one wrist after stopping in mid stride. It's a classic weightlifter pose! Too funny!
Absolutely. If I hear a broadcast from Iran, or any one of the countries that have told the ITF (I think that's the acronym, can't remember right now) that their citizens are not allowed to talk on my ham radio, I'm legally required to not listen to it. I guess I'm supposed to plug my ears, or pull the radio plug out of the wall as soon as I hear a callsign from one of the blacklisted countries. Pretty silly, no?
Ok, so doing good things is a good thing. However, I take issue with your attitude of "have faith, go to heaven, be happy". First off, a lot of us don't believe in any of that religious bull!@#$. Secondly, that's precisely the attitude that prevents us from progressing - "oh, don't worry, you'll go to heaven anyway." Sorry, but umpteen different conflicting religious theories have convinced me that they are all full of crap, and I'd rather spend my time trying to improve the world rather than devoting my short life to the study of some medieval dude's theories on the (at that time) unexplained.
So, we can blow up whole cities in a single shot, sometimes we can shoot missiles out of the sky. Put the two together, and we can make a difference. Maybe we have to insert the bomb a ways into the asteroid - that what they were playing with NEAR for. Maybe we need a bigger bomb - but I doubt THAT will ever be a problem.
Detection is the big thing though - a small nudge a few years early is a lot easier that trying to move the entire asteroid a few days before impact. Yeah, there are problems, but motivated people will work out solutions to those problems. Fatalistic, religious apathy disgusts me to no end.
Wow, invading peoples privacy for money - those guys are real kings!
Yeah, a couple of web cams for target acquisition and tracking, two torquey servoes to aim the Nerf blaster, one more to pull the trigger, this software to track the perps, and whammo! I could even calculate trajectories for the nerf darts (within their uncertanty, which is large), and give the target a few seconds to yell out the password in case they don't want to get shot. Very cool. Automatic cubicle defense systems - I could make a fortune here!
The danger is that this type of system, if it was automated, could easily over-run us.
Hey, why bother with a railgun? If your projectile is not in a gravity well (ie, like an asteroid), all you have to do is drop it on somebody's head. Small grans of sand - nice fireworks. Suitcased sized chunks of iron - take out some cars (good luck with the guidance). Asteroid sized stuff - ever hear of that crater near Yucatan? Seen any dinosaurs lately? Nuff said.
Perhaps this is why I compulsively stick my neck out all the time, whitewater kayaking, paragliding, motocross, etc. I hope I don't get eaten by a cat...
Yeah, I just did a search for hp emulators for palms - I only came up with a 12c emulator. I've already replaced the built in palm calc with a rpn version. I use my palm more these days, but you just can't beat the old 48GX for built in dimensional analysis and all that. The roms are there; the ram is in the palm; I wonder if it'd be possible to do a complete port?
And while I'd dreaming, I want to be able afford this too!
Really, I think nanotech and genetic engineering will evolve into the same science.
Heh, I just refer to them as Small and Floppy.
Ebooks. Gutenburg Project or otherwise, I love to read, and it's hard to beat fitting 10 books in your pocket. Plus I can read at night very comfortably, without turing on the light and pissing off the girlfriend.
PDF's. I read Podkletnov's latest paper on my palm one night. I still don't know if the guy is for real, but it was a cool read!
Avantgo. I get Space.com (including a nightly guide to the sky), all the latest Routers and AP news bites, some Canadian content, and what movies are playing where in my town, with reviews!
Planetarium. I never new !@#$ about the night sky till I tried this. Now I can look at any celestial object in the sky and positively ID it in a few seconds with my palm. Very cool around the campfire on those whitewater kayaking weekends. I'm even learning to do rudimentary navigation using the stars. I just wish the Palm was waterproof.
Collins French-English Dictionary. Full on, 100,000 definitions, and instant lookup. Kicks ass on any paperback dictionary I've ever seen, and with graphiti I can find words very very fast.
Asteriods. Need I say more?
Actually, colonizing a new planet isn't going to solve any problems. They'll just get twice as big. We reproduce exponentially right now - double the habitat, and it only takes a few generations to absorb the new resources. Look at North America, for instance. If we want to survive in the future, we need to learn to work with what we've got. Either we learn to control our population, or it gets controlled. War is a pretty effective retro-active birth control. Do it now, or do it later - we choose.