Bloom Box Solid Fuel Cell

Some CO2 emmited, no idea about the math on it. It needs to be produced, maintained, and trashed/ recycled. It might be more efficient given the fact that there is almost none energy transport cost.

Green, or will it just double the energy consumption?

Lou Reed - Heroin

Except for electro, psytrance and house, yeah, I like the old stuff like Lou Ree, Nico, the Velvet Underground, or Iggy Pop too. Below, one old Lou Reed, not really the song I was looking for but I liked the old rawness of it.



Can't remember that other song? Fistful of dollars? Something... ?? Yeah, later question was it, 1966 Velvet Underground and Nico - Waiting for the Man, get the whole album if you can.


Old Stuff

Wiretapping the Internet: Giving Weapons of Mass Destruction to Idiots

Various jurisdictions around the world have lawful-intercept implementations and even require ISPs to implement these. In the U.S., lawful intercept capabilities on Internet infrastructure are a legal requirement under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)

This is done wholly for the common good, and to protect your law-abding citizens against online money scams, illegitimate porn, child abuse and seeking terrorist activity. The problem: A substantial part of our population consists of idiots, and that doesn't stop at the doors of your local law-enforcement agency.

To the IRS we are all tax-avoiders, and to the police everyone is a criminal until proven otherwise. You need thugs to beat thugs, and in their hunger to go after every crime, and their in incapability to often do so, your average cop will fabricate evidence, cross-use lawful wiretapping to wiretap other cases, use break-and-entry when not permitted, resort to lies, libel and slander to incite witch hunts, provoke crimes -even legal in some countries,- send innocent people to jail, or even degrade, mutilate or kill people all in a day's work.

It depends on your country, maybe you do feel safer if your police can spy on you. But, if you live in a wealthy country like I do, where the average biggest crime daily committed is by a set of ducks causing a traffic jam, you might end up sending your own anti-social family to jail since mom cheated once, daddy got bored and looked at some boobs, daughter did a research project on online terrorism, son used an illegal credit-card list to pay his online gambling habit, and your neighbour was smart enough to break the wep-encryption of the wireless access point to satisfy his own extreme needs.

It may come as a surprise to you, but given everything, the biggest criminal organization in your vicinity is probably your law-enforcement agency, and yes, you do have stuff to hide. It's called your freedom.

The US model of shooting everything on sight, probably isn't that bad.

Freeform Five - No More Conversations

Good Noize!

Extreme Flies

Extreme Sheep

Beehh...

Its Wrong!

Great, I remembered a rule wrongly, and have been consistently writing something wrong for the last year or so, so a new sticky for my forehead:

It's is a contraction of "it is" or "it has." Its is the possessive form of "it."

Ah well, not fix post but fix my writing.

Grrr....

School Spies on Student?

According to BoingBoing.

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

Uh, as far as I know, my home is my home, and I can freely walk around half-naked wearing a purple tutu, yellow feathers up my *ss, look at Megan Fox pictures while liberally indulging in a lot of depraved sex acts with green stuffed bunnies imagining one of them is Bill Clinton, and I still wouldn't be doing anything wrong?

The bunnies are okay, but the feathers itch.

Lego Problem Solvers

Just some geeky stuff. A Lego solver for Rubik's Cubes:





And a Lego solver for Sudoku (not shown, the embedding Flash is too large).

Thanks to singularityhub.com.

Puzzling.

Mechanical Computing

I needed to bypass my own ethics for a moment -its a personal open question,- but I love these videos which show how mechanics were used to implement fire control computers in the navy.

Watch them here: Video 1 and Video 2.

Bombs away.

Jet, Ink and Math

I decided to take the go-ahead and buy a printer. Since I don't expect to print a lot, but thought it would be nice if I could print the occasional photo, I bought a cheap inkjet.

Still, I was kinda hungry for the cheap laserjet too. At a price of Euro 99, it would have been a nice deal. The annoying part is the consumables of course, ink cartridges dry out if I don't use them enough, and colour laserjet toners are very expensive at about a Euro 160 per change. Driving home, I puzzled a bit further, and decided that the absurd cheapest deal would have been to buy one cheap inkjet, and about three laserjets - one to print, the rest for cheap toners.

Uh... Bubbles? ... Anyone? ...

Algorithm Fined for Bad Conduct

NYSE Euronext, the Euro-American operator of several securities exchanges, has fined Credit Suisse's trading division for failing to monitor a computer trading algorithm. The algorithm misconducted hundreds of thousands of stock transactions.

Earlier this month, a malfunctioning algorithm accidentally traded 200,000 futures contracts to itself. And last year, the London Stock Exchange shut down after a rash of computer-generated orders.

With an estimated sixty percent of all trading done by algorithms, a number which can be expected to grow, the algorithms seem to have found a smarter path to world domination than through global warfare.

I can't do that, Dave.

Afrikanerhart

I was looking whether an old friend -singer/songwriter- would have placed some videos on youtube and ended up with this, this guy has the same family name. No idea what to think of it...

Single Window Gimp. Finally.

The Photo editor most commonly used at Linux systems, the Gimp, gets a revamp, a single window mode.

Its a breakthrough. Not because this wasn't possible before, but because for years people, developers, insisted that multiple windows mode are the preferred way of working and disregarded all opposing views by what was then often called 'the Photoshop' league. Good to see the debate is over.

No sense or nonsense.

333 Posts

The three-hundred-and-thirty-third post. A good moment to go back to the roots on how bits are created. A movie derived from the development of the twitter source code: Twitter Code Swarm.

Icons are developers, particles are files.

Oh golly, now bits are particles, too.

Back to the Past!

I decided to place myself about thirty years back in the past, since I don't really grasp any computing science literature written after, say, 1985. Gone are the days of mathematical heroes who typed on PDP11s and were dreaming of the day a computer could be programmed with math only. Instead, current computing engineers hack around in languages like Java or C#, and computer scientists are entirely happy writing the biggest number of compressed greek symbols per page, in the hope someone will understand their voodoo.

I say, no more! I am looking for old typewriter fonts and handwritten greek to write a good critique, or possibly the documentation of the compiler I am writing.

Retro science.