I can't believe this link has been modded down elsewhere! NASA World Wind
It's a not only a great viewer for satellite images but uses a 3D card to combine it with DEM (digital elevation model) data, kind of like keyhole. Once you've zoomed in (both mouse buttons), use the right mouse button to change the angle and voila! And then, when finally bored of that, check out all the other good data/images like MODIS (fire/flood etc), tsunami, night earth etc with the WMS and Science buttons.
"Illegal income. Illegal income, such as stolen or embezzled funds, must be included in your income on line 21 of Form 1040, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity."
It seems very simple to start with, and so is good fun straight away, but is actually quite complex to get truly good at. I find it interesting to experiment with the strategies for defeating players with different flags.
I think it says something this in the docs: newbies should start on a server with limited shots, no jumping and probably just a few other players. Unless you're the sort of person who likes jumping in the deep end!
In the newest versions (10.0.x) there's some robots which will provide reasonable target practice, (start with -solo n) and watching the tactics of the autopilot (press 9) should help a little too.
There is some cheating around, but the newer versions are getting better and some servers are better than others.
I get to turn up here each day, a fantastic spot just out of the city, look after a network of Linux computers and the impressive hardware they control, and look at stars as well as spacecraft!
Yes, great idea - let's send out some nice powerful encoded signals, at a few hundred kilowatts to a few megawatts, at high enough frequencies to escape earth's effects, say a few gigahertz, from high-gain antennas which sweep the sky...
oh wait, we already do! Have a look at the transmitters used in NASA's DSN for the uplinks to the spacecraft all around the solar system, and the even bigger transmitters used elsewhere for planetary radar...
Actually, I work at Tidbinbilla, and there _were_ people here all weekend, 24/7, as there is every other day of the year.
In fact, there were more people here than normal - it's just that for part of saturday there was nobody inside the operations room as all tracking was stopped - everybody was needed to go out and help fight the fires.
The tracking station itself is undamaged, but the farmland around is burnt out, there is no commercial power and a bridge on one of the two roads from the city is out.
It's a nice theory that the staff should have done something, but how would they have noticed how long he had been there- even an extremely hard working staff member would not have been there for more than a quarter of this time continuously!
By the sounds of these places it would be quite common for staff to see the same people each day, with no idea as to whether they'd been anywhere else in between.
I have found a similar use for old hard drives: a simple laser engine.
If you connect the voice coils of two drives as suggested, (to an audio amp) and mount two small mirrors on them and shine a laser pointer on them with the axes 90 degrees apart, you can make a very cheap laser display. Connecting the audio to both drives with a few other basic components gives the most fantastic squiggles in time to the music - anything with a sampled beat is brilliant, the same pattern repeats when the same samples are played. Connecting the audio to one drive and a triangle wave generator to the other gives an oscilliscope-style wave display, which looks fantastic with a bit of smoke in the air. (a domesic iron makes a great smoke machine, just put the proper smoke juice in it and crank it up high. a tube from an aerosol pump or car windscreen wiper pump can be used to inject the fluid directly into the chamber)
I am working on how to drive them from my computer as a laser engine to do real laser lightshows, anyone else done this? I'm thinking either from the soundcard as above, or a clear cover and actually use the heads to read the surface with positioning info on it for a closed-loop system...
(of course, you can buy the proper parts (galvanometers) to make laser shows but they cost big $$$, and also recycling is good)
I didn't actually see this one personally (I'm not that old!) but apparently IBM once issued a program for their mainframes which must be the shortest program ever with a bug - a program with a single instruction!
It was IEFBR14, a standard utility program to branch on register 14; i.e. return immediately. Sounds trivial, but is actually quite useful in the weird and wonderful world of JES and JCL.
The fix for this program sounds huge though: it had to double in size to fix the bug!
For those who have not spotted it yet, the problem was that simply returning immediately does not clear register 15, the return code - hence if another program left register 15 nonzero, IEFBR14 would appear to fail!
Whilst we're slightly off topic: my perfect keyboard would have one thing I haven't seen or even heard of... a headphone jack. (yes, I've seen the ones with speakers, but read on)
It needs to be in the centre, on the edge facing you below the spacebar. This would prevent the cord from tangling! Please, anyone who makes keyboards....
