Category: Fun Stuff

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Weird Eyes?

I use this lil bmp file, tiled, as the desktop background in a Win2K VM I run fairly often, hosted on this Ubuntu box:

coffee_bean

The fun thing about this lil graphic on my background is that when I look at it just so, my desktop appears to become three-dimensional, the background “recedes” an apparent two feet or so (to about where the wall is behind my display) while the icons “float” on the surface of my monitor. Move my head and the background appears to move… while the icons stay still.

Weird eyes or just an interesting optical illusion?

I’m going with weird eyes for now.

😉

Anywho, it’s kinda relaxing for these old eyes to ALT-TAB over to that Win2KVM and just let ’em rest in 3-D comfort for a while. A “2/3-yard stare” instead of a 1,000-yard stare” kinda thing.

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Now, This Is More Like It

I’ve been wanting to take a small, light car and convert it to an electric plugin/hybrid*, but several factors have made me put off doing so. Now it looks like one roadblock may be falling:

EV batteries demonstrate 180,000-plus mile lifespan

One of the key points critics have leveled at the electric car movement is that any money saved by switching gas stations for the power point will be lost when the battery fades and needs replacing. With battery costs currently still high, this is a valid concern – but how long can a battery pack last? Battery provider Southern California Edison have been testing a lithium-ion battery subpack for two and a half hears now and have demonstrated a life of more than 180,000 miles without significant performance deterioration.

Of course, battery service life is just one of several factors influencing when/if I’ll actually get to such a project, but at least that’s one excuse that may be knocked down. “May be” since the test wasn’t under real life conditions, just a lab simulation.

*”plugin/hybrid”? Yeh, I’d like to be able to tow a generator on trips longer than the battery pack can handle on its own without recharge, and have the gas- or diesel-powered generator feed the batteries/electrical system on demand if necessary. Kinda like this car:

acp_tzero_dsc00467

Although, I do NOT expect to ever do a conversion that can do this:

*heh*

Trackposted to Rosemary’s News and Ideas, , The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, A Newt One/ American Truth Warriors, Political Byline, The World According to Carl, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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The Joys of eBooks

I could list a tons of benefits eBooks offer, from cost (zero for Gutenberg.org and other PD sites’ eBooks to very modest for a book still under copyright) to readability (yes, readability: I read almost all the eBooks I download in my web browser, often at 200%-300% magnification, nice for older eyes), but one benefit stands out: Googling (or other search engine use).

Example:

Actually, it was a spread spectrum signal that worked a lot like 802.11b wireless data transmission protocol, only it was centered somewhere around 1.42 gigahertz. Roger could not place it but that particular radio frequency meant something to him.

[Edit] OK, what happened to the whole paragraphs following the blockquote? I dunno… Should have said something like,

1.42 gigahertz? Sounded familiar to me, too, so… highlight, right-click, choose my search engine and… SETI. Of course.

Now, how easy would that have been were I reading a dead tree book? Not very.

Fun stuff.

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Hobo Wine

Take six cans of off-brand frozen grape juice concentrate. Add about 2.5 gallons of clean water, a couple of cups of sugar and a package of just regular old bread yeast. Place in “kitty litter” fermenter for a couple of weeks and…

right at 2.5 gallons of juuuust this side of drinkable, rather dry “hobo” wine. Didn’t use a hydrometer to measure alcohol content, but it has the mouth/taste/feel of alcohol content roughly comparable to a typical commercial wine.

Going to purchase some airlocks and other equipment this week so I can have four r five batches of beers and/or wines and/or cider going at once through the winter. I made an airlock for my “kitty litter” fermenter last year from PVC plumbing parts, but I can buy them for about that premade, so 2 or 3 of them will allow me to make some more primary fermenters.

I “bottled” one gallon of this w(h)ine in a very, very clean (and sanitized) opaque milk jug. another half gallon went into a clean cranberry juice jug and immediately into the fridge, while another gallon went into Grolsch swingtop bottles with some priming sugar to make some sparkling “shampipple” for Thanksgiving fare (since I’ll not have any hard cider ready by then. “Age” the “bottled” (and bottled) w(h)ine for a couple of weeks, refrigerate the “shampipple” version and, drink up.

So far, I’m really happy with this lil experimental brew. Total cost for 2.5 gallons w(h)ine? About $5.

Next batch will cost a tad more, since I’ll be using a $0.90 package of real wine yeast for the mix. Call it about $5.75 or so. Whoop-de-do.

*heh*

I’m no big drinker–none of us here at twc central are–so of the 200 gallons a year the law allows me to make, I’ll probably make no more than 100 gallons for the whole family to consume.

At least we have a half gallon to play drinking games with on election night if we want to.

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A Lil Compy Fun

[Note: I wrote about this last night, but it disappeared into the bit bucket somewhere and *poof!* ;-)]

Son&Heir and I took a day off and headed north. Ended up barely avoiding re-enacting a minor subset of The Gift of the Magi by buying each others’ Christmas presents together. *heh*

Soooo… I bought him his “original” XBox (all $60 of it) and he bought me mine. We knew he had his eye on a $75 deal on one to go along with his Wii and XBox 360 and PS3 for whatever reason and thought that would be a reasonable addition to his Xmas list from us. What we didn’t know was that he had planned on buying two, modding them to be used as media servers and giving us one of them.

(Oh, you noticed the disparity between the $75 and the $60? Yep. Price wars. NOTE: not exactly “price wars”–see comments.)

So, I’m modding “his” and he’s modding “ours”.

Works. (He gets the six games that came with the two ‘Boxes.)

As it stands, I’m just getting up to speed on the modding process. Deciding between a strictly softmod or an all-out hard mod. The difference? About $100. For the hard mod, about $40 for a mod chip plus $40 for some peripheral hardware, plus $60 for a new hard drive.

For a softmod, just about $40 for some interface hardware to easily transfer some setup files from my PC to the XBox–the rest of the stuff is either free (all free software) or already in Son&Heir’s possession (lil hardware stuff). Heck, maybe another $10 for a USB-to-PS/2 “Y” adapter for using a nice lil wireless keyboard/mouse combo I semi-retired a while back (the mouse felt a tad klunky in my hand).

Then, yeh, I’d probably change out the hard drive for a larger one. The reason I’d consider chipping the thing is that I could add a MUCH larger hard drive were I to do that. So, I may softmod it and then chip it later. That’d work. Heck, once I figure the best streaming solution from my computer with the TV card, I’d certainly want a larger hard drive to store DVR stuff, but not over 200GiB. If I needed more storage than that, I’d just burn a DVD or three.

Speaking of… Ripped the Jackie Chan/Jet Li “The Forbidden Kingdom” DVD the other day, cos the rental was up and Son&Heir wanted a look at it (yeh, the copy’s destroyed now–I think; that was the plan, at least). I’d just have kept it over and paid the late fee, but… small town, small video rental place, and apparently the vid’s really pouplar, so I took it back on time. Anywho, it’s a DVD I may well buy. The wire-fu scenes with the Monkey King, and the scene with Let Li and Jackie Chan going at each other are really, really good “choreography”. Fun. Heck, the stuff that’s not fly-by-wire-fu in those scenes is even better than the wire fu. The plot’s nothing. Characterization’s so-so (Jackie’s always fun, and Jet Li gets to play some fun parts in this one, but character development? In a Jackie Chan movie? Fuggetaboutit! *heh*). Nah. This is all about the “choreography” and the camera work. Fun movie.

Bad part? No out takes normally found in Jackie Chan movies. Bummer. Oh, well. Can’t have everything. This at least had Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the same flick.

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fo’ shizzle…

Seen at American Digest:



You saw it here (probably last *heh*)

Check out more “news” that beats the socks off the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind faux news for accuracy… even though it’s deliberately fictional humor at The Onion. One of the few “news” (that’s not news) outlets worth paying any attention to, IMO.

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Travel Through Time in the Middle East

For a cool, not entirely inaccurate OK, OK, moderately accurate, within the constraints of the medium (just quibbles for the most part) 90-second overview of the past few thousand years’ history of the Middle East, check this flash animated map out.


