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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…
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The Bumwad Fairy
I think my housemates think there is a toilet paper fairy. For the zillionth time it seems, I bought a huge brick of toilet paper and put it in our upstairs bathroom because we’ve been completely out for several days (who knows how long; I’m not home all that much to notice). I spool up…
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Geeksmas carols
Noels[0]; for k=[1:3]; it=snow; end; 0 0 12 25 * cd ~ tree -i O ./xmess nice@town# adduser -e 12/26/06 Santa mv -f reindeer Grandma chmod 777 Joy midnight = (unsigned char *) calloc(bufSize,1); memcpy(midnight, it, bufSize); diff /dev/dsp /dev/audio night=sparse(night); cat | woods > river cat night > /dev/null which child gzip ~/merry_christmas smixer…
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Tim’s Nostalgia Tour 2006
November 17 ~ 27 Batavia Chicago Countryside Elburn La Grange La Grange Park Mokena Morris Oak Park Oswego St. Charles Warrenville Westmont Western Springs Willow Springs Officially, a routine visit for the Thanksgiving holiday. Unofficially, one of both the most fun and the most depressing trips home I’ve had. My travels took me right near…
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You sleep. They Live
Blarrrgh. I’ve got to be up at 3:45 this morning (if I wanna shower) to be at work by 5 to pack up a sprawling mess of a helicopter blade test setup to start setting up in Connecticut by 8. And I can’t sleep, because I’m not tired. (Yaya, documentation of Chicago trip, xmas party…
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Telecommunications Device for the Dumb
So this morning GJM calls me: apparently this shit-for-brains in his company’s building has been abusing the deaf relay service to make anonymous prank calls and talk crap to people around the office. After getting hit himself about five times in a row, GJM has a prime suspect and confirms with a little social engineering.…
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Ooh, why didn’t I think of this before?
In the southwest suburbs’ local paper this week, there is a fullpage ad for a scam the EdenPURE 500 (R)(tm)(c)(processed cheese food), a space heater making all sorts of ridculous claims and using scare tactics to warn gullible readers away from those “other” space heaters. Did you know… this special space heater uses a quartz…
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The Talk
I’m back in Chicago for a long, much-needed Thanksgiving break. The other night my dad and I were relaxing shooting the bull, and the subject of my romantic life or lack thereof came up… and I ended up getting the talk. No, not that one…puberty was long ago. This was the “gee, son, it looks…
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Dequeue
Fuck. I think I’ve slept a total of 14h this entire week. Which is usually more than enough to keep me out of bizarre mental states, but in general, me + extreme sleep deprivation = unpleasant. Getting all my work shizzle together before my trip back to chicago this+next week. Today I have… Recoded the…
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And nothing lasts forever, even cold november rain
This Sunday I found myself at the MIT fields in the middle of a downpour, watching a bunch of older guys re-live their glory days with an all-out game of rugby, tackling the shit out of each other. The game was arranged for TvS’s very-belated 50th birthday…there was at least one guy out there who…
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I need a spillproof keyboard
Overheard on LJ::Grammargasm Someone said, in response to the election results, “Bush is a sitting duck at this point.” They meant lame duck. But I think it’s funnier the first way. To which someone replied: […] And yeah, don’t call him a duck while Cheney’s around.
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On tow trucks, Medford MA, and crooked dealings therewith
After allowing myself my one day to stay in and be a code monkey, I came out of my house this morning around 9:30 to find the street eerily empty. Sometime between yesterday and today, Medford’s famous No-Notice Street Sweeping was scheduled for my area. How this works is, sometime on an arbitrarily-selected Sunday afternoon,…
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Sunday is code monkey day
+5 Ward against Distraction For the next 24 hours, target ally is equipped with a Ward against Distractions while coding. While so equipped, target is immune from interruptions arising from social responsibilities and has a 50% chance to “block” LJ, instant messages and lengthy going-nowhere phone calls. A man can dream, can’t he? Anyway, I…
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Happy halloween!
(In answer to the age-old question, “but can you run linux on it?”) Okay, there’s no linux kernel running inside the pumpkin, but there IS about 6 MIPS of CPU power in there :-P (6x PIC10F200s = 1 very lifelike, work-safe, flickering un-blow-out-able candle.)
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Unusual question from a ‘zine peddler
At work, our engineers occasionally (as in, all the damned time) field calls from marketing folk offering complimentary magazine subscriptions, as seems to be common practice. The magazines are supported by advertisers and at least vaguely related to our fields. EDN. ECN – with the ‘C’ styled to look like the ‘D’ in EDN flipped…
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- Das Blinkenlichten – wearable lighting
- Goldmine Electronics LCD pinout (mini-teardown)
- Mosquino: an Arduino-based energy harvesting development board
- Pick and Place Project
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