Author Archives: dr.hypercube

Blasts from the past

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And I do mean blasts –

  • S: (n) good time, blast (a highly pleasurable or exciting experience) “we had a good time at the party”; “celebrating after the game was a blast”
  • S: (v) blast, blare (make a strident sound) “She tended to blast when speaking into a microphone” *

From the Hemmings blog, an ad for Dr. Old’s creation – the 442. I went as fast as I’ve ever gone (in a car) in a friend’s 1966 442 – probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but what are you gonna do? Lest we all wax too nostalgic, I read a comparo in Car and Driver matching classic muscle cars against the VW GTI/Civic Si’s of the world and the newer little thangs ate the old iron up. There’s a lot to like about the old stuff, but when gas hits $4/gallon here in the states this summer, well…

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From Make:, another vintage noisemaker – homemade Leslies! A Hammond B3 and Leslies – a pair that’s worth their own ‘Got a Match?’ post… Again, as a result of misspent youth – I’ll always associate Leslie speakers with the J. Geils Band (local boys make good – Mr. Faye Dunaway, though from the Bronx, will always mean early 70’s Boston to me).

The youtube of the homemade rig:

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And the J. Geils Band – couldn’t find anything era-appropriate that had the whole band going, so you’ll have to settle for Magic Dick:

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“27 more minutes, before I say bye-bye…”

New category

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I’m throwing a new category up in the right margin: Etsy. For those who haven’t encountered it, Etsy is a way for craftspeople, artists, makers, etc. to bring stuff to market. The category ties to some thinking I’ve been doing about markets and what’s getting bought and sold in a networked world – long tails, bespoke vs. commodity, content and provenance, gift/barter/cash economies – I’m still sorting through my thoughts and have had a draft post in various stages of disarray for months. Recent conversations with A Certain Design Student (he’s looking at fixy/single-speed bicycle options) have moved this particular pot closer to the front of the stove; perhaps I can wrap up something post-worthy relatively soon. In the meantime, read 1000 True Fans over at Kung Fu Monkey.

Hello world!

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Um, not quite – but it does seem like I’m up on a new platform. Will shake stuff down – there will likely be a burp or two over the next couple days. Loyal readers, please bear with me!

Update1 – RSS is back, but the feed address is a little different than the one I was using – http://www.hawkdog.net/wordpress/?feed=atom is working for me.

Update2 – I seem to have lost some comments (everything after Jan. 24?) – I’ll try to get them back this evening – time to hack away at the XML export file I used to restore the posts/comments.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

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Good news – the blog is mostly updated to WordPress 2.3.x. XMLRPC (a component that allows me to post from other blogging clients – see post below for an example) is functioning properly; it wasn’t working on the 2.0.x software I was using.

Bad news – RSS, comments and direct links in to posts still aren’t working. I’m working on it… If you see anything else boogered up and would like to let me know, I’d appreciate it: dr.hypercube at gmail.com.

WordPy

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I’m testing micro/mobile blogging from the N810, using WordPy (an offline blogging client). Still thinking about the best way to get pictures from my good digital camera to Flickr – without a PC – but I know I can email from the camera in my cell direct to Flickr…

I know it’s a sign of my advanced age, but every so often I just fall over in amazement. Five years ago, posting to the web from just about anywhere in the developed world using a phone and a gadget that’ll fit nicely in a pocket? Right.

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A good day for it…

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I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole Bear Stearns thing. While I’m doing that – and trying not to see it as a precursor to a financial apocalypse – happy St. Patrick’s Day!

JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to buy Bear Stearns Cos. for about $240 million, less than a 10th of its value last week, after a run on the company ended 85 years of independence for Wall Street’s fifth-largest securities firm. *

Value of the office building BS owns?

The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure built in 2001 is worth about $1.2 billion, based on the average $1,000 per- square-foot that comparable office space in the city is currently fetching.

Um. Wow. So the rest of Bear Stearns assets are worth in the neighborhood of -$960,000,000?

Update – Nouriel Roubini:

The response of the Fed to this run has been radical and in the form of the extension of the lender of last resort support to non bank financial institutions. Specifically, the new $200 bn term facility allows primary dealers – many of which are non banks – to swap their toxic mortgage backed securities for US Treasuries; second, the Fed provided emergency support to Bear Stearns and following the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, is now providing a $30 bn plus support to JPMorgan to help the rescue of Bear Stearns; finally, now the Fed is allowing primary dealers to access the Fed discount window at the same terms as banks.