CLICK HERE for the animation

While it won’t illuminate much for folks who don’t already have some grounding in the area’s history, it’s a pretty cool review for folks who do.

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Heigh-Ho…

Or perhaps, “Eighteen tons and what do you get… ”

Well, at least I have refuge from the word (and activity) that gave Maynard G Krebs heart palpitations every time it was uttered…

Yeh, that’s the ticket: home sweet home, refuge from a world gone mad. But then…

Lovely Daughter has planned on moving back into the twc central catacombs (finished basement), which means… the room that we’ve used for storage for the past five or six years must be cleaned out. Unfortunately, that happens to be the single largest room in the house, about 10 SF larger than the living room, in fact. And it is (was) packed to the gills.

*heh*

Sooo, in the past week, as time and energy has permitted, Son&Heir and I have been sorting and re-packing and throwing stuff out, no matter how appealing the junk may be. Including, but certainly not limited to, a storehouse of “ancient” computers and computer parts, 8088/8086/286/386/486 and old Pentiums/586/686 computers, stripped of usable (or even potentially usable) parts (which are now packed away and stored much, much more compactly) and hauled out for disposal. Eleven of ’em so far.

Oh, I’m keeping 6 of the older, rarely-booted 486 and Pentium boxes, primarily just for fun, although I do have some old files archived on a 486 I really ought to transfer elsewhere. Heck, it’s an old Win 3.11 for Workgroups comp I no longer even have a network card in… getting that thing on the network ought to be a buncha fun all by its lonesome. *heh*

And then there are all the peripherals. Most of them are sorted pretty well, but many of them just need to be tossed. Who needs a bunch of perfectly usable, but slow, CD read-only drives, anyway? (OK, I’ll hang on to the NEC CD changer drive, cos it’s cool, and I can use it building a media center. A six CD shuffler would be OK in a multi-drive system. Besides, the faceplate’s already painted black, which should match up well with the rest of my components.)

And, of course, the computer related junk is just the tip of the iceberg, as it were. Boxes of books that we want to hang onto are going in pastic tubs and then into the newly-emptied storage shed outside (and yes, that was a fun chore, too :-)).

More fun ‘n’ games? Yeh, what I want to do in that room, after a thorough cleaning, is reseal and “plaster” the walls, add a ceiling fan (have one) and ethernet cabling (2 of 4 of the other rooms downstairs already have ethernet, and I think the bathroom doesn’t really need it, do you? :-)). Oh, and a little work on the closet in that room might be in order. Already have a “new” door set aside for the place and Lovely Daughter will need to pick out her own paint color(s). Yep. Another two weeks from today should be about right.

So, who needs [that word that drove Maynard G Krebs around the bend] to stay busy?

😉

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Paris Hilton for President?

For a bobbleheaded bimbo who thinks she’s lampooning Juan Mexicain’s energy policy, Paris Hilton actually makes sense in her “campaign ad” (linked above–h.t. to my Wonder Woman :-)).

Of course, “thinks she’s lampooning” is the operative phrase. While she simplifies Barack Hussein Obamassiah’s energy policy fairly well enough (“de-negativeizing” it by omitting, of course, the punitive energy taxes he wants to impose on John and Jane Doe), she oversimplifies Juan Mexicain’s policy suggestions the other direction, mentioning only the offshore drilling position he’s recently taken and omitting his seriously sensible suggestion of prize money for the development of new energy storage technologies.

Hmmm, “the old guy’s” energy policy sounds remarkably like Paris Hilton’s. I don’t know whether that’s an encouraging sign or not.

At least Juan Mexicain’s people jumped right on it and noted how much more sensible a blonde bobbleheaded bimbo’s energy policy is than a brunette bobbleheaded bimbo’s energy policy.

Come to think of it, maybe Paris Hilton as president might not be so bad considering the alternatives. What’s her position with urm, on *dang!* about illegal immigrants? If she’d come out for strict enforcement of laws already on the books on that issue, I might not even mind it when she painted the White House pink.

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This weekend…

…is starting early for me. I’m going to be playing with Virtualbox, and I’m putting other things in… another box, for now. (Lovely Daughter’s dropping by Saturday, so that day’s out *heh*)

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