Trying to see what I broke w/ the unsuccessful upgrade attempt this AM…
Update – looks like I screwed up RSS.
Random linkage
All are worth clicking through to (if you haven’t already read them, of course).
- Adam Greenfield on the (re)discovery of the Velvet Underground’s Gymnasium set.
- Curious Expeditions on bioluminescence.
- Bioephemera on the Waldseemuller 1507 map of the world. Word of the day: mise-en-abime; example here.
Nokia N810
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
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
- 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:
LOL to the rescue
I usually resist the urge to repost things featured on BoingBoing – it’s not like it’s an obscure blog and I’m sure a large percentage of my readers read it as well. However… I just can’t pass up a chance to add my voice to the pointing-and-laughing.
First, the original:
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The voice of reason:
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And when in doubt, apply lashings of LOL (Lex10 wastes no time):
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Mock pants-pissing politicos and police. Mock mercilessly. Srsly.
(BTW – this worked during the freaking blitz!)
Monday morning potpourri for $500, please, Alex
…as I argued a few weeks ago, before the monoline crisis fully blew up in public, no business that requires a AAA rating in order to be viable deserves a AAA rating in the first place. – Nouriel Roubini * (N. Roubini:macroecon::J. Kunstler:energy policy – h/t Tom)
- Friedrich von Blowhard has an interesting analysis of the ratings theater surrounding the monoline insurers here.
- John Robb posts on MEND, Henry Okah and 4GW in Nigeria.
- Reclaiming the concept of the go bag.
- Obsolete skills. Some are funny, some are (IMHO) just plain WRONG. Funny: Swapping floppy disks. Wrong: Starting a car that has a manual choke (my ’85 LandCruiser had a manual choke – fabulous vehicle), Map Reading (tell the S&R team that map reading is an obsolete skill).
An aside – I have this cranky-old-man theory that an entire science and math curriculum could be built around teaching/learning/doing celestial navigation. (sticks head out door – “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”)
Another run
Book Meme
I’ve been tagged!
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
This
The Andronovo cultural zone covers an enormous portion of western Asia. Its western flank constitutes a contact zone with the Srubnaya culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial and extending eastward to the Minusinsk depression (Fig. 3.5). Sites are found as far south as the foothills of the Koppetdag, the Pamir, and Tien-Shan mountains, whereas the northern boundary is unclear when it reaches the taiga zone. *
I tag HGP, M and/or D, Whimsy, Lex10 and Xtin (let’s see if this will cause her to emit signal).
Hey, hey Ralphie boy!
To mark the entry of the vainest man in American presidential politics (and that’s saying a lot) into the race today.
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Just in case anyone misinterprets – I could care less about Ralph. .38% of the vote last time? He’s just embarrassing himself.
K is for contra-rotating
Newton’s third law – refined as the conservation of angular momentum – is not the helicopter’s friend. There are the usual solutions – a tail rotor that provides thrust to counter the main rotor’s torque and tandem rotors (where two equal sized rotors move in opposite directions and offset each other) – and the out-of-the-ordinary takes on the problem.I was nosing around the web a couple days ago, trying to figure out if a picture of a helicopter was real or a model used in a movie (option 2, by the way) and discovered another Soviet/Russian helicopter design bureau: Kamov. The Kamov Design Bureau’s claim to fame is the use of coaxial contra-rotating rotors. I’ve got to think that this a hella complicated way to do things, but it is compact. Lots of good Russian chopper design – a couple stood out.
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The Ka-137 (above) is the quintessential evil drone. It’s a UAV that can do recon/surveillance work and – according to the linked web site – deliver cargo. No mention of weapon mounts…
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The Ka-56 is superspy material. Depending on who you believe, it was either designed just to be carried in a torpedo tube (why?) or actually fired from the tube inside, one assumes, a special torpedo (yay!). Followed by another torpedo carrying our intrepid agent, one hopes. Looks like the writers of the Venture Brothers missed a perfect obscure reference when they put Assassinanny 911 together.
What makes the title of the post work is the solution of another chopper designer – Kaman Aircraft. They used an intermeshed contra-rotating solution – at least the hubs are side-by-each rather than one sorta-inside the other. The HH-43 Huskie has been fave of mine since my plastic model aircraft days.
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If you embiggen the picture above, notice the warning on the rotor mast. Because of the way the rotor assemblies are canted, approaching from the side would result in a radical hair cut.
