Saturday 02/28/04
The art of Daniel Conway. The dude is twenty years old.
Roger Dean is offering his classic album cover art for download as desktop pictures for just $16.95 per set of ten. But wait! If you enter through Apple's Macintosh Products Guide, you can get the second set free when you buy the first! I'm not sure whether you have to specify "Mac format" (as far as I can tell, that just means StuffIt) and/or use a Mac browser when ordering. I got mine, is all I know.
Sure, you could try to scan your old Yes and Asia records, but these look absolutely incredible. You can see every brushstroke.
Update: Someone on one of the Mac sites pointed out that there's no reason not to get the highest available resolution even if your screen is smaller, since you can easily scale them down. I wholeheartedly agree.
Friday 02/27/04
Make your own CD/DVD inserts and envelopes on the Web! You can even download the source code and install it on your own site.
The Literary Dick (as in private detective) answers your questions about literary mysteries and scandals.
Turn the battery tester on the side of a Duracell (or Energizer) battery into a CPU load meter connected to your serial port. Sorry, the driver's only for Linux.
What are social networking sites like Tribe.net and Orkut good for? Well, one potential use is as a source of creating whitelists for spam filters. Interesting idea.
Seattle's Museum of History and Industry is conducting a one-time tour of the city's historic neon signs on March 6 at 7 PM. $35.
The minimoog V is a software emulation of the classic 1971 synthesizer, endorsed by Bob Moog himself. Yours for just $199. There have been software Moogs before, but I believe this is the first "official" one. The demo tracks are pretty cool. The Prayer Capsule one reminds me of Tangerine Dream. (Actually, it's not just that track; Prayer Capsule seems very TD influenced. Check out their other tracks on their own site. Mmm, tasty.)
The secret origin of the Muppets' "Mah na mah na." Do dooo, de doo do! BTW, there's a Portland band called Menomena whose name is pronounced the name way. Their album I Am the Fun Blame Monster is pretty cool.
Thursday 02/26/04
I went to the Friends of Libraries USA author reception at the Seattle Hilton last night to provide moral support for my friend Alma, who was one of the authors being recepted, although she needed much less such support than she let on. It was far more enjoyable than I anticipated; I'm going to have to get Harry Stein's new book for my dad, I think, and Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series seems like it'd be a hoot. Both authors struck me as real gentlemen.
On the other hand, Jean Reynolds Page's interminable reading of an extremely depressing passage from her first novel sure brought the mood down.
Alma's treat of a book The Secrets of Jin-Shei comes out in the US on May 1 (the UK gets it on March 1). If you're going to Potlatch this weekend, say hello to her. I met her on the misc.writing newsgroup many years ago, when she still lived in New Zealand, and am delighted that she and her husband now live in the Pacific Northwest where I can see them regularly.
Tuesday 02/24/04
Panasonic has announced that they will ship yet another even smaller flash memory format, dubbed MiniSD, for use in cellular phones. It's apparently electrically compatible with regular SD memory cards, as Panasonic will provide an adapter so you can use the new cards in SD slots.
You know, I haven't really heard anyone complaining that SD cards are too big. In fact, they're too easy to misplace as it is. If you want to make a cell phone smaller, removing the completely superfluous gadgetry (camera, music player, etc.) from the phone is the obvious solution. Bonus: you probably won't need the memory card slot at all anymore, saving even more space!
There are some people who think they want cameras or other unrelated trinkets in their cell phones, true, but aside from the base profit motive, there is no imaginable reason to encourage these folks by actually producing such devices. Phones are for talking, not for taking pictures, or for playing music or games, or for anything else. That's why they're called "phones!"
You damn kids had better stay off my lawn, too.
The Phoenix New Times has a fascinating-like-a-wreck article on a recent gathering of white supremacists, which was officially called Aryanfest but for which the writers have come up with a far superior name: Nazipalooza. I'm dismayed that people like those dsecribed in the article still exist, but the good news is, their numbers are dwindling, and they seem to everyone else increasingly pathetic and ridiculous. Good.
Monday 02/23/04
Build your own electronic Enigma, a solid-state replica of the code machine used by the German army during World War II.
If you want something like Movable Type, only not Movable Type, to manage your site, Dean Allen's Textpattern 1.0 is out. It appears to have some interesting features Movable Type does not, so maybe it's worth a look even if you do use Movable Type.
Find animals in the map of the London Underground.
Interesting page about edible plants and the parts of them we eat.
