The nodes could be called servers, or clients, or routers, or storage, depending on how you view them. The distinguishing characteristic of Freenet is that the people running nodes don't know what's in them.
Freenet's a nice place to publish blogs, since there's no advertising and no hosting cost. You're asked to run a node if you're able, to help the network in general, but you're under no obligation to do so.
If anyone actually gets ahold of this, despite the inevitable heavy slashdotting it will receive, please mirror it on Freenet! It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity.;) If the Powers That Be don't want you corrupting your mind with impure knowledge, then such material belongs on Freenet!
If you're not familiar with the Freenet project, take look: Users donate bandwidth and space by running a "node", and the network's content exists in the collective datastore shared by thousands of nodes.
Data is duplicated as it's retrieved, so popular content gets more redundantly distributed. Node-to-node communications are encrypted, and so is the content in each datastore. You don't know and can't control what's on your own node.
The usual interface to Freenet is a web browser, since web pages and images can be easily inserted into the network. Other types of data (music, movies, programs) are common, and front-end programs exist to facilitate large uploads and downloads.
Check out Freenet, run a stable node, and play with it! The more you use it, the faster it gets. Bandwidth is more important than space; if you can host a node on something faster than a dialup it would be nice.
Oh, and here's the cool thing about Freenet that makes it perfect for things like modchip designs: Once inserted, content cannot be forcibly removed. Even the creators of the network can't delete something from it. The only way content falls out of freenet is if everyone ignores it.
Had the most wonderful names for its characters. How are you gonna beat the Crimson Tape? (his special power is Organizational Charts)
To further quote the ibiblio review, "However, the pictures are so colorful, so unique and lively that identifying with the characters is easy. Captain Excitement, Oxide Man, Princess Glovebox, they are much more memorable and interesting then any amount of warriors or mages. Every character seems to spring to life."
How can you not love characters who turn things to rust?
If you're one of the lucky bastards who DOES get something before the site slows to a crawl, please insert it into Freenet and post the CHK in the comments after the story.
There's no reason to wait for someone to put up a bittorrent link, when any bozo can insert anything into Freenet.
Of course it would all be more trustable if the original content provider (QNX.com in this case)would put an MD5 hash on their download page, so even if we don't get the file from them, we can make sure it's authentic.
Of course of course, since a Freenet CHK is itself a form of checksum, if the original content provider would insert the file themselves and post the CHK on their download page, all of this silliness could be averted and their poor server would be happier too.
Freenet is perfect if you want to avoid this sort of arbitrary rule. Freenet is uncensorable, anonymous, and almost usable! (It's made great improvements lately, and it needs your help to grow.)
Read about how freenet works (totally distributed) and why it's cool (encryption means you don't even know what's stored on your node), and then run a node! Putter around for a while then publish something. Your political speech belongs on Freenet.
I personally own two Panasonic Toughbooks (an old CF-25, and my present CF-17), and I love them to death, despite the fact that the old batteries don't hold squat for a charge anymore. I found a place that'll rebuild the packs(nuclearcomputers@nospam.hotmail.com) but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Buying a used Toughbook can be bit of an adventure. If the auction doesn't say the port covers are present and in good shape, they probably aren't. If it doesn't say the battery holds a useful charge, it definitely doesn't. One nice thing is that all the Toughbook models share a common battery charger, so the AC and car adapters are universal.
Owning a machine that you can dropkick while running is a lot of fun. I think nothing of walking in the rain, laptop perched on one hand, typing with the other, Nextel velcroed to the back of the machine with a plastic baggie over the top of it because the sissy phone isn't ruggedized. IRC from a thunderstorm? You bet! Folks sometimes look at me funny when I use the laptop as a hammer.
As far as the memory stick thing: Utter madness! Can you imagine a computer with a 40-gig hard drive, that only let you store data on floppies? That's just assinine. Digital video cameras that don't let you use the tape for stills are crap. Many do, and I'm presently in the process of figuring out which do and which don't. Just imagine, thousands of megapixel still photos on a single tape.
By the way, if you're not Firewire-enabled, some of the new DV cameras will let you download the mpeg movie data from the tape over USB 1.1. Although it is agonizingly slow, it works in a pinch.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen web email that was happy about doing large file transfers. Assuming one only runs across an internet cafe every few weeks, one might have hundreds of megs of photos that need to be realiably sent home. No web mail is going to do that.