This is the most radical change and expansions of Fed powers and functions since the Great Depression: essentially the Fed now can lend unlimited amounts to non bank highly leveraged institutions that it does not regulate. The Fed is treating this run on the shadow financial system as a liquidity run but the Fed has no idea of whether such institutions are insolvent. As JPMorgan paid only about $200 million for Bear Stearns – and only after the Fed promised a $30 billlion loan – this was a clear case where this non bank financial institution was insolvent. *

Nokia N810

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I’ve written before about the *nix vs. iPhone approach to mobile web fun. Circumstances conspired to keep me away from Apple’s little bar of techno-groove; I’ve been keeping my eye on the small internet-capable convergence device space for a year now. There are currently a bunch of choices: iPhone, Asus Eee, and 2 internet tablets (their term) from Nokia – the N800 and N810. Although I still covet an iPhone, I wanted to try an open, more modular platform – I may end up drinking the Apple kool-aid in 6 months or a year – who knows. The three open devices provide a nice spectrum – the N800 on the info consumption side to the Eee on the info production side, with the N810 in the middle. I wanted Bluetooth, so I could tether to my cell and get on the net wherever I got cell signal (not an out-of-the-box option w/ the Eee) and I wanted the device to be pocketable. Survey says? N810 – especially since there was a really good deal available a week ago (someone trying to make February numbers?). Some early impressions:

  • I knew this going in, but it bears repeating – not a PDA. This little box is fully into the ‘the network is the computer’ space. There is a local email app – I haven’t tried it yet.
  • Some nice subtle touches. When you unplug the tablet from the charger (standard Nokia charger and replaceable battery BTW) a message box pops up momentarily, suggesting you unplug the wall wart as well. If you’ve locked the screen, sliding the keyboard out automatically unlocks, and if the keyboard is out for a short time (don’t know what a ‘short time’ is yet), the screen will re-lock when the keyboard is stowed.
  • You can install Doom.
  • As delivered, the N810 doesn’t have much local storage. I’m waiting for 8 Gb mini-SDHC cards to come back into stock at my favorite supplier. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with universal plug-n-pray media streaming from my desktop (using TVersity) to the media player on the n810. Audio seems to work nicely – I can stream files that are FLAC-encoded, and since it’s decoded on the desktop, no fuss or muss at the Nokia end. Video is – no surprise- more problematic. I’ve streamed some video files successfully and failed with others – time to learn about TVersity and how it does its on-the-fly transcoding.
  • The ease of connection has come in handy already. I was in Best Buy yesterday, burning a gift certificate on upgraded ear-buds. Shocking, I know, but the salesperson I snagged could not answer any of my questions about my first choice. Wait – I have the internet available! Less than 5 minutes later – questions answered. While I’m on the subject of customer service – when I added a data plan to my cell phone service, I wanted to get my iBook connected (via cellphone/bluetooth) to the net as a proof of concept. AT&T tech support – worse than useless (no information is better than incorrect information) – a quick google, and I was connected (should have done that first, but the iBook told me to get log on info from the cell carrier).
  • Thanks – again – to Lex10 for the wallpaper I’m using on the N810.

Some shots of the N810 doing various things:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Trash to gas to steam to electricity and heat

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A recent BLDBLOG post gave me the motivation I needed to do some photography and (brief) posting that has been on my ‘ought to get to that at some point’ list for six months. Last fall I noticed a lot of digging and pipe laying near home and on my drive to work. I was curious, but didn’t figure out what was going on until a story on the radio clued me in. The University of New Hampshire and Waste Management are collaborating on a project: EcoLine.

In 2008, UNH will become the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas, from Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) facility in Rochester, NH, will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant in January 2009, enabling UNH to receive 80-85% of its energy from a renewable source and sell additional power produced to the grid by mid-2009. Construction began in 2007 on thelandfill gas processing plant in Rochester that will purify the gas and on the 12.7 mile underground pipeline taht [sic – glad I’m not the only one taht does taht] will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus.

I took some pictures this morning between deluges as I ran some errands – slide show is below. UNH’s cogen plant’s website is here. In a laudable bit of transparency (way to go!) they allow you to log in to a guest account on their monitoring system – the diagrams in the slideshow are screencaps of the monitor that I grabbed. If you’re really curious – I’ve mapped the pictures on Flickr – you can click through to see where this is happening.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Mixed media

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  • Observations on books as display items (yes, I’m thinking bowerbirds again) and on the fact that romance novels are not appropriate for this purpose – here. A hat tip to two writers of romances and a personal observation: unread books on my shelves are the result of a collision between bibliomania and the work week.
  • Netvibes have just rolled out a new release (review here). One of the things the new version allows me to do is publish a public version of my portal – a ‘universe’ in netvibes-speak. I’m putting up a new category on the right margin; Alt Tentacles (yay DKs) will collect pointers to other debris I’m cluttering the web with. Flickr and Twitter get their own widgets – because they can.
  • A musical interlude: