Aliens Enter the Conversation

March 24, 2004 – 12:00 am

[ via John Redford ] Greg Beaty’s “geek love prose poem” on aliens and culture (high and pop):
Aliens enter our lives to save us, because somebody must, and Heinlein is dead.

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For Soviet Interplanetary Glory!

March 15, 2004 – 12:00 am

Mars 3, the silent Soviet lander, has started radioing reports back to Earth. For some strange reason, the transmissions end up on Live Journal.

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The Complete Yeti + Penguin

March 3, 2004 – 12:00 am

A history of the Flash game that became a denial of service attack for whomever hosted a version.
The original game now has its own site at http://www.yetisports.org/.

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Wanted

February 28, 2004 – 12:00 am

A USB punch card reader, so you can import all those old FORTRAN programs you wrote in college.
Leap Day Update: Oh, and appropriately enough: Feb 29 1860, Herman Hollerith, inventor of punch card collating machines, is born.

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Drum Machine

February 23, 2004 – 12:00 am

Coolest. Flash. Ever. [ 3.0 MB, Have your headphones ready. ]

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Not the Mars of Viking, Pathfinder, and MER-A,B

February 19, 2004 – 12:00 am

Kip covers the languages, ethnography, and class systems of some other Mars. Just read it. Brilliant stuff.

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Charcoal Feather Federation and the End of the World

February 7, 2004 – 12:00 am

Oh the Internet’s good at bursting any pretension of cleverness on my part. I watched the first DVD of Haibane Renmei, thought, damn, that reminds me of Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and immediately find several pages who had the same thought.
But go rent Haibane Renmei anyway.

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Stout and Soda Can Stove

February 5, 2004 – 12:00 am

[ via Boing Boing ] Making a lightweight backpacking stove from a can of soda and a can of stout.

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Wacky XML

January 8, 2004 – 12:00 am

Simon St. Laurent asked the XML-Dev list for interesting and offbeat uses of XML, and got some interesting responses:

Hero Games has a role playing game character designer that uses XML as the native format.
Ari Nordström manages multiplex cinemas with XML.
The Flight Gear uses XML to describe aircraft and control systems.
Len Bullard and his son wrote [...]

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Words to Live By in 2004

December 31, 2003 – 12:00 am

Never trust your upstream platypus.

Thank you Mark. At least I don’t abuse the marsupials in my tool chain.

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Modding your VX 4400, or, we want Kare Kano ringtones!

December 30, 2003 – 12:00 am

Went with a friend to Verizon, where she got a VX 4400 handset.
“Oooh, this one does ringtones,” I exclaim. C laughs and says she’ll have to get a Kare Kano ringtone for it. Hah! It’s a challenge. We’ll need to:

Find a source file.
Convert the source file to a ringtone.
Get the ringtone onto C’s phone.

Finding a [...]

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Your own Pay Phone

December 28, 2003 – 12:00 am

You can’t use it as a pay phone, but you can buy an otherwise working BellSouth pay phone for $135, postage paid.
If I still kept a land line, I’d get one.

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Your Light Cone as an RSS Feed

December 15, 2003 – 12:00 am

Your light cone is the portion of the universe that you could had influenced. It grows at the the speed of light from the moment you are born (okay, that’s fudging things, but bear with the assumption.) Matt Web has a tool to let you generate your light cone, in terms of nearby stars, as [...]

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Moving Mars, no, really.

December 7, 2003 – 12:00 am

A gloriously hair-brained idea: moving Mars to a more human hospitable orbit by sending asteroids past it. It takes 12,000 years, but hey, these things take time. Or, as Professor John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, and proposer of this venture, says:
If speculation on a large scale offends you, too bad for you.

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Badgercam

November 29, 2003 – 12:00 am

For Badger Bag: the Badgercam!

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