Plus, most internet cafes don't have flash memory readers attached to the computers, and might not be happy if you plugged in your own. The only way to use the network "as you please" would be to bring along a laptop or Terapin Mine, and plug straight into the ethernet.
Once internet access has been obtained, getting the photos somewhere is easy enough. Get an account on a friend's FTP server, and make them promise to make backups as soon as new uploads are detected.
Then you just have to cope with the speed of the connection in a foreign internet cafe. If you're supremely lucky, they might have a T1/E1 connection, but it's more likely to be quite slow. Sitting there waiting for a half gig of photos to transfer might take a sizable bite out of one's day.
Good tip about the universal current adapter. Instead of a 110-to-DC and a 220-to-110 adapter chained together, it might make more sense to order a 220-to-DC adapter. This is not only more reliable and lighter, it also makes it less obvious that you're a Yankee.
Carry a set of Lithium batteries. They weigh almost nothing, and when your NiMHs are dead with no chance to charge them for a few more days, you'll be glad you spent ten bucks on the Lithiums.
There are dozens of other "media vault" style devices, many of which use 1.8" drives instead of 2.5" like the Mine. They're single-purpose devices, with a button that simply copies the flash into a directory on the drive, and blinks when it's finished.
The Mine is much more than just camera-to-storage. It's got Ethernet, USB master, USB slave, AV output, and a PCMCIA slot. It's also not too great on the batteries, so you might want to carry a solar panel.
I'm not sure if all revisions of the Mine include this little undocumented feature, but my friend's model has a jumper which allows it to charge the batteries in its compartment, when connected to external power.
I've long been a fan of CF, because of its high capacities and universality, which drives cost down. However, its is bulky compared to the other standards, and the multipin connector is expensive.
My most recent camera is SmartMedia (SSFDC) based, and I'm happy with it. The neat thing about the cards is that they're flat. I can tuck one into my cheek to conceal it, slobber all over it "I don't know what you're talking about officer", wipe it off, put it back into the camera, and it works flawlessly.
Doing the same thing with a CF card would result in the contact holes becoming waterlogged, and requiring compressed air to blast them out. By the way if you've never opened a CF card, grab one that you don't use any more (who needs all those 8mb starter cards that come with crappy cameras?) and rip it apart. They're pretty cool. I think I'll put photos up on my gallery, check the Tech album.
Anyway, CF's speed and size are great, but the connector is its downfall as a media format. (as an expansion slot, lots of pins are great!)
TelcoData.US is great if you want to find out what provider serves a particular prefix, or what switches are in an area, or what ILECs have presence in a city, that sort of stuff. Play with it!
The best thing is, there's a WAP interface so you can easily do such lookups right from your phone.:)
The funny thing about 802.11b is that it's not spread spectrum in any sense of the word I'm familiar with. It's not resistant to interference, it's not compatible with other transmitters on the same band, and it certainly doesn't appear as "background" to another device. Witness 802.11b versus X10 video cameras. If these were truly spread spectrum, they'd never even notice each other except for a bump in the noise floor.
Read the article Resisting 802.11 zealotry and tell me what you think.. This raises a lot of good points about why 802.11b is a bad example for a lot of what's being discussed here.
I agree that implementing these ideas in the existing unlicensed spectrum is the only sensible way to prove that we deserve access to more. It's a neat coincidence that this makes true wideband SDR totally unnecessary, since we already have transceivers that work happily in all the part-15 bands, and many implementations are just a radio front end coupled to a DSP. (Ricochet comes to mind. Anyone wanna reverse engineer some poletops?)
The real hurdle I see is protocol problems. Look at the 802.11b hotspot disaster. Look at the cacophony of incompatible cell phone standards! Think of what happens when arbitrary numbers of monkeys write HTML with proprietary extensions, and try to tell me with a straight face that developers will be able to cooperatively share spectrum.
I believe it's quite important to write with a pen, just not in cursive. It's slow to write, slower to read, and utterly impossible to OCR. Engineer-style block printing should be taught and required.
As far as actual illiteracy goes, I agree completely. My sister used to walk home from elementary school, red pencil in hand, marking the mistakes in the principal's newsletter as she walked. The educators in our "exemplary school district" can barely spell their own names, much less explain the difference between "there" and "their".
I'm all in favor of simplifying the language. "DRIVE THRU" is just fine with me, since through though tough ought
is just ridiculous. Certain spellings deserve to die out. Grammar, on the other hand, does not! I never learned how to diagram a sentence, I can't tell you the difference between a dangling preposition and a gerund, and I can barely remember the different parts of speech. (Is it just me, or is "parts of speech" a stupid term that sounds like it should mean "phonemes"?)
At my last job, the receptionist (who secretly held the whole place together) insisted on proofreading letters written by the owner and president. It's hard to tell someone "You sound like an idiot on paper." but she managed somehow.
She and I used to commiserate about the inability of the engineers to express themselves, and the money it cost the company because of vague contracts, misinterpreted job specifications, and delayed vendor support. A little misspelling here and there just makes you look stupid or hurried, but unpunctuated paragraphs are difficult to extract meaning from!
d'Nealian. I agree, it looked childish then and it still does today. I loathed wasting the time to learn it, and I forgot it as quickly as possible afterward. Cursive handwriting is one of those things the teachers honestly have a hard time justifying when asked "when are we ever gonna need this?".
The form of my writing, like yours, follows function. It's composed of large caps and small caps. I've never seen the point to crossing the 7 or Z characters (I can make them distinctly, thank you) but I do cross my zeroes.
My writing always indisputably legible, even though it frequently looks messy. That's probably because I only write when there's no alternative, so a good portion of it is done in moving vehicles, on the backs of envelopes, or in a heck of a hurry.
My signature's atrocious too! I forget letters in my last name constantly. This causes bank tellers endless grief. Once I endorsed 3 checks while standing in line, then asked to deposit them. The signatures looked nothing like each other. The teller asked for ID, then asked me to verify my "mother's maiden name".
Useful fact: The field labeled "mother's maiden name" is simply a password field. Feel free to fill in an alphanumeric string. As long as you can recall it when asked, it serves its purpose.
I've taken to the "celebrity" style for most signatures, first initial then a squiggle, and if I remember to throw a few ups and downs in the right places, so much the better.
How about a Ban Cursive Month, when we all flatly refuse to sign or write in anything but regular block letters?
That's funny, I got jack. The offer I remember was a $10-off coupon if I decided to buy yet another zip drive. There was certainly never any offer to simply replace the defective drive, or I would have done so!
Have you checked Tabaware? The author of Pixelzap and others, offers a ton of info on post-processing digital images to do neat tricks, including perspective correction for panorama assembly, etc.
Years ago I heard of a laptop where the backlight could be removed from the screen, and the hinge folded flat, so the whole unit could be set on top of an overhead projector.
A little Googling turns up an educational review of projector options where it's briefly mentioned, but I was unable to find any specific reviews of the machines mentioned.
Personally I want a display like that, with an optional diffuser to slip in back so I can use ambient light instead of the backlight, to save power.
I came across Marshall Electronics while looking for miniature cameras and immediately fell in love with their site. It's packed with technical info, easy to navigate, and uncluttered. I wrote their webmaster a thankyou note. These are also the folks responsible for Mogami cable and connectors.
Use a single 802.11a AP on the roof above the MDF with a decent omni on it. Then, at your other locations around the complex, use more.11a gear with directional panels pointed back at the master. Set them to bridge the wireless side to their ethernet jacks. Now you've essentially got "wire" to all your locations, without stepping on the 2.4GHz spectrum.
Then at each location, connect one or more 802.11b/g APs to the ethernet. I say "or more", because you may wish to use several APs with narrow sector antennae, to provide stronger signal to a broad area.
Another poster pointed out, you'll have to make people swear not to use 2.4GHz cordless phones. Since 802.11b isn't really spread spectrum, it doesn't handle interference well.
People in their apartments will need to realize, they're not aiming for the AP on their own building, they're aiming for the building across the way. Explain that 2.4GHz is line-of-sight, so if they can't visually see the AP, they might have problems. Consider marking the rooftop locations with flags.
You're going to have to let them breathe to equalize pressure. Sealing air over a temperature range like that isn't practical. Throw some silica gel packs in each one and change them every spring and fall. (No need to throw out the old ones, just bake them in a partly-open oven to drive out the moisture.)
The other poster is right, some components will have problems as the temperature drops. Automatic enclosure heaters are no big deal, but they draw more watts than you can push over PoE.
