I still love the idea someone on Kotaku had when they saw the Team Fortress 2 spy cosplayer with the 'GOD HATES SENTRIES' sign: He should have been standing in the midst of the WBC crazies, with one of THEIR signs, wearing 'a moron mask'.
The whole thing is just absolutely hilarious though. Good on them for mounting the counter-protest! Those WBC people are assholes.
This whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, what the hell, TI? I can at least understand the point of view of say, SONY, when they try to block people from running homebrew on the PSP... But I don't really see TI being worried about PIRACY on their CALCULATOR. What the hell are they even thinking? What's the rationale behind this ridiculousness?
No joke. The only way to ensure you get what you want is to build it yourself.
Buy an arcade stick and buttons from the nearest Suzo/HAPP distributor, these are what the arcades in the US and most locales outside of Asia have been using for decades. Then you just need a way to interface it. You can buy USB controller interface boards, like GroovyGameGear's GP-Wiz series of boards, or design and build your own using an opensource microcontroller firmware like V-USB. Just stay away from older boards that do keyboard emulation, they suck. Turning a bunch of inputs into a proper USB HID is much more reliable and easy to work with than mapping them to keyboard input.
I've made my own US-style arcade stick, a Japanese-style stick using Sanwa parts, and even interfaced an actual arcade cabinet 2-player control panel. All worked great!:)
Why does suddenly not getting mail on Saturday make sense at all? What about the people who are too busy to send OUT mail and USPS packages except on Saturday? Are they going to close the post offices entirely for the weekend?
For that matter, why does less than one tenth of one percent of online stores let you select the UPS/FedEx Saturday delivery option? I almost want to say I'd prefer that to USPS Saturday delivery, but really, anything I have coming USPS is often international and taking a god-long time to arrive anyway, so I kind of like having that extra day each week that it can show up...:(
Something else annoying on Google lately, when you search for something, and the result you click on is a forum thread, when you go back to the google search, after several seconds the entry for the forum thread you were just looking at expands to have a 'More threads from this forum' or somesuch link. And this invariably happens JUST as you're about to click on the next search result.
You had to imagine this was going to happen, everyone I knew was using Bing for the sole purpose of getting cashback. I'd search for something on Bing (The old standby was 'cheap ps3') and then follow the link to eBay and get xx% cashback on my BiN purchases. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I don't know what that bob8766 guy way up above is talking about, I'm pretty sure he's either making that crap up or is just ignorant. Because I never saw anything like that from retailers (Also, that sounds like it'd be of fairly dubious legality!) and certainly not on eBay!
When I first tried it a couple years back, they had something ridiculous like 25% cashback on eBay, capped at $200 per purchase with a max of 3 purchases in like 90 days or something. So I got $200 cashback on my Cintiq 21UX, making it an even better deal. (Not as good a deal as the crazy scammer people who were doing stuff like buying 8 $100 bills 3 times and getting $600 free...)
This year, it was down to like 8% cashback on eBay and 1-5% on lots of big-name online stores, apparently without a cap on the number of qualifying purchases... So I offered to do all my family's tax refund shopping.:) Got something like $100 back on my little sister's new laptop and electric guitar, $80 back on my new DSLR, $40 back on my NEO-GEO arcade cabinet, and $80 back on the 8 1.5tb HDDs I got to start my new RAID array.
I actually got instant cashback on the HDDs, so that was nice, but I really liked suddenly having an extra couple hundred bucks two months later.:D
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. So long Bing, and thanks for all the free money!
Two months ago I put an end to nearly a decade of practically continuous caffeinated beverage intake, and after feeling like the ravening undead for about two weeks-- which I spent the majority of sleeping --I'm back to feeling exactly the same as I did with the caffeine intake. Sunday I made the mistake of drinking a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, and it kept me up through Monday, wired as hell.
So, now I know two things... Constant caffeine intake basically nullifies any benefits, and the withdrawal is an absolute bitch. And now that I'm free of the constant intake, I can use caffeine occasionally like goddamn rocket fuel.
I have to imagine everyone saw that coming, since even an idiot in one of my IRC channels said "inb4 corporate firewalls block google for lost productivity!" when he first heard about it. Hehe.
