I recently had a discussion with a friend about webcams, and we both mentioned that we rarely had any use for them… at least, for the usual uses. We’ve had a problem in the last few months with one of our cats defecating on the floor in a particular spot. As mentioned, we have three [...]
Archive of entries posted on August 2010
“Think Twice About What ‘Everybody Knows’”
I found some of this stuff to be shocking. It’s worth a read.
“How To Grow A New Joint Inside Your Body”
I think I’m jealous of future generations. They’ll grow up with all this neat technological stuff that we’re just hearing about now, like the ability to regrow a damaged joint in your own body. The stuff of science fiction to us will be taken for granted by them. On the other hand, they’ll have to [...]
Useful Memory Tricks
I’ve mentioned the memory tricks that I use before, a couple times. Yesterday I had a rare chance to really put them to the test. I’d used those tricks to remember the combination to a lock that I’d put on our shed, maybe six or seven years ago. The lock was on there for less [...]
“WPA Cracker cracks WiFi passwords in the cloud”
I can’t believe that someone had the gall to do this. My systems are safe enough, because I use long random strings that I’ve been able to memorize, but most of the WiFi networks of my friends and associates — the ones I’ve been given the passwords for — would fall to it quickly. I [...]
“How to Rebuild Your Attention Span and Focus”
This is generally an excellent article, but I have to take exception with one of its assertions: I’ve been using a second monitor for nearly ten years, thinking that vast amounts of space were key to productivity. The second monitor myth has been around for quite some time. Yet the only actual scientific study I [...]
“Street-Fighting Math: down and dirty guide to approximation and problem-solving”
A useful skill. I didn’t realize that anyone had written a book about it. It’s available as a free PDF file too, there’s a download link in the “related links” section. I’ve picked it up, and I plan to read it when I have a chance. (Via BoingBoing)
“Google, boffins crack Rubik’s Cube mystery”
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything may be 42, but it seems that the ultimate answer to how many moves (at most) it would take for an omniscient being to solve the Rubik’s Cube is much lower. (No omniscient beings were harmed in the calculation of that answer.)
“The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2″
This book sounds hilarious. I’ve always been a sucker for fiction mixing the physical world with a fantasy world. Things like Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series, in which a group of D&D players are transported to what they thought was their fantasy world by their professor-slash-Dungeon-Master, who turns out to be a wizard [...]
“Human hive-mind game whups computer boffinry ass”
My high-school best friend and I both ended up in Virginia in the very early nineties, a few years after we graduated, he in the Air Force and I going to tech school. We decided to make a trip back to Connecticut to meet up with the old gang. Among the people we met were [...]