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Thursday, November 30, 2000
Damnit. I want php. That way I can do neat dynamic things that are totally unjustified because nobody comes here. It costs $30/month at pair. But there's no way in hell I'm going elsewhere. Pair rocks. They are far and away the best host I've tried.
¶ 13 Posted at 11.22 PM ⇒ No Comments ( geek | cool ) Sunday, January 28, 2001
Hotair investigates the limits of the USPS. How weird can your package be before they won't deliver it. Neat stuff.
Tuesday, February 13, 2001
Amateur Physics for the Amateur Pool Player (PDF). More than you ever wanted to know.
Tuesday, February 27, 2001
At long last, the mighty GeForce3.
¶ 100 Posted at 09.44 AM ⇒ No Comments ( geek | cool ) Thursday, April 19, 2001
This has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen all year. Action stick figure fighting in Flash.
¶ 122 Posted at 03.43 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | site | cool ) Wednesday, May 02, 2001
Filler: Unstoppable fighting and filing techniques.
¶ 124 Posted at 04.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | funny | cool ) Tuesday, January 22, 2002
Universal Turing Machine in XSLT. Why would you want to do this? Ever? This is insane.
¶ 264 Posted at 04.37 AM ⇒ No Comments ( code | geek | cool | whoa ) Tuesday, February 19, 2002
From the ...za? department: Tempest for Eliza Tempest for Eliza is a Program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio.
¶ 290 Posted at 03.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( cool | whoa ) Monday, March 25, 2002
Everything you wanted to know about Ground Combat at High Altitude, but were afraid to ask.
Wednesday, June 12, 2002
If you insist on using Internet Explorer, this thing rocks: AdShield Banner Ad Blocker. Get one of the benefits of Mozilla without Mozilla. Really easy. Really effective.
¶ 377 Posted at 03.21 AM ⇒ No Comments ( privacy | cool | software ) Thursday, June 13, 2002
This is new: Google Answers. I think idealab had a similar concept in answers.com that I fiddled with in like 96 or 97. Apparently it got sold off and refocused (of course).
Thursday, June 27, 2002
See my new cellphone. 2.65 oz (~71g) has to be felt to be believed. I can't get over how cool this thing is.
Sunday, January 26, 2003
upsideclown short story about (among other things) future computing: the same old subroutine. I especially liked this part: A sense of direction has never been my strong point. I've got a spare pipe in my pocket, so I give another shout and this time clip the pipe to my ear. When the ironmongers shout back their Over Here's!, instead of remembering which way each was, the pipe reroutes the information to my shoes. The databoot feature activates, and I now I merely need head in what feels like the general downhill direction. That is such an excellent interface idea. Thursday, May 29, 2003
Back in middle school and high school, I devoured Tom Clancy books, as well as the cheap knock-offs (Dale Brown, Stephen Coonts, etc.). For a while, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. My friend Ryan and I would build plastic models (badly, I might mention) and read the same books and just obsessively talk about this sort of thing in the way that sixth-grades boys do. We thought it was the coolest stuff. Ryan moved away and I grew older, so the romance of the military wore off. It just seemed to be less immediately relevant post-Cold War, and I was starting to think dangerous ideas about the role of the US military. Not to mention all the other things that distract you. Nevertheless, every now and then, I'll run into something like the Navy Fact File, which has all kinds of neat information about Navy ships, and I'm back into that mode again. Part of it is just the geek appeal of cool equipment, but there's also the romance of all things military that can exist when you are far removed from it. I'm fairly aware of what the reality of military life is, but when it's in a Tom Clancy book that goes into almost pornographic descriptions of high-tech weapons systems, it can become something different. I'm not always a lily-livered, tree-hugging liberal, you know. Just most of the time.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Mailinator is choice. It's a mind-numbingly easy way to get around email registration-required sites. Just create a random word @mailinator.com and use that as the email address. Then check the mailbox at mailinator.com. No signing up. Nothing. It just works. Although I think they're going to have to have a couple more domains once this gets going and registration sites start banning @mailinator.com email addresses.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
You may have heard that steel from the World Trade Center will be used in the construction of the USS New York. I guess the symbolism is meaningful to some people. More exciting to me are the details of the San Antonio class amphibious assault ships, of which the USS New York will be but one.
Thursday, January 01, 2004
Handy and cool life expectancy info (PDF). From your friends (and mine) at the CDC.
Friday, January 09, 2004
Just on a lark, I gave a program a URL to open in the File->Open dialog. Imagine my surprise when it downloaded and opened that file. I tried a couple other programs to see, and they all work. Seems like it's a feature of the standard Windows XP (other versions?) dialog. So if you want to muck around with an image or document you found on the web, just paste the URL directly into the "File name" field and it'll download it right into your app. Even lowly notepad has been so upgraded. I'm amazed that I never found out about this before.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Check out these pictures from the Harbin snow and ice festival. Thanks, mom!
Friday, May 07, 2004
Japanese people know how to rice a car (and scooter, van, etc.). That's some crazy stuff. I will never, ever understand Japan. A couple of weeks back, I saw a Chevrolet Silverado in a parking lot and I could have sworn I saw its rear wheels turning. I thought I was crazy, but it turns out that you can actually get 4-wheel steering as on option. Apparently it's adaptable; at low speeds, the rear wheels turn in the opposite direction of the front ones to reduce the turning circle. At higher speeds, the rear wheels turn less, and at high speeds, the wheels turn in the same direction as the front wheels so the truck can sort of slide sideways as it moves forward. It's really cool. I can only imagine what that kind of system would do in a car like the Mini Cooper.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
I am sad that I have forever missed the opportunity to make a death-defying landing at Hong Kong's notorious Kai Tak Airport, which closed in 1998, and was replaced by the much less interesting Chep Lap Kok (built on a man-made island). Around the airport were a mountain, the ocean, and tall apartment buildings. A few seconds before landing, each aircraft had to make a sudden, sharp turn. If you missed the turn, you slammed into a mountain. Amazingly, that never resulted in catastrophe. Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4.
I want a
REAL war game. A little on the edgy side, with use of bad words and other
stuff that you might want to avoid. I especially like the Jack Nicholson.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
It's gimmicky, and its exterior arouses many conflicting feelings in me (refreshed, wary... hungry?), but Seattle's new public library building looks really cool. Coming from someone who spent a substantial part of his childhood in libraries, they were definitely due for a "What Not To Wear/Queer Eye" makeover. I can begin to imagine what the librarians' uniforms will look like (Parker Posey meets Trinity? Chris Cunningham robots? Barbarellibrarian?), but then the 50-days-till-marriage handicap radio reasserts control and my train of thought jumps the tracks.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Dodgeball is launching in Austin. If you haven't heard of it, Dodgeball is a social networking service (yeah yeah) that ties into the real world by connecting you to friends of friends in the same area as you. It only goes 2 levels deep in your social web instead of the 6 of Friendster, so these aren't complete strangers. You tell the site where you are and it broadcasts your location to anyone in your network within a 10-block radius. Sounds like a winner, even if I don't go out anymore. I seem to recall someone I know coming up with a similar idea like 4 years ago, but Dodgeball actually exists, so you know, chalk one up for them. Note that my phone doesn't receive text messages for some reason, so if you want to go searching for me, you have to fiddle a parameter in the user search.
Ah... to be filthy rich. As the article asks, what's the point of being rich if you can't spend your money frivolously?
Friday, June 04, 2004
Word is that Austin's getting an Apple Store. Soon. It's already listed in the Barton Creek Mall store directory. Some guy says it's opening on the 12th.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
I was looking to see if there was a Ben & Jerry's in Vancouver. Unfortunately, I wasn't that lucky, but I did discover that since the last time I checked, they've infiltrated Texas, like Austin and Houston. Mmmm. I know where I'm going when I get home. Alas, one of my favorite flavors, White Russian (fantastic in a shake) is now dead. A moment of silence, please.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
A pair of new bookmarklets will split your current page either horizontally or vertically. It creates a new page with the old page embedded twice as frames. This way you can cross-reference different parts of an article or whatnot. Pretty neat. Just right-click and create a bookmark or drag it to your links toolbar for easy access.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Patrick Blackett, one of the pioneers of Operations Research developed and applied his skills during World War II. Here's a piece from Wikipedia: In another piece of work Blackett's team analysed a report of a survey carried out by RAF Bomber Command. For the survey Bomber Command inspected all bombers returning from bombing raids over Germany over a particular period. All damage inflicted by German air defences was noted and the recommendation was given that armour be added in the most heavily damaged areas. Blackett's team instead made the surprising recommendation that the armour be placed in the areas which were completely untouched by damage, according to the survey. They reasoned that the survey was biased, since it only included aircraft that successfully came back from Germany. The untouched areas were probably vital areas, which if hit would result in the loss of the aircraft.That's not exactly OR, but it's brilliant.