They did actually manage to...de-Shinji...Shinji in the new movies. He still has plenty of whiny bitch moments, but he manages to man-up when it comes down to it. And he has a pretty spectacular crowning moment of awesome at the end of Evangelion 2.0 (Or Wevangeliwon, if you want to make fun of Anno's newfound love of obsolete katakana characters.) I can't wait for the bluray to come out on the 26th. (Something in the back of my mind has been screaming inarticulately in horror ever since it was faced with the 8+ month wait.)
Still, (as of yet) clean beaches and untainted food seem to scare consumers away from vacations and shrimp, not because there's a risk, but because most consumers are total alarmist bozos, just like most career-environmentalists.
Agreed. Personally, my reaction to the situation is "Eh, whatever." and will likely remain such right up until there's a flaming cloud of shit hanging overhead. Freaking the hell out never improves situations.
...maybe they'll fix the whole 'Firefox is suddenly an unreliable and slow piece of crap' bug introduced over the last several updates......but I doubt it.
Now if only someone would make a Chrome plugin that provides full FF-like 'awesome bar' support. I love Chrome, but the address bar's history seems very selective, and it makes recalling the addresses for images I've uploaded to my site a total pain in the ass, whereas in Firefox it was damn near like having an eidetic memory.
...what in the HELL is with these comments? A lot of these people either seem to have their heads up their asses, or are just jerks.
Sure, a million bucks isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and may not be huge by small business standards... But for fuck's sake people, we're talking about companies consisting of-- on average --just a couple of people. People JUST LIKE US. In fact, they ARE some of us! If YOU made a million dollars in a year, wouldn't it be a pretty big deal?
With the world economy in the toilet and still goin' round an' round, tiny companies like these making decent money selling open source gadgets and whatnot IS a big deal.
Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it? Sparkfun? Sure, they're not really tiny like the rest, they have facilities and staff and all that, but still... Wanna know how they're doing? They gave away $100,000 worth of free stuff a while back, and I'll bet everyone's still got their jobs and can afford to eat.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics. Opensource hardware is even going to change the consumer side of the equation. Making people smarter about the things they buy, and making the consumer take up a more participatory role. It's another step in the democratization of technology.
Here's hoping we bring up the next generation wanting to build and create more things than they buy off the shelf. And here's hoping my name will show up in a similar presentation in the not-too-distant future!
It's my understanding that volcanic ash is, among other things, incredibly abrasive. Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines.
I'd have to say the best practical learning experience comes from having something you want to do that you don't know HOW to do.:D
There were projects I wanted to undertake, ideas I wanted to try...but I had almost no idea what I was doing.
I'll be the first to admit that despite being a pretty smart guy, saying I'm 'high school educated' is a stretch; I swear, they'd graduate rocks around here if one were to enroll. I knew hardly anything about electronics, aside from growing up around tinkering in-general and thus knowing which end of a soldering iron to hold.
Ignorance has never been something to stop me though, so I set about looking into what I needed to know to do the things I wanted to do. (After all, half of being smart is knowing what you're stupid at, the other half is rectifying it.)
I found, what has to be, one of the single greatest places to start: Adafruit. I adore LadyAda, she's awesome.:) I bought a Digg Button kit, a USBTinyISP kit (AVR microcontroller programmer), an Arduino, an Arduino motor control shield kit, and an Arduino protoshield kit. The kits got my soldering skills back up to spec, and the Arduino was really a marvel. You can learn so much just screwing around with one. It's like 'Embedded Systems LITE' because it uses an easy-to-understand language that is structured in an intuitive way and actually helps you understand some of the more basic stuff going on. You can use it to do just about anything. One of my favorite early projects, was using a 'navigation switch' (Up, down, and push to select) to act as a 'color mixer' for an RGB LED. Turning the (PWM-controlled) brightness up and down, and using the 'select' to cycle through the R, G, and B elements.
Another great source is Sparkfun. You can find all sorts of sensors and other devices to use in your microcontroller projects ranging from useful to novel. Just interfacing an Arduino with random inputs and outputs is a great learning experience.