Has anyone looked into thermochromic paints? Something that's black when it's cold but turns white as it heats up would be ideal. Heaters could be much smaller, while not creating a cooling nightmare in the summer.
I never figured out why it was released under two names, I played it as SSO but found the soundtrack listed as Driller.
Anyway, the storyline is thus: The moon around an inhabited planet has been used as a penal colony for many decades. The prisoners were allowed essentially free reign on their barely-habitable little world. They constructed a large environment, complete with all sorts of nasty security lasers and treacherous traps.
Just recently, it was learned that explosive gas is building up under the crust of the moon. The prisoners left (or were moved?) and you were sent down in a tank-like vehicle which can "beam in" drilling rigs. You must place a rig at just the right spot in each of the world's 18 sectors before the gas builds up to an explosive level.
Doors to some sectors are locked, and the switches that open them are never labeled. One sector is hidden and doesn't even appear until the other 17 are cleared. Storage sheds are dark until you roll inside, to find the precious crystals that replenish your energy and shields, or the laser pedestals that deplete them further.
According to measurements, the gas will reach catastrophic levels in about an hour.
The FreeScape engine used for this game was later seen on the PC as Wolfenstein 3D, and while the frame rate was obviously low on the Commodore, the experience was no less immersive.
A haunting musical score by Matt Gray rounds out the game, providing enough mood manipulation that after exploring a few sectors, I completely forgot about the outside world. Something in my brain was probably aware that I was in the dark basement of my parents' house, but as far as I was concerned, it was just me and my tank, on a limited supply of energy and ever-dwindling shields, racing the clock to avert imminent destruction. Every time I'd enter a doorway or toggle a switch, it was anyone's guess whether it unlocked another puzzle, closed the passage to a critical sector, or activated still more of the lasers that plagued my solo journey across this cold, unfriendly world.
Remember Dumbo and the magic feather? I can see it now, my mother will call up to say she can't access her files because she lost the shortcut object, because she's afraid to navigate the filesystem.
Slashdot Mirror
The nodes could be called servers, or clients, or routers, or storage, depending on how you view them. The distinguishing characteristic of Freenet is that the people running nodes don't know what's in them.
Freenet's a nice place to publish blogs, since there's no advertising and no hosting cost. You're asked to run a node if you're able, to help the network in general, but you're under no obligation to do so.
If anyone actually gets ahold of this, despite the inevitable heavy slashdotting it will receive, please mirror it on Freenet! It's very hard to censor a network with no servers, no administrators, and no controlling entity. ;) If the Powers That Be don't want you corrupting your mind with impure knowledge, then such material belongs on Freenet!
If you're not familiar with the Freenet project, take look: Users donate bandwidth and space by running a "node", and the network's content exists in the collective datastore shared by thousands of nodes.
Data is duplicated as it's retrieved, so popular content gets more redundantly distributed. Node-to-node communications are encrypted, and so is the content in each datastore. You don't know and can't control what's on your own node.
The usual interface to Freenet is a web browser, since web pages and images can be easily inserted into the network. Other types of data (music, movies, programs) are common, and front-end programs exist to facilitate large uploads and downloads.
Check out Freenet, run a stable node, and play with it! The more you use it, the faster it gets. Bandwidth is more important than space; if you can host a node on something faster than a dialup it would be nice.
Oh, and here's the cool thing about Freenet that makes it perfect for things like modchip designs: Once inserted, content cannot be forcibly removed. Even the creators of the network can't delete something from it. The only way content falls out of freenet is if everyone ignores it.
Had the most wonderful names for its characters. How are you gonna beat the Crimson Tape? (his special power is Organizational Charts)
To further quote the ibiblio review, "However, the pictures are so colorful, so unique and lively that identifying with the characters is easy. Captain Excitement, Oxide Man, Princess Glovebox, they are much more memorable and interesting then any amount of warriors or mages. Every character seems to spring to life."
How can you not love characters who turn things to rust?
If you're one of the lucky bastards who DOES get something before the site slows to a crawl, please insert it into Freenet and post the CHK in the comments after the story.
There's no reason to wait for someone to put up a bittorrent link, when any bozo can insert anything into Freenet.
Of course it would all be more trustable if the original content provider (QNX.com in this case)would put an MD5 hash on their download page, so even if we don't get the file from them, we can make sure it's authentic.