Friday, October 29, 2004
For something I'm not cool enough to understand, Jothan (who designed our wedding invitations) did a parody "Vice Krispies" box as a CD case. It's totally awesome. See vice and versa. I'd link the post that explains it all, but he doesn't do permalinks, so you'll just have to go to main page, where it's currently the first post. Update: fixed the second link.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Last year, I linked this guy's pictures of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival. He went back again this past winter.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Fanimation has some really cool fans. The Enigma, Palisade, Palmetto, Torrento, Centaurus, Punkah, and Brewmaster are my favorites.
Monday, July 25, 2005
If you're a geography nerd, you'll probably enjoy these geography games. Capitals, countries, etc. Some of them get pretty hard. A couple of them are dumb, though; it says Rangoon is not valid for the capital of Myanmar, but I think that should be acceptable.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
A group of scientists has written in Nature about the possbility of reintroducing mega-fauna to North America. Animals like lions, elephants, and wild horses were wiped out by the climate change of the late Pleistocene 13,000 years ago. Introducing such animals to the middle of North America would give these endangered species a home in a relatively stable and uninhabited area, helping to keep the species alive even as their original homes in Asia and Africa continue to be threatened. It's a crazy, grand idea.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The Sierra Club has published a report on America's best new development projects. They picked a dozen or so development projects of various sizes from around the country that they thought would be well-planned, livable, and, yes, ecologically friendly communities. It's nice to see that it's not just about throwing stones. I hope to see Austin's Robert Mueller development in such a list in a few years (as well as us in it). There's a lot that the highlighted communities and the Mueller project have in common, and it all sounds good to me.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Apple has added (the new) Battlestar Galactica to the iTunes Music [sic] Store. According to Ars Technica, they are offering the entirety of the show's run thus far, including the mini-series (in 4 parts), the first season, and all of the second season that has been broadcast thus far. I think ad-supported media is a bad idea, so I'm happy to see the apparent success of a simpler, fairer business model for television programs.
¶ 1190 Posted at 11.41 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv | cool ) Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Somehow, I found this neat online graphic novel. It's a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic type of a thing. Might not be your flavor, but it is mine.
Monday, September 11, 2006
I don't know art, but I know what I like. Even so, I challenge you to say these lovely works of A4 paper are not art. I have seen few things as creative. I especially like Dead Bird, Distant Wish, Looking Back, Snowballs, Traces in Snow, and The Impossible Meeting.
Monday, April 16, 2007
This is a really great reorientation of a map of Europe from 1952 that effectively makes Western Europe look vulnerable to the Red Menace.
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
I just saw the deserts episode of "Planet Earth." Wow. Maybe I've just forgotten what nature documentaries are like, but it was really great. My friend tells me it's even better in HD, which I'm too cheap for. I highly recommend watching. There were so many "holy crap" moments.
¶ 1471 Posted at 10.20 PM ⇒ No Comments ( cool | science! | good stuff ) Thursday, August 02, 2007
I'm too cheap to buy a game console, but if I was going to get one, it would definitely be a Wii:
¶ 1524 Posted at 02.03 PM ⇒ No Comments ( video | cool | games ) Thursday, August 23, 2007
Big Faceless Organization produces software for businesses. That's their real name. I did a little bit of research to make sure it wasn't a joke; it seems like a real thing.
¶ 1552 Posted at 04.11 PM ⇒ No Comments ( names | cool | funny ) Tuesday, November 06, 2007
If you're an engineer and are not married, consider this fine piece of jewelry in lieu of a traditional wedding band.
Friday, February 01, 2008
A research team has made aluminum look like gold without any kind of tint or stain, possibly almost to the point of fooling a spectrascope (my inference). They use a laser to etch small features into the surface of the metal that alter which frequencies of light are emitted. It sounds to me kind of like the same thing as butterfly wings. This is certainly not restricted to making one metal look like another; I'll bet they could make all kinds colors and patterns once they refine the technique.
Friday, February 15, 2008
The premise: two artists battle back and forth, each concocting a super-hero that trumps the others. So far they've come up with 134 funny, clever, silly, and occasionally lame super-heroes in their battle. Who is the superest hero of them all? Nobody knows yet. But we know the least super (the Superlest?). Start there.
Friday, April 18, 2008
I found a weather station just about ¾ miles from my house1. Weather Underground has this deal where you can buy a personal automated weather station and set it to automatically upload information to their site. I'm sure it's not unique to them, since the hardware and software are off-the-shelf, but that particular site has a decent interface with important things like easily linked/bookmarked URLs, maps, etc. The storm that came through last night dropped between an inch and an inch and a half of rain on Austin; Thanks to that weather station, I know that we got just about an inch of rain in our immediate neighborhood. I like precision. There are lots of stations throughout the country; I'm sure you can find one close to you.
1 On Baltus Drive. That sounds suspiciously like Gaius Baltar compressed into a single word.
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