From there, I taught myself schematic layout and PCB design using EagleCAD. I started etching my own PCBs for prototypes using the toner transfer method.
It's been a year or two since I started down this road, and I have made progress on countless projects. I have one that I started seriously pursuing about a month ago, and I'm about ready to have a run of PCBs professionally produced. I also just built my own reflow soldering oven using a Black & Decker Infrawave and some control circuitry, so assembling the boards won't pose much of a problem despite the abundance of SMT devices present.
All in all, the opensource hardware movement is an incredible thing. Being able to see what other people have done through the original design files and code is incredibly educational, and it often gives me new ideas for things I want to do. Not to mention the fact that opensource hardware is making things more affordable. A couple weeks ago, I put down a preorder for an opensource logic analyzer, $45 assembled and shipped. That's practically nothing for a tool like that.
Having access to inexpensive Chinese PCB fabrication and methods of fast and reliable in-house assembly, means anyone can output production-quality electronic devices. Manufacturing 2.0 is here.:) (I can't wait for opensource injection-molding!)
Microphone and line-in jacks are definitely under-appreciated these days. Of course, less people need line-in jacks than used to, but microphone jacks are vital to online gaming. All the same, they could make them more robust. A couple years ago, I built two nearly-identical new computers, one for me, and one for my father.
A couple months later, he wanted to hook up the microphone that came with the motherboard so he could use VOIP, I talked him through it, and it wasn't working... Finally, I took the microphone and plugged it into my computer...suddenly my microphone jack didn't work anymore... I still don't know what was wrong with the mic (It was the same exact one I had already had plugged into my motherboard) but it fried the mic ports on both motherboards. I've recently taken to using my studio mic and mixer setup through a USB audio device for playing Left4Dead2 online with friends.... The sad irony of using a multi-hundred dollar audio rig to communicate things like "SHIT, SHIT, SHIT! KILL THIS FUCKING THING!!!" is palpable.
The other day, I took part in an online drawing seminar featuring Dave Gibbons... I wanted to record it (Something I wish I had done with the last webinar I attended) so I set up Camtasia Studio, only to find out that if I want to record system sounds, I need to use the line-in... (Nevermind the fact that that is STUPID.) So I took the USB line-in box (A Behringer U-CONTROL, similar to the U-PHONO that someone linked to earlier, but for interfacing a PC with a mixing board) and I literally took a cable and plugged the box's line-out into the line-in. Why is that even necessary? :
Anyway, I digress. I guess what I'm trying to say is, necessary or not, going extinct or not, I think they're being undermined by various issues and sometimes external devices are your only option, as sad as that may be.
I was surprised to see so few 'Netgear' SSIDs, around here that's 90% of the SSIDs I see, apparently a lot of that is due to Comcast's default config for users who opt for a wifi router. I see a lot of ISP names in that SSID list. I wonder why ISPs see a need to brand users' Wireless APs...free advertising?
As for pop culture references, my SSID (Used almost exclusively for my PSP, but available for visiting devices, like my sister's laptop and PSP.) is NERVHQ. And all my machines are named after the EVA units. (ZEROGOKI, SHOGOKI, NIGOKI, etc.):P
I recently had to change network topology— again, the first time was when I moved in, and found out that my new cable modem didn't provide internet sharing like my DSL modem did. —and it forced me to get a Wifi AP router instead of using the AP-capable wireless card on my PC. I had a nice little Netgear router someone gave me when I ran into problems with my cable modem, and I was able to find an identical router (With wifi AP) for less than $40. Which was less than I spent on my new network switch. (Finally moved up to gigabit) It's really a nice little router, good web interface, too. Seems like a fairly smart little box.
Okay, so drastically improving the thermal conductivity of a plastic is pretty neat, but can they— using similar molecular alignment methods —take materials that are already good heat conductors and make them EVEN BETTER heat conductors? The idea of a metal that only conducts heat in one direction and does it VERY WELL has interesting prospects.
If they can get a means of mass production to the point where it achieves the desired results more often than not, they could test the heatsinks after production and bin them by performance. As long as it performs better than the unmodified base material, it'd probably be worth it to the performance PC market. (And small high performance heatsinks are always desirable in a lot of industries.)
