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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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Vibe update
So, Jane and I built the electronics for 30 of them, then I took them home and plugged one in for a test drive. It connected to the USB port, beautifully, then I go to turn up the juice. As soon as there is power going to the motor and it’s getting ready to turn,…
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On nomenclature (Soylent Green is… is..)
Ok, so, apparently in certain circles of defense parlance, you do not blow up people. Well, you do, but the correct euphemism is “soft targets” (as opposed to “hard targets”, such as tanks, buildings, etc.). Referring to soft targets as people is rather frowned upon. I managed to inadvertently silence a getting-out-of-hand meeting yesterday as…
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Playing with polyurethane casting material
For a project at work I had to mold some things in this hard clear polyurethane, so my Mechie ordered a giant kit of the stuff – more than the project ever will need (and it has a very limited shelf life). So I mixed up a little more than necessary and used the leftover…
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LOLplants
Probably not funny unless you’re a horti/carnivore freak, but I just about rolled when I saw this.
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More disappearing…
So, all my last minute work shizzle is for the most part done. Some guys in Cali and a guy in DC will be receiving some (entirely unrelated) totally awesome, kick ass hardware. (The latter, also a hundred-plus-page brick of a Final Report, which he in all likelihood will not read.) So on Saturday, I…
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Some very bulk
OK, this has been a busy little while here, and I forgot that here is where I write what I’ve been up to so I don’t forget :-P And now I’ve forgotten. So, this is the last few months of real-life events… We last left off with Xmas in Massena, with Kr*’s folks (and, from…
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LiveJournal Strike? (Don’t back-down, back-up!)
Today, I logged into LJ (that drug I joined because All my Friends were Doing It), and found out that: a) As of yesterday (or some other near-term time), free accounts have been discontinued (new users join as Sponsored or Paid accounts) b) As of about-same-time, some unspecified changes to “Acceptable Content” policies, with the…
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Disappearing act
Going to be holed up at work most of this week finishing up two projects with immediate deadlines. Returning to civilization sometime after next Monday!…
Find stuff…
Pages
- 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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