Topics pertaining to science and technology, current or future.
If you’re a true Internet geek, you probably know about RFC 1149, the “Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.” Yes, you read that right — it’s a way to transmit information, via Internet protocols, by homing pigeons. It was released on April first, 1990. Well, after eighteen years, it looks like …
In the wee hours of last Sunday morning, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my copy of Ubuntu Linux. I’d been using the previous major release (7.10) since it came out, eight months ago. I’d wanted to wait and upgrade Mini-mEee to 8.04 first, before subjecting my main work system to it, but …
My Dell XPS 1210 laptop has been having an occasional problem recently: random pixels have started changing to random colors when it gets warm. I bought a laptop stand with a couple fans in it, to help reduce the heat buildup, and didn’t think anything further of it — until the system started crashing when …
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my main system over the weekend (I’m preparing a blog entry about it now). I’d hoped to try it out on the Eee system first, but that hadn’t been possible yet. The Ubuntu-Eee project finally posted a Release Candidate for the 8.04 upgrade a week ago yesterday, on the second. …
This New York Times article suggests that longevity drugs might be not only possible, but developed fairly soon. As I’ve heard that there are already more humans alive right now than have died in all of history combined, that suggests some interesting and disturbing things… I want to live a good long time as much …
Continue reading ‘“New Hints Seen That Red Wine May Slow Aging”’ »
We humans think that we’re the be-all and end-all of evolution… that our bodies are mere support systems for our brains. Maybe we’re right, but some fascinating recent experiments suggest that we’ve survived despite our intelligence, not necessarily because of it.
More information on NASA’s temperature data, and why it points to a major global warming trend despite the Earth actually being in a twenty-year-long “cooling period.”
And again, life imitates art — in this case, the horse-racing game in the men’s bathroom in one of the Austin Powers movies, which was controlled by the “flow” of those standing at the urinals below it. Gotta love technology… and admire the business sense of the two guys who created it.
(For the unenlightened out there, IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a program that usually includes a text editor specifically geared toward program source code, an integrated project manager to keep track of what files are part of your program, some kind of parser for error messages from your compiler, easy ways to call up …
I was at a Radio Shack today, and discovered a package labeled “High Speed USB 2.0 Beverage Warmer!” I had to read it several times before I convinced myself that I wasn’t misreading. A hot-plate plugged into your computer is fairly weird in and of itself, but it would only need to draw power from …
Continue reading ‘The Weirdest Piece of Hardware I’ve Ever Seen’ »