Having heard about this, I didn't install any of the pending updates on my WinXP x64 machine which I was a scant couple days from installing Windows 7 on. Tonight, just as I was getting ready to do the do, the WinXP installation stopped booting... I guess the update snuck its way in. Luckily I was in a position to simply move up the install a couple hours. I had been hoping to copy the data off the original system drive while it was still operational, but instead I just took the drive out and I'll copy the stuff off later.
God I hate Windows updates. They're always doing SOMETHING to automatically screw us good, whether by accident or not...
Could have been worse though; if I weren't in the process of getting ready to reinstall, I would have been completely up the creek.
Oh well. Windows 7 install is chugging along, I guess I'll go play some King of Fighters on the arcade cabinet I pissed away my tax refund on last week.:)
As if enough people aren't killing or being killed just talking on the goddamn things! Seriously.
Yes, yes. I know. Most people would be smart enough to play when it's appropriate... But those so inclined probably have a better standalone gaming handheld anyway.;o
I wonder if it'd be possible to integrate this with ARtoolkit. I was just about to put some money into a couple good webcams and a consumer HMD so I could really play around with doing cool stuff in AR.
I never really faced a problem with the Y2K bug, but now I remember it just about any time I sit down at my desk... A couple years ago at a thrift store, my mother found a Y2K snowglobe. Yes. I'm not kidding.
The base says '01-01-00' and 'It's coming...'. And in the globe, there's a computer with '01-01-00' on the screen, and a bunch of components and stuff bursting out of the top of the monitor. And the snow? Little plastic 1s and 0s. BEST. GIFT. EVER.
Slashdot Mirror
I still love the idea someone on Kotaku had when they saw the Team Fortress 2 spy cosplayer with the 'GOD HATES SENTRIES' sign: He should have been standing in the midst of the WBC crazies, with one of THEIR signs, wearing 'a moron mask'.
The whole thing is just absolutely hilarious though. Good on them for mounting the counter-protest! Those WBC people are assholes.
This whole thing makes absolutely no sense to me. I mean, what the hell, TI? I can at least understand the point of view of say, SONY, when they try to block people from running homebrew on the PSP... But I don't really see TI being worried about PIRACY on their CALCULATOR. What the hell are they even thinking? What's the rationale behind this ridiculousness?
No joke. The only way to ensure you get what you want is to build it yourself.
Buy an arcade stick and buttons from the nearest Suzo/HAPP distributor, these are what the arcades in the US and most locales outside of Asia have been using for decades. Then you just need a way to interface it. You can buy USB controller interface boards, like GroovyGameGear's GP-Wiz series of boards, or design and build your own using an opensource microcontroller firmware like V-USB. Just stay away from older boards that do keyboard emulation, they suck. Turning a bunch of inputs into a proper USB HID is much more reliable and easy to work with than mapping them to keyboard input.
I've made my own US-style arcade stick, a Japanese-style stick using Sanwa parts, and even interfaced an actual arcade cabinet 2-player control panel. All worked great! :)
Why does suddenly not getting mail on Saturday make sense at all? What about the people who are too busy to send OUT mail and USPS packages except on Saturday? Are they going to close the post offices entirely for the weekend?
For that matter, why does less than one tenth of one percent of online stores let you select the UPS/FedEx Saturday delivery option? I almost want to say I'd prefer that to USPS Saturday delivery, but really, anything I have coming USPS is often international and taking a god-long time to arrive anyway, so I kind of like having that extra day each week that it can show up... :(
Something else annoying on Google lately, when you search for something, and the result you click on is a forum thread, when you go back to the google search, after several seconds the entry for the forum thread you were just looking at expands to have a 'More threads from this forum' or somesuch link. And this invariably happens JUST as you're about to click on the next search result.
You had to imagine this was going to happen, everyone I knew was using Bing for the sole purpose of getting cashback. I'd search for something on Bing (The old standby was 'cheap ps3') and then follow the link to eBay and get xx% cashback on my BiN purchases. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I don't know what that bob8766 guy way up above is talking about, I'm pretty sure he's either making that crap up or is just ignorant. Because I never saw anything like that from retailers (Also, that sounds like it'd be of fairly dubious legality!) and certainly not on eBay!