Of course of course, since a Freenet CHK is itself a form of checksum, if the original content provider would insert the file themselves and post the CHK on their download page, all of this silliness could be averted and their poor server would be happier too.
Freenet is perfect if you want to avoid this sort of arbitrary rule. Freenet is uncensorable, anonymous, and almost usable! (It's made great improvements lately, and it needs your help to grow.)
Read about how freenet works (totally distributed) and why it's cool (encryption means you don't even know what's stored on your node), and then run a node! Putter around for a while then publish something. Your political speech belongs on Freenet.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Until intellectual "property" law gets reformed, all this activity needs to take place on Freenet.
I personally own two Panasonic Toughbooks (an old CF-25, and my present CF-17), and I love them to death, despite the fact that the old batteries don't hold squat for a charge anymore. I found a place that'll rebuild the packs(nuclearcomputers@nospam.hotmail.com) but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Buying a used Toughbook can be bit of an adventure. If the auction doesn't say the port covers are present and in good shape, they probably aren't. If it doesn't say the battery holds a useful charge, it definitely doesn't. One nice thing is that all the Toughbook models share a common battery charger, so the AC and car adapters are universal.
Owning a machine that you can dropkick while running is a lot of fun. I think nothing of walking in the rain, laptop perched on one hand, typing with the other, Nextel velcroed to the back of the machine with a plastic baggie over the top of it because the sissy phone isn't ruggedized. IRC from a thunderstorm? You bet! Folks sometimes look at me funny when I use the laptop as a hammer.
As far as the memory stick thing: Utter madness! Can you imagine a computer with a 40-gig hard drive, that only let you store data on floppies? That's just assinine. Digital video cameras that don't let you use the tape for stills are crap. Many do, and I'm presently in the process of figuring out which do and which don't. Just imagine, thousands of megapixel still photos on a single tape.
By the way, if you're not Firewire-enabled, some of the new DV cameras will let you download the mpeg movie data from the tape over USB 1.1. Although it is agonizingly slow, it works in a pinch.
I don't know about you, but I've never seen web email that was happy about doing large file transfers. Assuming one only runs across an internet cafe every few weeks, one might have hundreds of megs of photos that need to be realiably sent home. No web mail is going to do that.
Plus, most internet cafes don't have flash memory readers attached to the computers, and might not be happy if you plugged in your own. The only way to use the network "as you please" would be to bring along a laptop or Terapin Mine, and plug straight into the ethernet.
Once internet access has been obtained, getting the photos somewhere is easy enough. Get an account on a friend's FTP server, and make them promise to make backups as soon as new uploads are detected.
Then you just have to cope with the speed of the connection in a foreign internet cafe. If you're supremely lucky, they might have a T1/E1 connection, but it's more likely to be quite slow. Sitting there waiting for a half gig of photos to transfer might take a sizable bite out of one's day.
Good tip about the universal current adapter. Instead of a 110-to-DC and a 220-to-110 adapter chained together, it might make more sense to order a 220-to-DC adapter. This is not only more reliable and lighter, it also makes it less obvious that you're a Yankee.
Carry a set of Lithium batteries. They weigh almost nothing, and when your NiMHs are dead with no chance to charge them for a few more days, you'll be glad you spent ten bucks on the Lithiums.
There are dozens of other "media vault" style devices, many of which use 1.8" drives instead of 2.5" like the Mine. They're single-purpose devices, with a button that simply copies the flash into a directory on the drive, and blinks when it's finished.
The Mine is much more than just camera-to-storage. It's got Ethernet, USB master, USB slave, AV output, and a PCMCIA slot. It's also not too great on the batteries, so you might want to carry a solar panel.
I'm not sure if all revisions of the Mine include this little undocumented feature, but my friend's model has a jumper which allows it to charge the batteries in its compartment, when connected to external power.
I've long been a fan of CF, because of its high capacities and universality, which drives cost down. However, its is bulky compared to the other standards, and the multipin connector is expensive.
My most recent camera is SmartMedia (SSFDC) based, and I'm happy with it. The neat thing about the cards is that they're flat. I can tuck one into my cheek to conceal it, slobber all over it "I don't know what you're talking about officer", wipe it off, put it back into the camera, and it works flawlessly.