I have to have headphones if I want to listen to music at work (bummer, but that's a different story), and the cord can be a real pain. I have a headphone extension cord blu-tacked below the desk in this position, which despite being a little messy works very well - the cord sits nicely, and as I move to either side looking at other stuff, my hands don't get tangled. A built-in amp with a volume slider in easy reach would be another big bonus for when you actually want to talk to someone!
How about Dilbert? Are the publishers of that next? By some incredible fluke, I turned over my desk calendar today, and there's one portraying a large dinosaur as stupid, and although it's only black & white, bears a striking resemblance to the purple one being talked about...
As an Australian, I'd like to say that that this action is a bloody good idea, but it won't work. It it's up to us as consumers to change this.
Most people I know have made their point of view known where it counts - at the cash register when they bought their DVD player.
Sure, the big brand players are mostly better quality, with fancier features, but Australians are snapping up the smaller asian brands for half the price that play discs from ALL REGIONS!
If enough people in the world buy these, and continue buying discs (esp. region 1) overseas, it will make a mockery of this system in a way that will see it end.
This site is good, but here's some even better tips:
(I've been using an old CD-ROM in my car for ages, here's my experience)
there's no need to stuff around with heatsinks! Just mount the 7805 so that the back of it is firmly against either the CDROM's housing or a good piece of metal in the dash. This dissipates the heat well enough, and electrically there's no worries in a negative earth car. (almost all cars in the last 20 yrs.)
Not all CDROM's are created equal. Experiment with different drives - some are excellent! I've got a "Diamond Data" 12x, which actually seems to have a (small, only fraction of a second) anti-skip buffer, and you can see the disc rotating at 2x. It also has nice big rubber shockers inside!
"alternator whine", the enemy of any in-car electronics can be particularly bad for these. (you can tell if it's this because it only happens when the engine's on, and changes pitch with engine revs.) Use a capacator across the power supply, but there's no need for ridiculously big one like for stereos. If it's still too bad, use a coil as well, these are commonly available at car shops as "noise suppressors".
experiment with different bumps: most CDROM's are good at withstanding bumps in some directions and not others. Test yours on the bench first, using just the computer's power lead and headphones. figure out which bumps are worst. Then when you mount it in the car, try and allow for some padding in that direction.
security: I deliberatey removed the flip-down cover from where the tray comes out of. It still works just fine, but it looks like a detachable face unit without the face! (but let's face it, if someone does nick it, it's cheap to replace)
Mine has been happily working for about 2 years like this, and with some rags at the sides as padding it's better over the bumps than my friend's cheap car stereo.!
IDEA: (for the enthusiastic, probably even a money-making idea): It would be possible to use a microcontroller to send the play command to the IDE port, i'm just not sure how much of the bus you'd have to implement or how expensive it would end up being.
Good luck! (but be careful...that site describes what can happen)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bush/gallery.html
I can't believe this link has been modded down elsewhere!
NASA World Wind
It's a not only a great viewer for satellite images but uses a 3D card to combine it with DEM (digital elevation model) data, kind of like keyhole. Once you've zoomed in (both mouse buttons), use the right mouse button to change the angle and voila! And then, when finally bored of that, check out all the other good data/images like MODIS (fire/flood etc), tsunami, night earth etc with the WMS and Science buttons.
here in Canberra, Australia we just got a new FM station which uses lots of smaller transmitters for stuff not played by the big networks:
Raw FM
Best paragraph of that one:
"Illegal income. Illegal income, such as stolen or embezzled funds, must be included in your income on line 21 of Form 1040, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity."
I'm totally hooked on this one :)
It seems very simple to start with, and so is good fun straight away, but is actually quite complex to get truly good at. I find it interesting to experiment with the strategies for defeating players with different flags.
I think it says something this in the docs: newbies should start on a server with limited shots, no jumping and probably just a few other players. Unless you're the sort of person who likes jumping in the deep end!
In the newest versions (10.0.x) there's some robots which will provide reasonable target practice, (start with -solo n) and watching the tactics of the autopilot (press 9) should help a little too.
There is some cheating around, but the newer versions are getting better and some servers are better than others.
I too take inspiration from the bigger picture, but I'm lucky enough to love even the "unglamorous" part of my job!
I work here - CDSCC
I get to turn up here each day, a fantastic spot just out of the city, look after a network of Linux computers and the impressive hardware they control, and look at stars as well as spacecraft!