When I first tried it a couple years back, they had something ridiculous like 25% cashback on eBay, capped at $200 per purchase with a max of 3 purchases in like 90 days or something. So I got $200 cashback on my Cintiq 21UX, making it an even better deal. (Not as good a deal as the crazy scammer people who were doing stuff like buying 8 $100 bills 3 times and getting $600 free...)
This year, it was down to like 8% cashback on eBay and 1-5% on lots of big-name online stores, apparently without a cap on the number of qualifying purchases... So I offered to do all my family's tax refund shopping. :) Got something like $100 back on my little sister's new laptop and electric guitar, $80 back on my new DSLR, $40 back on my NEO-GEO arcade cabinet, and $80 back on the 8 1.5tb HDDs I got to start my new RAID array.
I actually got instant cashback on the HDDs, so that was nice, but I really liked suddenly having an extra couple hundred bucks two months later. :D
Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. So long Bing, and thanks for all the free money!
Two months ago I put an end to nearly a decade of practically continuous caffeinated beverage intake, and after feeling like the ravening undead for about two weeks-- which I spent the majority of sleeping --I'm back to feeling exactly the same as I did with the caffeine intake. Sunday I made the mistake of drinking a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, and it kept me up through Monday, wired as hell.
So, now I know two things... Constant caffeine intake basically nullifies any benefits, and the withdrawal is an absolute bitch. And now that I'm free of the constant intake, I can use caffeine occasionally like goddamn rocket fuel.
I have to imagine everyone saw that coming, since even an idiot in one of my IRC channels said "inb4 corporate firewalls block google for lost productivity!" when he first heard about it. Hehe.
Fuck yeah! Fuckin' A! Fuck, fucking, fuckity-fuck! Fuckin' etcetera!!
Okay, I've reached my quota for today.
They did actually manage to...de-Shinji...Shinji in the new movies. He still has plenty of whiny bitch moments, but he manages to man-up when it comes down to it. And he has a pretty spectacular crowning moment of awesome at the end of Evangelion 2.0 (Or Wevangeliwon, if you want to make fun of Anno's newfound love of obsolete katakana characters.) I can't wait for the bluray to come out on the 26th. (Something in the back of my mind has been screaming inarticulately in horror ever since it was faced with the 8+ month wait.)
Agreed. Personally, my reaction to the situation is "Eh, whatever." and will likely remain such right up until there's a flaming cloud of shit hanging overhead. Freaking the hell out never improves situations.
...maybe they'll fix the whole 'Firefox is suddenly an unreliable and slow piece of crap' bug introduced over the last several updates... ...but I doubt it.
Now if only someone would make a Chrome plugin that provides full FF-like 'awesome bar' support. I love Chrome, but the address bar's history seems very selective, and it makes recalling the addresses for images I've uploaded to my site a total pain in the ass, whereas in Firefox it was damn near like having an eidetic memory.
...what in the HELL is with these comments? A lot of these people either seem to have their heads up their asses, or are just jerks.
Sure, a million bucks isn't a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and may not be huge by small business standards... But for fuck's sake people, we're talking about companies consisting of-- on average --just a couple of people. People JUST LIKE US. In fact, they ARE some of us! If YOU made a million dollars in a year, wouldn't it be a pretty big deal?
With the world economy in the toilet and still goin' round an' round, tiny companies like these making decent money selling open source gadgets and whatnot IS a big deal.
Yes, revenue isn't profit, as many have pointed out. But I'll bet you anything, these people are doing fine, which isn't exactly something we can all say, now is it? Sparkfun? Sure, they're not really tiny like the rest, they have facilities and staff and all that, but still... Wanna know how they're doing? They gave away $100,000 worth of free stuff a while back, and I'll bet everyone's still got their jobs and can afford to eat.
These are people just like us, and they're pioneering the new way to design, manufacture, and sell electronics. Opensource hardware is even going to change the consumer side of the equation. Making people smarter about the things they buy, and making the consumer take up a more participatory role. It's another step in the democratization of technology.