Saturday 02/21/04
Mark-Jason Dominus has a great article on why he hates advocacy. It's at O'Reilly's perl.com, so it focuses specifically on Perl advocacy, but there are a lot of good and subtle points in there that apply to any technological advocacy.
Friday 02/20/04
DxO Optics Pro is a clever new application that claims to correct digital camera images based on an extensive profile of the imaging chain. Lens distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting, and softness are among the flaws that can be corrected. Looks pretty cool. Of course, the first supported cameras are ones that need it least -- high-end digital SLRs.
Matthew Richardson, an Oxford engineering student, was unexpectedly approached to deliver a series of lectures in Beijing on global economics. He knew "next to nothing" about the subject, but he decided to go anyway and try to bluff his way through. Despite the fact that his audience consisted of Chinese MBAs, he almost pulled it off, fleeing only when he neared the end of his introductory textbook.
Upon his return, Richardson discovered that he shared a name with a New York University professor who is an authority on international financial markets. No doubt that is who the Chinese were expecting. They were probably just too polite to say anything when they were regaled with Economics 101 instead.
Soople is a collection of new interfaces to various Google search features.
Thursday 02/19/04
Video Feedback art. 'Nuff said.
Got a big form on your Web site? Try these Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms. Some good tips, including a few I hadn't thought of. I must say, however, that I'm disappointed to see discussion of neither the taborder attribute nor JavaScript tricks for selecting the appropriate radio button or checkbox when the user tabs into a particular text field.
Once upon a time I had a betterforms.html document on my Web site that demonstrated similar techniques -- the difference was, this was in the days when Netscape 4 was king, so there was a lot of effort expended to do things that are trivial to do with decent CSS and HTML 4 support.
Boeing. Surplus. Store! This is a must-visit for me in the near future.
The universities of Regensburg and Rostock have published the results of a large research project on facial attractiveness. The Web site, featuring inhumanly beautiful computer-generated faces, is called Beautycheck.
James D. Macdonald has written a long thread on how to write publishable commercial fiction.
EC Brown has an extensive directory of links to sites with MP3s for download -- legitimately.
Wednesday 02/18/04
"Like a Jules Verne fantasy, a ghostly city with its own network of four-lane highways lies deep beneath the industrial heart of Detroit, its crystalline walls glittering and gleaming in the flickering light. It is a world of no night or day. ... It is a world of salt."
(This page appears blank in Mozilla Firefox; it's worth firing up another browser to look at it.)
From the NOVA program about the crash of flight 111: the interactive Anatomy of a Jetliner. Wonder no more about those clunking noises under the floorboards.
Salon has an excerpt from Steven Johnson's new book about the mind and the brain, Mind Wide Open. It's well worth suffering through the ad to obtain the day pass to read.
Fragments: art by Mat Clum, music by Patrick Fitzgerald (ex-Kitchens of Distinction). A few MP3s of Fitzgerald's current project, Stephen Hero, are also available.
Seattle Weblogger meetup tonight at 7 PM, upstairs at Bauhaus at 301 Pine Street on Capitol Hill. Join us. Joinnnn usss!
Update: As always, Jake has the canonical list of attendee links at 8bitjoystick.com.
MacMerc tells you how to never lose the Pepsi iTunes giveaway. Turns out it's possible to read the underside of the cap from below by tilting the bottle -- the word "again" will be visible if the bottle is a loser. Put it back in the cooler and grab a different one.
The late Michael O'Donoghue (an original contributor to the National Lampoon) reveals How to Write Good.
Donald Rumsfeld's fighting techniques are unstoppable!
Tuesday 02/17/04
Blogged for my future reference: the aptly named ConnectionStrings.com, which collects connection strings for using various databases with Microsoft's ADO (e.g. from VBScript on an Active Server Page).
Atmospheric optics including why Mt. Rainier's shadow, like that of most mountains, looks triangular.
Benford's Law dictates that, in any group of related numbers, whether it's a list of the areas of rivers or the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book "American Men of Science," numbers that begin with the digit 1 are found about 30% of the time -- three times more frequently than a naive theory might predict. The probability declines smoothly as the digits rise; the digit 9 is found at the beginning of numbers only 4.5% of the time. This counterintuitive and freaky result can, in theory, be used to help detect fraudulent tax returns, bogus scientific experiments, and other cases of data fabrication, at least until the fabricators catch on to Benford's Law.
Friday 02/13/04
A little over a year ago, after much deliberation (documented on this site), I bought the first new car I've ever owned: a 2003 Hyundai Elantra GT hatchback. Not the world's sexiest car, but I was impressed with the features you get for the price and the long warranty. I wanted a small, affordable car for the daily commute, with the flexibility to bring a friend or two along as passengers or to haul a bit of cargo. The 5-door Elantra was exactly what I was looking for, and it was two to three thousand dollars less expensive than its competition (primarily the Mazda Protege 5).
I now have 16,500 miles on the car and have had no mechanical problems with it. I have had the following three issues, all of which I consider minor enough not to justify a trip to the dealer:
- The driver's side power mirror won't adjust horizontally when it's raining. It works fine if I run the defroster for a while (the mirrors are heated). I'm the only one who drives the car, so the mirrors haven't needed adjusting for months.
- The driver's seat shifts very slightly forward and backward, usually when accelerating or braking. It doesn't seem dangerous, but you can feel it.
- The vinyl adhesive trim on the rear passenger door is starting to bunch up a little, but not so much most people would really even notice.
The latter two issues are apparently fairly common on this car. I have received a recall notice for a potential brake problem, and when I take the car in for that, I'll have the dealer take care of the other issues as well.
The Check Engine light has come on a couple of times due to, I was told, a gas cap that wasn't tightened quite enough. I'll have the dealer double-check the codes during the recall service, too.
Fuel economy has been decent, though not outstanding; I'm averaging 26 MPG for the particular combination of highway and city driving that constitutes my commute. On the highway I often get 34 or even 35 MPG, 2 MPG better than the EPA estimate on the sticker. (This is due to the less restrictive K&N air filter I installed along with the Bosch Platinum +4 plugs, each of which was good for about an extra MPG on the highway.)
Some design features that could be improved on this car:
- The moonroof control needs to be one lever instead of two.
- The glovebox should have a lock.
- The detents on the doors (where they "stop" when you open them) need to be adjusted or to have an extra stop added between the two existing detents. It always seems like the door is open too wide or not wide enough.
- Pushing on the map lights should turn them on and off, rather than having separate buttons for that.
- The alarm system needs an indicator light on the dash. (I had the car stereo installer add a dummy flashing light.)
- The cargo area could really use a brighter light on each side.
- The lights on the dashboard should all be blue to match the instrument cluster.
- The steering wheel is kind of plain and could use, say, a chrome ornament in the center or something.
- The plastics in the interior outgas for quite a while. I was wiping film off the windows for months. It seems to have finally slowed down now, though.
- The trip computer is really hard to read during the day. It needs to be lit up all the time regardless of whether the headlights are on, or something.
- The "adjustable lumbar support" could stand to be a few inches higher; it's more a poke-in-the-butt lever now.
- I wanted both the moonroof and ABS anyway, so the fact that you can't buy the ABS without the moonroof didn't bother me, but it's kind of a dumb bundling of options.
- You can't turn off the A/C when running the defroster.
- The armrest on the door needs a bottom on the handhold you use to pull the door closed. It's very handy to put your wallet there when going through a drive-through or a toll booth, because when you get out of the car it's right there so you won't forget it. I still occasionally leave my wallet in the car accidentally.
- There's only a single horn rather than a dual horn like on most cars. It's kind of wimpy. Luckily, it's cheap to upgrade this yourself if you so choose.
- The interval wipers need a Mist function (a momentary switch that causes them to perform one cycle and then stop).
As you can see, these are incredibly nitpicky things to be concerned with. I could put together a similar list of annoyances about any of the other cars I've owned. Some of the issues above, in fact, have been addressed in the 2004 model (which also includes a new version of Hyundai's 4-cylinder engine with variable valve timing and a Kenwood MP3 CD stereo). I understand they've got a chrome emblem on the steering wheel now and better lighting in the cargo bay.
The car salesman told me that Hyundai's build quality is about where Toyota's was ten or so years ago, and my experience bears this out. Bottom line, I still often find myself smiling when approaching my car, and I still look forward to taking it on road trips.
Some things I liked about this car that I didn't expect:
- The windshield wipers actually go different speeds depending on whether it's raining or not. It doesn't seem to be documented, and I kind of freaked out when I first noticed how slow the wipers went, but later I noticed they went faster when it rains. I swear I'm not making this up!
- The shoulder belts can be adjusted in height.
- There are more storage cubbyholes in this car than I can find things to put in 'em, including a bulge in the door storage pocket that doubles as a cupholder.
- Speaking of the cupholders, the car came with a little plastic insert that allows the center cupholders to be adapted to different-sized cups.
- The hatchback acts like one of the doors; you don't need a key to open it if the car's unlocked. Instead, there's a handle just above the license plate.
- The remote keyless entry system doesn't make any annoying sounds when you arm or disarm it. (You can hear the doors locking, particularly the hatchback; that's plenty of audible feedback.)
- If you leave the key in the ignition when you get out of the car, you will find that you can't lock the doors; the power locks push back at you when you try! An incredibly clever and thoughtful feature.
- Another thoughtful feature: when you turn off the ignition, the windows remain powered for about a minute, so you can roll 'em up if you forgot. Of course, it would be even more thoughtful if this applied to the sunroof, too, but the sunroof requires that the ignition be in the On position.
As an aside, the 5-door body style (in hatchback or wagon format) seems to be enjoying a resurgence; the new Toyota Prius hybrid is a 5-door, and Chevy has a new 5-door version of its midsize Malibu dubbed the Malibu Maxx. That's in addition to the 5-doors available when I was shopping in January 2003: the Toyota Matrix/Pontiac Vibe twins, the Ford Focus ZX5, and the Mazda Protege5 (which has since been replaced with a 5-door model of the Mazda 3), not to mention the Subaru Outback. It's a very practical and attractive body style for a small car.
Thursday 02/12/04
"Sometimes the most interesting airplanes are the ones that never got built."
Nice photos by Sean McHugh.
Wednesday 02/11/04
FreeMind is free mind-mapping software written in Java. "Mind-mapping software" is a category of application that lets you record your thoughts and ideas along with their interconnections in a kind of network diagram. Naturally, you can include links in your maps, and post your maps on the Web.
Find sounds with FindSounds, a Web search engine that brings audio files and audiophiles together.
A social history of conjoined twins.
Tuesday 02/10/04
Sorry about the downtime this afternoon. I restarted the server from work, and it didn't come back up. Not sure why, aside from the fact that the hard disk light was stuck on. I'll be keeping a close eye on it.
Teleflip is an easy, free way to e-mail anyone's cell phone -- without having to know whose cell phone service they use. With number portability, that could change at any time anyway. Now you can just e-mail the phone number @ teleflip.com.
segusoLand is an interesting new user interface based on "reciprocal list narrowing" -- basically it's a paneled list in which you select tasks, files, applications, and peripherals in any order that is convennient for the task at hand. Lots of screenshots explain what's going on. It's nice to see the open source community finally beginning to come up with interesting new UI ideas.
Monday 02/09/04
Paul DePodesta explains how he transformed the Oakland Athletics into a winning team by thinking differently about statistics, scouting, and management. This is the same story Michael Lewis wrote about at far greater length in Moneyball, but this version is free and still meaty.
If you're using PayPal to accept payments for expensive items in online aucitons, you may want to think again. Use an escrow service if you have any doubt -- but make sure you check out the escrow service to make sure it's legit first!
February 7 is John Waters Day in the filmmaker's hometown of Baltimore, MD. Or is it?
The source code for the venerable NewTek Video Toaster has been released. Well, all of it except for Lightwave (the 3D modeler and renderer), but including the Flyer nonlinear editor as well as CG, ToasterPaint, ChromaFX, and Switcher. A related Slashdot thread has some great Toaster trivia, including the name of the famous comedian whose brother designed the hardware, and an explanation of what became of the official Toaster spokesmodel Kiki Stockhammer.
The bad news is, the source code is apparently all 680x0 assembly language. The good news is, it's apparently the final release, for the more advanced Toaster that inhabited an Amiga 4000 rather than the older A2000 version.
Sunday 02/08/04
You know you're in Seattle when they put coffee in your steak.
I'd never heard of her before the Haughey linked to her, but I have to agree that Terra Naomi deserves your ears. "Old Woman" in particular is a tour de force; it's damn hard to sound as good unaccompanied as she does. (Not that there's all that much more accompaniment on her other tracks, just guitar or piano.) At times she reminded me a bit of Tori Amos or Ani DiFranco, except, you know, much less annoying than either of them.
Trench Art: art created by World War I soldiers from battlefield materials.
Henry Dreyfuss designed the classic AT&T Model 500 telephone for Bell Labs, and documented the design process for posterity.
Anti-Valentines. Just in time.
Saturday 02/07/04
The photography of Ed Freeman illustrates the beauty of urban decay. He also has some inventive black-and-white nudes. Nice.
Sometime this weekend, this site will probably be down for an hour or two while I upgrade the server's motherboard. In the parlance of the kids today, the machine will be "getting giggy." As in a 2.4 giggyhertz (Intel-equivalent) Athlon, a giant leap from the dual 366 Celerons that are in it now. With luck, it won't be as frustrating as the last upgrade I did.