Yes, great idea - let's send out some nice powerful encoded signals, at a few hundred kilowatts to a few megawatts, at high enough frequencies to escape earth's effects, say a few gigahertz, from high-gain antennas which sweep the sky ...
oh wait, we already do! Have a look at the transmitters used in NASA's DSN for the uplinks to the spacecraft all around the solar system, and the even bigger transmitters used elsewhere for planetary radar...
Actually, I work at Tidbinbilla, and there _were_ people here all weekend, 24/7, as there is every other day of the year.
In fact, there were more people here than normal - it's just that for part of saturday there was nobody inside the operations room as all tracking was stopped - everybody was needed to go out and help fight the fires.
The tracking station itself is undamaged, but the farmland around is burnt out, there is no commercial power and a bridge on one of the two roads from the city is out.
It's a nice theory that the staff should have done something, but how would they have noticed how long he had been there- even an extremely hard working staff member would not have been there for more than a quarter of this time continuously!
By the sounds of these places it would be quite common for staff to see the same people each day, with no idea as to whether they'd been anywhere else in between.
I have found a similar use for old hard drives: a simple laser engine.
...
If you connect the voice coils of two drives as suggested, (to an audio amp) and mount two small mirrors on them and shine a laser pointer on them with the axes 90 degrees apart, you can make a very cheap laser display. Connecting the audio to both drives with a few other basic components gives the most fantastic squiggles in time to the music - anything with a sampled beat is brilliant, the same pattern repeats when the same samples are played. Connecting the audio to one drive and a triangle wave generator to the other gives an oscilliscope-style wave display, which looks fantastic with a bit of smoke in the air. (a domesic iron makes a great smoke machine, just put the proper smoke juice in it and crank it up high. a tube from an aerosol pump or car windscreen wiper pump can be used to inject the fluid directly into the chamber)
I am working on how to drive them from my computer as a laser engine to do real laser lightshows, anyone else done this? I'm thinking either from the soundcard as above, or a clear cover and actually use the heads to read the surface with positioning info on it for a closed-loop system
(of course, you can buy the proper parts (galvanometers) to make laser shows but they cost big $$$, and also recycling is good)
I didn't actually see this one personally (I'm not that old!) but apparently IBM once issued a program for their mainframes which must be the shortest program ever with a bug - a program with a single instruction!
It was IEFBR14, a standard utility program to branch on register 14; i.e. return immediately. Sounds trivial, but is actually quite useful in the weird and wonderful world of JES and JCL.
The fix for this program sounds huge though: it had to double in size to fix the bug!
For those who have not spotted it yet, the problem was that simply returning immediately does not clear register 15, the return code - hence if another program left register 15 nonzero, IEFBR14 would appear to fail!
It needs to be in the centre, on the edge facing you below the spacebar. This would prevent the cord from tangling! Please, anyone who makes keyboards ....
I have to have headphones if I want to listen to music at work (bummer, but that's a different story), and the cord can be a real pain. I have a headphone extension cord blu-tacked below the desk in this position, which despite being a little messy works very well - the cord sits nicely, and as I move to either side looking at other stuff, my hands don't get tangled. A built-in amp with a volume slider in easy reach would be another big bonus for when you actually want to talk to someone!
How about Dilbert? Are the publishers of that next? By some incredible fluke, I turned over my desk calendar today, and there's one portraying a large dinosaur as stupid, and although it's only black & white, bears a striking resemblance to the purple one being talked about ...
Most people I know have made their point of view known where it counts - at the cash register when they bought their DVD player.
Sure, the big brand players are mostly better quality, with fancier features, but Australians are snapping up the smaller asian brands for half the price that play discs from ALL REGIONS!
If enough people in the world buy these, and continue buying discs (esp. region 1) overseas, it will make a mockery of this system in a way that will see it end.
(I've been using an old CD-ROM in my car for ages, here's my experience)
Mine has been happily working for about 2 years like this, and with some rags at the sides as padding it's better over the bumps than my friend's cheap car stereo.!
IDEA: (for the enthusiastic, probably even a money-making idea): It would be possible to use a microcontroller to send the play command to the IDE port, i'm just not sure how much of the bus you'd have to implement or how expensive it would end up being.
Good luck! (but be careful...that site describes what can happen)