Doing the same thing with a CF card would result in the contact holes becoming waterlogged, and requiring compressed air to blast them out. By the way if you've never opened a CF card, grab one that you don't use any more (who needs all those 8mb starter cards that come with crappy cameras?) and rip it apart. They're pretty cool. I think I'll put photos up on my gallery, check the Tech album.
Anyway, CF's speed and size are great, but the connector is its downfall as a media format. (as an expansion slot, lots of pins are great!)
TelcoData.US is great if you want to find out what provider serves a particular prefix, or what switches are in an area, or what ILECs have presence in a city, that sort of stuff. Play with it!
:)
The best thing is, there's a WAP interface so you can easily do such lookups right from your phone.
The funny thing about 802.11b is that it's not spread spectrum in any sense of the word I'm familiar with. It's not resistant to interference, it's not compatible with other transmitters on the same band, and it certainly doesn't appear as "background" to another device. Witness 802.11b versus X10 video cameras. If these were truly spread spectrum, they'd never even notice each other except for a bump in the noise floor.
Read the article Resisting 802.11 zealotry and tell me what you think.. This raises a lot of good points about why 802.11b is a bad example for a lot of what's being discussed here.
I agree that implementing these ideas in the existing unlicensed spectrum is the only sensible way to prove that we deserve access to more. It's a neat coincidence that this makes true wideband SDR totally unnecessary, since we already have transceivers that work happily in all the part-15 bands, and many implementations are just a radio front end coupled to a DSP. (Ricochet comes to mind. Anyone wanna reverse engineer some poletops?)
The real hurdle I see is protocol problems. Look at the 802.11b hotspot disaster. Look at the cacophony of incompatible cell phone standards! Think of what happens when arbitrary numbers of monkeys write HTML with proprietary extensions, and try to tell me with a straight face that developers will be able to cooperatively share spectrum.
I believe it's quite important to write with a pen, just not in cursive. It's slow to write, slower to read, and utterly impossible to OCR. Engineer-style block printing should be taught and required.
As far as actual illiteracy goes, I agree completely. My sister used to walk home from elementary school, red pencil in hand, marking the mistakes in the principal's newsletter as she walked. The educators in our "exemplary school district" can barely spell their own names, much less explain the difference between "there" and "their".
I'm all in favor of simplifying the language. "DRIVE THRU" is just fine with me, since
through
though
tough
ought
is just ridiculous. Certain spellings deserve to die out. Grammar, on the other hand, does not! I never learned how to diagram a sentence, I can't tell you the difference between a dangling preposition and a gerund, and I can barely remember the different parts of speech. (Is it just me, or is "parts of speech" a stupid term that sounds like it should mean "phonemes"?)
At my last job, the receptionist (who secretly held the whole place together) insisted on proofreading letters written by the owner and president. It's hard to tell someone "You sound like an idiot on paper." but she managed somehow.
She and I used to commiserate about the inability of the engineers to express themselves, and the money it cost the company because of vague contracts, misinterpreted job specifications, and delayed vendor support. A little misspelling here and there just makes you look stupid or hurried, but unpunctuated paragraphs are difficult to extract meaning from!
d'Nealian. I agree, it looked childish then and it still does today. I loathed wasting the time to learn it, and I forgot it as quickly as possible afterward. Cursive handwriting is one of those things the teachers honestly have a hard time justifying when asked "when are we ever gonna need this?".
The form of my writing, like yours, follows function. It's composed of large caps and small caps. I've never seen the point to crossing the 7 or Z characters (I can make them distinctly, thank you) but I do cross my zeroes.
My writing always indisputably legible, even though it frequently looks messy. That's probably because I only write when there's no alternative, so a good portion of it is done in moving vehicles, on the backs of envelopes, or in a heck of a hurry.
My signature's atrocious too! I forget letters in my last name constantly. This causes bank tellers endless grief. Once I endorsed 3 checks while standing in line, then asked to deposit them. The signatures looked nothing like each other. The teller asked for ID, then asked me to verify my "mother's maiden name".
Useful fact: The field labeled "mother's maiden name" is simply a password field. Feel free to fill in an alphanumeric string. As long as you can recall it when asked, it serves its purpose.
I've taken to the "celebrity" style for most signatures, first initial then a squiggle, and if I remember to throw a few ups and downs in the right places, so much the better.
How about a Ban Cursive Month, when we all flatly refuse to sign or write in anything but regular block letters?
