• Bank of America(R) Doesn’t Like your Lifestyle

    Via LJ::pervygeekfancy Geek dating site opens, accepts most comers, including all gay/bi/lez/mixed/poly preferences which are somewhat heavily represented in geekdom. Bank of America(R) signs on as merchant account support. Bank of America(R) isn’t cool with poly. Poly users get their profiles kicked off the dating site with a polite, but unambiguous letter essentially saying, “our

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  • Garden stuff!

    So, we’ve been tearing weeds (once in a while) out of this garden for a while now, but few people have actually seen it. So here it is! [Our Garden] It’s in a great spot since directly behind our house is a ballfield, which means a) plenty of light (no tall houses behind it blocking

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  • First New England RepRap User’s Group Meeting at Olin College

    Toward the end of July a couple friends and I had the chance to drop in to the first New England RepRap usergroup meeting. RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper (a.k.a. 3D printer), the goal being an open-source machine design capable of making most of its own parts. The machine itself consists of a

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  • Only in Medford…

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  • Howto: Talk to arbitrary USB devices with Processing (1.0 Beta)

    I’ve been playing with the Processing language (http://processing.org) a little bit and liking it so far. For anyone not familiar, it’s a Java-based rapid-prototyping language that includes very friendly libraries for graphics, sound, video and select hardware (e.g. serial port). One thing I couldn’t find much info on was talking to arbitrary USB devices (not

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  • House wiring, A Beautiful Mind style

    Our power went out sometime in the last couple days’ raging thunderstorms and reset all the computers/clocks in the house, so I figured before I reset them, this was an excuse to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: map out the breaker box. (Exciting, ya? Well, this anti-electrocution research is

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  • Evil thought of the day…

    When I noticed more and more Web sites trying to detect and block ‘bad’ or otherwise unprofitable users (e.g. those using ad- or popup-blockers, privacy tools, etc.), and banking sites like the one I use trying to detect potentially compromised machines, I thought, “How long will it be until some unnecessarily clever dickface just adds

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  • My Fossil Collection

    Fossils in ironstone nodules I collected near my folks’ place on a strip-mine lake near the Mazon Creek in Grundy County near Morris, Illinois. This area is sometimes referred to as one of the Lagerstätten (i.e. mother lode) – one of few places on earth where conditions were just right to preserve a rich deposit

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  • The Pomp Room

    Near my parents’ house in IL. Laugh, it’s funny (in Afrikaans, anyway – a good name for a place that might rent rooms – and companions – by the hour).

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  • Couch denting at a 14th grade level

    Some random observations on being back in my hometown for the week of the 4th… I know it’s not the first time I’ve felt this way, but I was particularly amazed at how this place… no longer feels like home. Yeah, a few things have changed – buildings where there were no buildings before, a

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  • Entropy Is

    Destroying information. I’ve never had an easy time with this. Feeling in a productive mood the other day, I made a plan for my next side-project* (picking back up my interest in building gas discharge tubes, i.e. those decorative plasma globes, except doing it right this time), and set my sights on clearing some space

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  • Camping in Maine

    Kr* an I went camping/hiking in Acadia for this weekend…her first time in South Canada Maine. So we made camp on Friday evening, and ran up to the top of Cadillac Mtn. on Saturday, followed by a trip back down the steep side to Bubble Pond (~6mi). This was just after the Corporate Challenge (the

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  • And speaking of malware…

    Overzealous AntiVirus Programs. How the hell much work do you have to do in order to keep over-zealous antivirus programs from deleting your old virus/spyware samples, saved evidence, cracks for old abandonware you’ve been hanging onto since high school, and harmless nuisance/prank programs? I suppose I could zip them, then RAR them (replace these with

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  • Bloody hack!

    So, for those (if any) who found several pages of visible Viagra links at the end of the last few posts, my apologies. A vulnerability in the version of WordPress I was running allowed a machine at keymachine.de [87.118.124.3] to directly inject spam links into posts using the attach/edit features. (This site is apparently a

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  • DIY Magnetic Fridge Poetry

    Like the idea of magnetic poetry kits, but they don’t come with the types of words you want? Here’s an easy way to make your own, specialty kits. Supplies needed: Printer in working condition Magnetic Sheeting – any kind that will feed thru your printer (such as Staples Inkjet Magnetic Sheets), or most any kind

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  • My next art project…sane?

    Given an original piece of music, slice it into arbitrarily small time slices and perform FFT. From a corpus of (1000+) copyrighted songs similarly sliced, find the slice whose frequency content most closely matches the original slice. By pulling in such slices in place of the originals, reconstruct the piece, still sounding recognizably like the

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  • [citation needed]

    [citation needed] This should be made into a bumper sticker. It would be applied to the cars of 1) Wikipedia editors, 2) Reckless drivers you don’t like. Real updates coming soonish, I promise.

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  • Blinkenlichten RGB LED controller: protocol / firmware (1.2)

    This is the protocol spec and PIC10 firmware download for Das Blinkenlichten (1.2). This version improves handling of the ‘Identify’ command by end devices. Backward compatibility to 1.1 is not affected. I don’t have pretty datasheets, application notes, timing diagrams, or much example code / pseudocode, but I’m sick of sitting on this thing until

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  • Encryption: Not just against the bad guys anymore! (or, how Comcast contributes to global warming)

    In Part 1, we explored evidence supporting the conclusion that Comcast’s well-known policy of blocking / interfering with p2p file transfers (notably BitTorrent protocol) extends to several other legitimate moderate- to high-bandwidth activities, including collaboration via Lotus Notes, remote desktop applications, FTP, and even sending emails with large attachments. A working temporary solution (again, while

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  • Fixing Gmail, FTP, VNC, p2p, and other legitimate traffic not working in a Comcast Town (part 1: solutions)

    As fate (or rather, failure to research local broadband monopolies and factor them into my home-buying decisions) would have it, I am a Comcast cable internet customer, in a Comcast town. As you might now, Comcast has for some time been quietly blocking…er, the polite term is “throttling”, certain types of bandwidth-intensive traffic. While that

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