Here's hoping we bring up the next generation wanting to build and create more things than they buy off the shelf. And here's hoping my name will show up in a similar presentation in the not-too-distant future!
Luckily, all my drives are mounted through silicone vibration isolators. Gotta love Antec case design! :D http://media.giantpachinkomachineofdoom.com/2007-02/blog/images/u1_array_supersize.jpg
...I don't have much on the key ring.
And I want to do away with the apartment door key by switching to a keyless entry setup I plan to build. :D
Think we could clean up the air a little faster? It's snowing in New England right now, and it's supposed to keep doing it for the next 20 or so hours. http://media.giantpachinkomachineofdoom.com/blog/2010-04/images/someweather.jpg
It's my understanding that volcanic ash is, among other things, incredibly abrasive. Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines.
I'd have to say the best practical learning experience comes from having something you want to do that you don't know HOW to do. :D
There were projects I wanted to undertake, ideas I wanted to try...but I had almost no idea what I was doing.
I'll be the first to admit that despite being a pretty smart guy, saying I'm 'high school educated' is a stretch; I swear, they'd graduate rocks around here if one were to enroll. I knew hardly anything about electronics, aside from growing up around tinkering in-general and thus knowing which end of a soldering iron to hold.
Ignorance has never been something to stop me though, so I set about looking into what I needed to know to do the things I wanted to do. (After all, half of being smart is knowing what you're stupid at, the other half is rectifying it.)
I found, what has to be, one of the single greatest places to start: Adafruit. I adore LadyAda, she's awesome. :) I bought a Digg Button kit, a USBTinyISP kit (AVR microcontroller programmer), an Arduino, an Arduino motor control shield kit, and an Arduino protoshield kit. The kits got my soldering skills back up to spec, and the Arduino was really a marvel. You can learn so much just screwing around with one. It's like 'Embedded Systems LITE' because it uses an easy-to-understand language that is structured in an intuitive way and actually helps you understand some of the more basic stuff going on. You can use it to do just about anything. One of my favorite early projects, was using a 'navigation switch' (Up, down, and push to select) to act as a 'color mixer' for an RGB LED. Turning the (PWM-controlled) brightness up and down, and using the 'select' to cycle through the R, G, and B elements.
Another great source is Sparkfun. You can find all sorts of sensors and other devices to use in your microcontroller projects ranging from useful to novel. Just interfacing an Arduino with random inputs and outputs is a great learning experience.
From there, I taught myself schematic layout and PCB design using EagleCAD. I started etching my own PCBs for prototypes using the toner transfer method.
It's been a year or two since I started down this road, and I have made progress on countless projects. I have one that I started seriously pursuing about a month ago, and I'm about ready to have a run of PCBs professionally produced. I also just built my own reflow soldering oven using a Black & Decker Infrawave and some control circuitry, so assembling the boards won't pose much of a problem despite the abundance of SMT devices present.
All in all, the opensource hardware movement is an incredible thing. Being able to see what other people have done through the original design files and code is incredibly educational, and it often gives me new ideas for things I want to do. Not to mention the fact that opensource hardware is making things more affordable. A couple weeks ago, I put down a preorder for an opensource logic analyzer, $45 assembled and shipped. That's practically nothing for a tool like that.
Having access to inexpensive Chinese PCB fabrication and methods of fast and reliable in-house assembly, means anyone can output production-quality electronic devices. Manufacturing 2.0 is here. :) (I can't wait for opensource injection-molding!)
Microphone and line-in jacks are definitely under-appreciated these days. Of course, less people need line-in jacks than used to, but microphone jacks are vital to online gaming. All the same, they could make them more robust. A couple years ago, I built two nearly-identical new computers, one for me, and one for my father.
A couple months later, he wanted to hook up the microphone that came with the motherboard so he could use VOIP, I talked him through it, and it wasn't working... Finally, I took the microphone and plugged it into my computer...suddenly my microphone jack didn't work anymore... I still don't know what was wrong with the mic (It was the same exact one I had already had plugged into my motherboard) but it fried the mic ports on both motherboards. I've recently taken to using my studio mic and mixer setup through a USB audio device for playing Left4Dead2 online with friends.... The sad irony of using a multi-hundred dollar audio rig to communicate things like "SHIT, SHIT, SHIT! KILL THIS FUCKING THING!!!" is palpable.
