Month: September 2008

  • Fixing Dell Precision T3400 USB not working

    This is an update to a previous rant about the mysterious Windows XP “Dee-Dunk” error (and the novel concept of presenting an “error message” when an error condition exists), possibly in conjunction with broken or intermittent USB functionality. This post is mainly for Googlers – my friends are more than welcome to skip it. I…

  • Fun with High Voltage & Plasma

    The other night I picked back up playing with insulated gas discharge tubes (IGDT), better known as plasma globes. The basic idea is to pump a sealed chamber filled with a noble gas (or air, in a pinch) down to low pressure (1s to 10s of Torr), and apply electricity at high voltage (a few…

  • Railway Supply Institute expo 2008, Chicago

    I was there to demo my self-powered wireless brake health monitoring system at the FRA’s Advanced Concept Train booth. Despite the final assembly of this and the other 29 units occurring only a couple days before (and passing through the TSA’s loving hands), everything went perfectly! (Murrphy’s Law might have a surprise or two for…

  • Worst User Agreement, Evar

    And the winner goes to… The Terms & Conditions for use of the Hampton Inn’s complimentary WiFi. Weighing in at 47.4KBytes* and a whopping 90 screens (scrunching it all into a tiny browser text box did not help in this regard), this is quite possibly the longest, and most unilaterally evil, user agreement I have…

  • Beer! (pt. 2)

    So, a week-and-change ago Kr* and I picked up some basic homebrewing stuff and started a batch of English brown ale. Since this is our first ever beermaking attempt, we purchased a ready-made ingredient kit with all the stuff pre-selected and measured into labeled baggies, idiot-proofing the process as much as possible. This Sunday we…

  • Daily Windows Rant

    Error messages, people. Error messages. When an “error” occurs, it should be accompanied by an “error message”, which informs the user a) that an error did occur; b) what that error was. It does not even necessarily have to be understandable to mere mortals (although this would be really nice), because understanding it is the…

  • And these points of data make a beautiful line…

    (and we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time… Err… deliverable code freeze will happen monday morning, or wednesday afternoon (due date), or before 50% of the devices are sealed up for delivery with the code already on them, whichever comes before the last bug is found. [Especially if the bugs are discovered in hardware,…

  • Deep Session Control – proposed browser feature to increase privacy

    As you probably know, a Web cookie is a small bit of information (typically a server-generated ID number) a Web site can store on your computer to read back on any subsequent visits, even years later. Currently, the major browsers support making all cookies “session-only” (even if the site sends them with an expiration date…

  • NorrisolideFacts.com

    Ok, so apparently this is pants-pissingly funny to chemists* :-) NORRISOLIDE FACTS Norrisolide does not dissolve in water. It pounds the water into a pulp and bathes in where its blood would be if water had blood. Norrisolide does not get metabolized. It gets even. Norrisolide consists of x carbon, x hydrogen, x oxygen and…

  • Comcastic!

    So, Friday morning I’m doing some prep for our Cape Cod camping trip online, and I notice a Comcast truck parked in front of the neighbor’s house, and the Comcast guy putting a ladder up against the telephone pole. I go to take a leak, and when I get back, the truck is gone, and…

  • Beer!

    I’m contemplating picking up some homebrewing equipment this week. Anyone else interested in making (+ drinking) some homebrew beer?