Month: January 2007
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Modern Bombs Don’t Tick
“The sky is falling!” – City of Boston If you haven’t heard the news, today the City of Boston ground to a halt as streets were blockaded, the subway’s Red Line was shut down and bridges were closed for hours. The cause? Turner Broadcasting, as part of an advertising stunt, placed magnetic light-up displays in…
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It’s Not You, It’s Me (or my flapjack of a customer)
So, I pop up from the lab and this horny sales rep has left me a voicemail. “Er, a while back I sampled you an LCD for a project you were working on, ah, just wanted to know, um, how that’s working out you, what the status of your project is, ok, I guess just…
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Using a Peltier cooler to refrigerate a terrarium
Executive summary: Didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Lowered the temp in my tank by about 4 degrees F – and it’s a pretty small tank. As a long-overdue followup to my climate-controlled terrarium, i.e. the actual climate control part, I bonded heat sinks to both sides of a Peltier device (thermoelectric “heat…
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Methinks somebody wants grandkids…
www.sciconnect.com This is for picking up geek chicks, compliments of discover magazine! Give it a try. Dad
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Whither TrashAmp?
The TrashAmp, a project I started while living in Chicago (to give you some idea how long ago that was – late 2003), was to serve as a subtle testament to a disposable society by building a high-power car audio amp entirely out of trash (specifically, electronics waste scavenged from the curb). Things started out…
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Geek Christmas carols – answered
Noels[0]; “The First Noel” for k=[1:3]; it=snow; end; “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” 0 0 12 25 * cd ~ “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (Unix crontab entry) tree -i O ./xmess “O Xmess Tree” (okay, that was a bit of a stretch) nice@town# adduser -e 12/26/06 Santa “Santa Claus Is…
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I go shooting my mouth off and…
Dammit, I should know better than to tempt fate by blogging about things in jest, like extremely localized global warming (or for that matter, medical industry conspiracies). I think GK said it best. For those of you not around here, it is January 6th and 70 degrees in Boston. It’s actually warmer outside my house…
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The last few weeks in review
Woo, long-ish hiatus from blogging. Anyway, since last “real” entry (non roommate rant, geeking, meme, etc.) some or all of the following have happened: Did the company Christmas party thing; dragged LE out to it this time to meet these nut-jobs I work with. She humored me, even though we all got toasted and I…
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Doosh: Incremental database-backup script gets around PHP execution-time limits
The premise: You have a database full of many very important things. However, the server it’s on is owned by some goofus who doesn’t give a damn, on a dusty PII box under his bed. You don’t have shell access and can’t dump it that way. You can’t install utilities. Maybe phpMyAdmin doesn’t even work…