Thursday, October 27, 2011

Cutting glass is hard.

Just saying, how pass fail is that. You either cut it correctly or you need another thing of glass. Long story short I changed a very broken window in my house for a slightly broken window, that I cut and kinda glued the bits back on. And only really had the one large enough piece of scrap glass. My mistake was using the glass cutter after I broke it. I fixed it with a pin, a nail, and a screwdriver, but it didn't cut the same (I cut a bunch of smaller bits of scrap glass to practice).

Friday, October 21, 2011

Harold Camping says the world ends today.

Be ready, we may have to fight flying insects with goat heads or something. Yeah, sure he wasn't spot on come May, but he's certainly right this time. He's gotta be right.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

An early review of Darwin. Exactly right.

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

(from an anonymous review of a work on evolution, Atheneum, 2102, 8 February, 1867, p. 217.)

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Red Line on Monitor, who's your friend?

So if I tweak my monitor the red line going down it will sometimes go away. I did this a couple times with fantasies that if I keep it that way it would stay that way. Now, there's a red line and a green line!

DOG BISCUITS!

Friday, October 7, 2011

Memristors are coming. Yay.

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/06/10/2011/51988/ief2011-hp-to-replace-flash-and-ssd-in-2013.htm

First properly developed a few years ago, Memristors have a really interesting property that as you send a current through them it changes the resistance as a lingering effect. And since it's pretty much just a special type of wire, and requires no transistors to work or capacitors like DRAM, it ends up being really really really tiny and taking very very little power. They are set now to replace SSD, and hopefully end up replacing a lot of computer memory including the memory on CPUs. With this technology it, you could significantly reduce the amount of electricity a computer needs. And, actually stop the computer without losing the computer's current state. You could turn it off, and all the data would stay where it currently is and turning it back on wouldn't change anything.

But, even without utilizing those properties yet, you still have faster and cheaper and better. Even if you don't yet need the non-volatile abilities for things which have traditionally been volatile. Also interesting technology in the pipeline (not at HP that I know of), non-volatile displays. It turns out there's more than a few ways to replace the current LCD displays which use refreshing liquid crystals with backlighting to technology that simply reflects different colors. Like a paper that changes what is printed on it. Then what is displayed on the screen stays on the screen, and if you take your device into the sunlight, it gets even more clear rather than bleaching out.

There's a lot of interesting technology out there, that's coming to fruition.

Skeuomorphs vestiges in human objects.

A skeuomorph is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines. An alternative definition is "an element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material"

Monday, October 3, 2011

Quote: Ernestine Rose

Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom. Do you tell me what Paul or Peter says on the subject? Then again I reply that our claims do not rest on the opinions of any one, not even on those of Paul and Peter, . . . Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters. -- Ernestine Rose, Feminist, Suffragette, Atheist, Abolitionist