a crank’s progress

I was just listening to White Fluffy Clouds by Camper Van Beethoven (from the album “New Roman Times - EP” | Get it) and Googling up all the military equipment and ordnance references (M-4, M-9, JDAM, A to A, OH-58): the next track was The Military by Ornette Coleman from the album [...]

The color photo was invented in:
The color photo was invented in 1903 by the Lumiere brothers, and the French army was the only one taking color photos during the
course of the war.
The images are artful and interesting, but are they really authentic color photos from the First World War? Or are they tricked-up Kodachrome?
Hmm, according [...]

5,000 cyclists huff and puff the Chilly Hilly:
Sunshine, lack of skiing may have boosted numbers
So that handwritten bib with “5001” on it was not a fluke . . .
Now playing: Pipeline by Dick Dale & Stevie Ray Vaughan from the album “Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble: The Real Deal - Greatest Hits 2”

So in the aftermath of yesterday’s misadventures, I took the chewed up plastic pedals off the hybrid and replaced one of them with the old pedals from my road bike (basic metal platforms, no cleats: I’m debating getting clipless pedals for it). One came off without incident, and it of course would be on the [...]

Help Wanted to Expand Free Speech Globally:
A group that wants to assist free speech in authoritarian nations is looking for a technically savvy person — a CTO or lead engineer type — who can do a short term study, possibly leading to a longer-term job. This is a paying gig for the right person.
The project [...]

Train Short, Go Long:
UNLESS YOU JUST BIKED the Tour de France, few cycling experiences inflate an ego like watching a bike’s odometer hit triple digits on the same day it registered zero. And cycling into shape for those 100 miles takes less time than you think. Try two months.
Well, there is plenty of information on [...]

Not as hilly, more chilly. It didn’t seem as rigorous (not that I didn’t end up walking up some of the steeper inclines, for various reasons), but my it was colder, especially at the end while waiting for the return ferry (imagine standing in a fogbank being wafted on a cool breeze after having ridden [...]

On the Badness of Classic-Rock Radio
Most classic-rock stations are pretty lame; formulaic, trashy, yappy, dumb. I have developed a deterministic method for measuring this badness, and it has to do with Pink Floyd’s execrable The Wall. Radio stations that never play it are almost always quite good; ones that play it a lot are the [...]

The default value of 8M was too small. In fact, to import my MovableType content, I ended up setting it to 128M, I think.
memory_limit = 16M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)
and I diddled these values a bit, though I suspect the change to php.ini is [...]

Boing Boing: Why Wikipedia works, and how the Britannica bully got it wrong:
Aaron Krowne has written a stunning refutation of [Robert] McHenry’s piece and published it in Free Software Magazine. This thoroughgoing debunking not only shows how shoddy McHenry’s reasoning is, but it actually goes some way toward a general theory of why and how [...]