Update 1: Well, it required a Windows 2000 re-install, and I'm still configuring IIS and the mail server, and there seems to be at least one folder whose permissions somehow got so forked-up that I can't even delete it, but the Web site seems to have survived. I'll call it a success! Movable Type is quite snappy now, too.
Update 2: Mail and IIS are happy now. Not bad! The server will probably be up and down a bit more this evening as I install some stuff that got lost when I re-installed the OS. And at some point, I want to put the Netgear firewall on -- there's no time like the present, since the box is already dragged out and has a keyboard and monitor hooked up to it.
Update 3: Firewall installed and... well... firewalling. Figured out how to fix the permissions on the aforementioned forked-up folder.
Footnote: You know how a couple weeks ago, I bitched about a motherboard upgrade that required the ATX12V connection to work right? When I ordered the motherboard for the server, I made sure to order a new power supply with the ATX12V connector along with it, only to discover that 1) the new motherboard didn't need it and 2) the power supply already in the machine had the connector anyway, tucked underneath where I didn't see it at first. Meh. Guess I'll keep the new one as a spare.
Friday 02/06/04
How to make a complete map of every thought you think.
Stephen Wolfram has put the complete text of his monumental 2002 book, A New Kind of Science, online. If you're curious about what was that year's must-read geek book, but not $50 worth of curious, here's your chance to check it out.
Thursday 02/05/04
Nick Maniatis of the Howling Fantods has announced the ten finalists for his David Foster Wallace parody contest. Worth a hoot.
Slashdot is serving up random quotes from Futurama characters (apparently just Bender and Fry) in its HTTP headers. These are hidden in browsers, but Simon Willison has some command-line incantations that retrieve Slashdot's front page and display just the quote. Talk about your waste of bandwidth. By the way, I had success with the Python one on Mac OS X.
Wednesday 02/04/04
Extremely portable fire. Make a camp stove from cans, either one each of Pepsi and Guinness or a couple of cat food cans.
The Straight Dope's message board has an icky thread full of stories about pimples, abscesses, cysts, and other dermal malfunctions, including lovingly graphic description of the squeezing and popping thereof, and the substances that issue forth. It is not for nothing that the title of the thread includes the abbreviation TMI ("too much information") -- the discussion is not for the squeamish and definitely should not be taken with food. The posts by a user named Broomstick are particularly disgusting. Still, I reluctantly admit that I was riveted, if only because I never cease to be astonished by the things people will admit when protected by a pseudonym.
How to manage smart people.
The University of Arizona's Sancet Field was recently renamed Jerry Kindall Field at Frank Sancet Stadium. This is, obviously, in honor of the Jerry Kindall who is not me, but rather the winningest baseball coach in U of A history.
Tuesday 02/03/04
Car and Driver has a neat virtual tour of the airy Dresden plant where Volkswagen assembles their Phaeton luxury sedan. It's supernaturally clean for a factory. Of course, it helps that they cheat by doing most of the actual manufacturing in other locations -- the "glass factory" only does final assembly.
Photos of colored smoke. Beautiful.
The Omni Group released OmniWeb 5.0b1 yesterday. I'd tell you what all is cool about this browser, but John Gruber has already posted a detailed first look over at Daring Fireball.
Since Gruber didn't say it, I will note that the obvious antecedent for OmniWeb's site preferences is Internet Explorer's Security Zones feature, although basically all you can do with Security Zones is add sites to one zone or another, a process requiring a lot of clicking and typing, and furthermore, only security-related preferences are affected. (Still, in my IE-using days, it sure was nice to be able to turn off JavaScript or plug-ins for some sites while leaving them on for others.) OmniWeb's site preferences are obviously far more flexible and therefore way cooler.
I suggested to Omni that they offer the user the opportunity to adjust the "aspect ratio" (basically reducing the height) of thumbnails in the tab drawer. I'd settle for just being able to get 16:9 "letterbox" thumbnails; you could sure stack a lot more of them in the drawer.
Mac::Glue turns Perl into a dialect of AppleScript, sort of.
Dot splat bang: The Unix Pronunciation Guide.
Monday 02/02/04
If you visit Charlotte, North Carolina, be sure to check out the city's historic tear in the space-time continuum. That is, if you can figure out where-when it is, or what it looks like. And if you have a pet, for God's sake be careful!
Bacon Buddies are the first in a line of meat dolls from Crafty Planet. They're the carnivorous alternative to Veggie Tales!
Sunday 02/01/04
Ancient Scripts: writing systems of the past and present from Arabic to Zapotec.
