Month: April 2005

all batteries are rechargeable?

Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools (3):

Disposable alkaline batteries are not perceived by most people to be rechargeable, and that’s how the manufacturers like it. Until digital pulse-technology chargers came out a few years ago, it was NOT an option for most people. Alkaline battery walls are very thin, and the heat generated by simple brute-force recharging frequently split them open with a bang.

There are new chip-controlled chargers which will safely and effectively recharge “disposable” alkaline batteries. I have a Buddy-L Super Charger, one of the first designed this way. Bought it about 7 years ago, and I still use it to recharge all my alkaline batteries. Saves me a BUNDLE!

As much battery wastage/disposal as we have around here, this sounds like a good investment.

Now playing: Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso by Leonard Bernstein (1) from the album “Bernstein in Berlin” | Get it

legitimate uses of P2P technology

I took a look at X-Plane, by Austin Meyer (10), the amazing flight simulator, the other day and was surprised to see that BitTorrent was offered as a download option.

Download with Bit-Torrent:
8.10 Mac (Bit Torrent)

It’s 300+ Mb for any platform, so a distributed download might make sense for speed as well.

I was just struck by the open mention of it for commercial software.

Now playing: 5_2. Andante mosso, quasi allegretto by Sir Colin Davis & the Boston Symphony Orchestra from the album “Complete Sibelius Symphonies No 2, 5” | Get it

Adieu, rendezvous, bonjour Bonjour

Apple Bonjour – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Bonjour, formerly Rendezvous, is Apple’s trade name for its implementation of the IETF Zeroconf protocol – a computer network technology used in Apple’s Mac OS X from version 10.2 onwards.
[ . . . ]
Rendezvous was renamed Bonjour due to a 2004 settlement between Apple and Tibco Software Inc, as Tibco already market a product with the name Rendezvous.

Any idea why they didn’t just go with ZeroConf or something more palatable?

notes to self

Working out how to use OS X system fonts in X11 applications is a nuisance. Took me ages to find out (again) how to do this. This time I’m making a note of how to do it.

mkdir .fonts/sys
ln -s /System/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/sys
mkdir .fonts/lib
ln -s /Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/lib
mkdir .fonts/user
ln -s ~/Library/Fonts ~/.fonts/user
I have fonts in both /System/Library and /Library. Anyway, fire up the Gimp and it should allow access to all your OS X fonts in the text tool.

[thanks for this page which built on this]

music meme

  1. Nightingales/Prefab Sprout/From Langley Park To Memphis
  2. Wearing a Raincoat/They Might Be Giants/The Spine
  3. Armada/Public Image Ltd./9
  4. Horses In My Dreams/PJ Harvey/Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
  5. Take It Up/World Party/Goodbye Jumbo
  6. Adagio molto e cantabile; Andante moderato/CSO-Fritz Reiner/Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Op. 125, “Choral”
  7. Gardening at Night/R.E.M./Chronic Town
  8. Giant Steps/John Coltrane/Giant Steps
  9. Finest Worksong/R.E.M./Document
  10. The Playboy Mansion/U2/Pop

assumptions

I just got a survey through my school mailing list (what, don’t have all elementary schools have a listserver?) and it’s all about kid’s TV watching habits. The assumption was that all kids watch TV. Mine don’t and their teachers are well aware of it. [*]

I resisted the urge to express myself plainly, but I left the conversation open. It’s hard to tell someone that kids have no more need for a minimum daily allowance of TV than they do for masturbation: I’ll save that for later.

* My 6 year old was called on to correct her teacher’s deliberate misspellings the other week, to the amazement of the 2nd and 3rd graders (she’s in a mixed grade classroom, the Montessori way). When the teacher explained that the little spark doesn’t watch TV and her language skills come for reading, another child we know called out “they have a TV, they just don’t have cable.” As if that makes a difference. Her teacher knew better, that all we watch are movies (Mulan 2 today) and occasional baseball games. An experiment that has paid off in ways we never anticipated . . .

Apropos of that, I just found this:
If You’re Not Making Television, It’s Making You. by Dirk Koning:

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of teens and adults have discovered that if you’re not making television, it’s making you. They’ve had this epiphany while volunteering at the Community Media Center’s public-access station, GRTV, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As they learned to angle a camera for a different perspective, edit for a desired effect, or schedule a broadcast to reach a certain audience, they realized that, all their lives—for good and for ill—television has been shaping their thinking, molding their culture, and persuading their purchases


Now playing: Fight Test by The Flaming Lips (2) from the album “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” | Get it (7)

incoming

5 military choppers just flew by my house, northbound, pretty much over I-5. Slow, noisy, and ominous. I could hear them long before I could see them.

We get a lot of air traffic here, mostly commercial: some of it stands out. There are military installations all over the place (Fort Lewis, McChord AFB, Naval Station Everett, Keyport Naval Base, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard/Bremerton) so who knows what they were about. Just a bit disconcerting . . .

And just now, 4 more . . .

bad poetry generator

Josh has the market cornered on adolescent poetry (54), of course.

But what do you do when you wake up with cliched imagery and motifs rattling round in your head and you’re not a sufficiently advanced perl script?

I just dropped them into a text editor window and I’ll stare them at as I go by that desktop (my iBook has four 12 inch workspaces (80) which I find to be really useful on a small screen). I’ll either find a way to use ’em or throw them out.