The other day, I took part in an online drawing seminar featuring Dave Gibbons... I wanted to record it (Something I wish I had done with the last webinar I attended) so I set up Camtasia Studio, only to find out that if I want to record system sounds, I need to use the line-in... (Nevermind the fact that that is STUPID.) So I took the USB line-in box (A Behringer U-CONTROL, similar to the U-PHONO that someone linked to earlier, but for interfacing a PC with a mixing board) and I literally took a cable and plugged the box's line-out into the line-in. Why is that even necessary? :
Anyway, I digress. I guess what I'm trying to say is, necessary or not, going extinct or not, I think they're being undermined by various issues and sometimes external devices are your only option, as sad as that may be.
I was surprised to see so few 'Netgear' SSIDs, around here that's 90% of the SSIDs I see, apparently a lot of that is due to Comcast's default config for users who opt for a wifi router. I see a lot of ISP names in that SSID list. I wonder why ISPs see a need to brand users' Wireless APs...free advertising?
As for pop culture references, my SSID (Used almost exclusively for my PSP, but available for visiting devices, like my sister's laptop and PSP.) is NERVHQ. And all my machines are named after the EVA units. (ZEROGOKI, SHOGOKI, NIGOKI, etc.) :P
I recently had to change network topology— again, the first time was when I moved in, and found out that my new cable modem didn't provide internet sharing like my DSL modem did. —and it forced me to get a Wifi AP router instead of using the AP-capable wireless card on my PC. I had a nice little Netgear router someone gave me when I ran into problems with my cable modem, and I was able to find an identical router (With wifi AP) for less than $40. Which was less than I spent on my new network switch. (Finally moved up to gigabit) It's really a nice little router, good web interface, too. Seems like a fairly smart little box.
Okay, so drastically improving the thermal conductivity of a plastic is pretty neat, but can they— using similar molecular alignment methods —take materials that are already good heat conductors and make them EVEN BETTER heat conductors? The idea of a metal that only conducts heat in one direction and does it VERY WELL has interesting prospects.
If they can get a means of mass production to the point where it achieves the desired results more often than not, they could test the heatsinks after production and bin them by performance. As long as it performs better than the unmodified base material, it'd probably be worth it to the performance PC market. (And small high performance heatsinks are always desirable in a lot of industries.)
Having heard about this, I didn't install any of the pending updates on my WinXP x64 machine which I was a scant couple days from installing Windows 7 on. Tonight, just as I was getting ready to do the do, the WinXP installation stopped booting... I guess the update snuck its way in. Luckily I was in a position to simply move up the install a couple hours. I had been hoping to copy the data off the original system drive while it was still operational, but instead I just took the drive out and I'll copy the stuff off later.
God I hate Windows updates. They're always doing SOMETHING to automatically screw us good, whether by accident or not...
Could have been worse though; if I weren't in the process of getting ready to reinstall, I would have been completely up the creek.
Oh well. Windows 7 install is chugging along, I guess I'll go play some King of Fighters on the arcade cabinet I pissed away my tax refund on last week. :)
As if enough people aren't killing or being killed just talking on the goddamn things! Seriously.
Yes, yes. I know. Most people would be smart enough to play when it's appropriate... But those so inclined probably have a better standalone gaming handheld anyway. ;o
I wonder if it'd be possible to integrate this with ARtoolkit. I was just about to put some money into a couple good webcams and a consumer HMD so I could really play around with doing cool stuff in AR.
I never really faced a problem with the Y2K bug, but now I remember it just about any time I sit down at my desk... A couple years ago at a thrift store, my mother found a Y2K snowglobe. Yes. I'm not kidding.
The base says '01-01-00' and 'It's coming...'. And in the globe, there's a computer with '01-01-00' on the screen, and a bunch of components and stuff bursting out of the top of the monitor. And the snow? Little plastic 1s and 0s. BEST. GIFT. EVER.