Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
I’ve spent the last few days integrating my new math library into the Windows project I started coding it for. Yesterday morning I was ready to try running the integrated copy, but I had some kind of problem starting it up. I couldn’t track it down very easily though, due to how long it took …
In one of the science fiction series that I used to read, the hero kept in constant contact with his robot companion through a surgically implanted microphone and earphone. This isn’t quite in that league, but it sounds like a solid piece of work. I have to wonder if it would work on denture-wearers, though. …
“Seriously, though, wouldn’t you have killed for this when you were 14?” I certainly would have. Sometimes I regret the inevitability of growing up (or at least older 😉 ). (Via LifeHacker’s “Remains of the Day” feature)
Geek Drivel is suddenly ridiculously popular with would-be blog spammers. I’m told that my primary defenses have blocked more than 400 automated spam messages in the last week, and maybe a dozen have gotten past them — all caught by my secondary defenses, I’m happy to say. I’m not sure what prompted this sudden surge …
There was no entry yesterday because I was deep in a programming project. Very deep… I was up and at it at 8am, and other than a few very short breaks, kept going until 3am this morning. And that’s on top of about six hours on it the day before. Around 1995, I started writing …
I’ve dealt a lot with software piracy issues, primarily with Project Badger (detecting and preventing piracy is one of its primary purposes). And I didn’t have to learn the hard way that you have to be very careful before calling any user a pirate, or allowing your software to do so — paying customers don’t …
I try to keep an open mind on most subjects, but I’ve been skeptical of “electrosensitives” ever since I heard of them. While it’s possible that some people can sense some forms of electromagnetic radiation that most of us can’t, the only way I can see that such an ability could cause the problems that …
An interesting idea for getting cargo into space. Oddly enough, it’s not something that I’ve heard about in science fiction, so maybe it’s not as obvious as it looks in hindsight.
Tired of having to remember to charge your cell phone every night, or of running out of juice in the middle of a call? Scientists may have come up with a solution for you: just go for a walk. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen this kind of thing mentioned in science fiction. It seems obvious …
Continue reading ‘“Energy-harvesting rubber could power phones”’ »
It’s a very long article, so I’ve only skimmed the answers that their chosen experts gave, but it’s very odd to me that the answers were so varied. Market share was brought up several times, as an argument for a Mac (or Linux, though that was barely mentioned), but others said that market share matters …
Continue reading ‘“In their words: Experts weigh in on Mac vs. PC security”’ »