Anyone remember the laserdisc video game Dragon's Lair? It came out in 1983, and to celebrate the 20th anniversary there's a comic book coming out.
That's funny, I got jack. The offer I remember was a $10-off coupon if I decided to buy yet another zip drive. There was certainly never any offer to simply replace the defective drive, or I would have done so!
Have you checked Tabaware? The author of Pixelzap and others, offers a ton of info on post-processing digital images to do neat tricks, including perspective correction for panorama assembly, etc.
Unlike certain other conferences held in Dearborn.
Years ago I heard of a laptop where the backlight could be removed from the screen, and the hinge folded flat, so the whole unit could be set on top of an overhead projector.
A little Googling turns up an educational review of projector options where it's briefly mentioned, but I was unable to find any specific reviews of the machines mentioned.
Personally I want a display like that, with an optional diffuser to slip in back so I can use ambient light instead of the backlight, to save power.
I came across Marshall Electronics while looking for miniature cameras and immediately fell in love with their site. It's packed with technical info, easy to navigate, and uncluttered. I wrote their webmaster a thankyou note. These are also the folks responsible for Mogami cable and connectors.
To solve the channel problem, consider this:
.11a gear with directional panels pointed back at the master. Set them to bridge the wireless side to their ethernet jacks. Now you've essentially got "wire" to all your locations, without stepping on the 2.4GHz spectrum.
Use a single 802.11a AP on the roof above the MDF with a decent omni on it. Then, at your other locations around the complex, use more
Then at each location, connect one or more 802.11b/g APs to the ethernet. I say "or more", because you may wish to use several APs with narrow sector antennae, to provide stronger signal to a broad area.
Another poster pointed out, you'll have to make people swear not to use 2.4GHz cordless phones. Since 802.11b isn't really spread spectrum, it doesn't handle interference well.
People in their apartments will need to realize, they're not aiming for the AP on their own building, they're aiming for the building across the way. Explain that 2.4GHz is line-of-sight, so if they can't visually see the AP, they might have problems. Consider marking the rooftop locations with flags.
You're going to have to let them breathe to equalize pressure. Sealing air over a temperature range like that isn't practical. Throw some silica gel packs in each one and change them every spring and fall. (No need to throw out the old ones, just bake them in a partly-open oven to drive out the moisture.)
The other poster is right, some components will have problems as the temperature drops. Automatic enclosure heaters are no big deal, but they draw more watts than you can push over PoE.
Has anyone looked into thermochromic paints? Something that's black when it's cold but turns white as it heats up would be ideal. Heaters could be much smaller, while not creating a cooling nightmare in the summer.
I never figured out why it was released under two names, I played it as SSO but found the soundtrack listed as Driller.
Anyway, the storyline is thus: The moon around an inhabited planet has been used as a penal colony for many decades. The prisoners were allowed essentially free reign on their barely-habitable little world. They constructed a large environment, complete with all sorts of nasty security lasers and treacherous traps.
Just recently, it was learned that explosive gas is building up under the crust of the moon. The prisoners left (or were moved?) and you were sent down in a tank-like vehicle which can "beam in" drilling rigs. You must place a rig at just the right spot in each of the world's 18 sectors before the gas builds up to an explosive level.
Doors to some sectors are locked, and the switches that open them are never labeled. One sector is hidden and doesn't even appear until the other 17 are cleared. Storage sheds are dark until you roll inside, to find the precious crystals that replenish your energy and shields, or the laser pedestals that deplete them further.
According to measurements, the gas will reach catastrophic levels in about an hour.
The FreeScape engine used for this game was later seen on the PC as Wolfenstein 3D, and while the frame rate was obviously low on the Commodore, the experience was no less immersive.
A haunting musical score by Matt Gray rounds out the game, providing enough mood manipulation that after exploring a few sectors, I completely forgot about the outside world. Something in my brain was probably aware that I was in the dark basement of my parents' house, but as far as I was concerned, it was just me and my tank, on a limited supply of energy and ever-dwindling shields, racing the clock to avert imminent destruction. Every time I'd enter a doorway or toggle a switch, it was anyone's guess whether it unlocked another puzzle, closed the passage to a critical sector, or activated still more of the lasers that plagued my solo journey across this cold, unfriendly world.
Remember Dumbo and the magic feather? I can see it now, my mother will call up to say she can't access her files because she lost the shortcut object, because she's afraid to navigate the filesystem.