Geeky

Super-easy macro ringlight to make

imageI have always wanted a ringlight for doing macro photography.  Especially now that I own an Olympus D5050, which must have some ‘microscope’ in its ancestry. 

Ringlights are neato because they produce shadowless lighting for macro shots. But I couldn’t afford one - they are usually over two hundred bucks. 

Then I happened to be browsing the aisles in Wal-Mart and saw this Ozark Trails camp light, and smiled broadly.  With minor modifications it makes a dandy ringlight.  It runs on plain old AA batteries and uses 24 white LEDs.  Here’s a first sample result:

image
Detail

So here’s one for seven dollars instead of two or three hundred, and it gives very professional results.  The modification is pretty much just a matter of moving the switch and enlarging the hole so it fits around your lens. Since the thing is made of soft plastic, this is easy.

Posted by George on 05/12/08 at 05:07 PM
Geeky • (7) Comments • Link

Wood-based computation technology

I wonder how large an Intel dual-core processor would be if you used this technology?  (Considerable expansion of the concept would be required) If you ran Vista on it, how long would it take to redraw the screen?

(Hat tip to Greg Laden, a frequent finder of Very Cool Stuff.  And if you want to build your own marble computer, here’s more.  And there’s much more at WoodGears.  Sometimes it just astounds me how clever some people are.)

Posted by George on 05/10/08 at 11:59 AM
Geeky • hardware • (3) Comments • Link

“Carnival Of The Elitist Bastards” request for submissions

Gathering posts for a brand-new Blog Carnival, Dana at En Tequila Es Verdad says; ”Gather ‘Round, Ye Elitist Bastards”…

...It’s time we took the word “elite” back… I think it’s time for the masses to aspire to some of that vaunted wisdom rather than trying to flatten the bell curve with a sledgehammer.

I think it’s time we stop letting our culture celebrate willful ignorance and start promoting genius instead.

Well yeah… I remember when creative and scientific genius was more celebrated than it is today.  When Einstein and Salk were national heroes and national magazines actually engaged in fairly decent journalism on science and the arts.  I’m getting pretty tired of cultivated hatred for People Who Actually Know What They’re Talking About.  Check out Dana’s post and consider participating - this is going to be fun!  (So much material to work with)

Posted by George on 05/09/08 at 06:34 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (2) Comments • Link

User-Friendly

In Robert Heinlein’s 1957 adventure novel, Citizen Of The Galaxy, the main character - a slave boy named Thorby - finds himself thrown into an empty cell on a spacecraft overnight.  The room appears featureless - just floor, walls, ceiling.  After searching for any kind of switch or shelf, he spends a miserable night curled up on the steel floor with the lights on.

The next day, he is taken under the wing of another boy who is amazed at his stupidity.  The other boy shows him how to operate the controls of the room, revealing hidden bed, table, light and temperature controls, a sink and a viewer full of stored media for information and entertainment.  The featureless cell turns out to be a very well-equipped cabin room.

Which leads to my definition of the term; “User-Friendly”; adj., meaning “That which is familiar to the user”.

I just spent an hour and a half figuring out how to install Flash on my son’s Linux laptop.  Admittedly I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer but it just wasn’t obvious to me.  Turned out to be only something like five clicks using the Synaptic package manager - about the same as in Windows through the browser.  But intuitive, it was not.  There were even contraindications.  What the hell is “Flashplugin Nonfree”?  Turned out that’s what I needed.  Once I remembered that in Linux, you can’t install Flash in the browser like you can Windows.  You need something called a “package manager”.

But hey - it’s easy! I suppose if I’d spent the last 13 years supporting Linux I’d think Windows was counterintuitive. 

Posted by George on 05/05/08 at 11:01 PM
Geeky • Design • (11) Comments • Link

A trip down (microfilm) memory lane

IBM’s 1890 data tabulator reading census data cards with pools of toxic mercury?  Robotic data storage on microfilm?  A US defense computer kept alive by Russian vacuum tubes?  And much more!  In the BBC News video Computer Dinosaurs.  Some seriously, awesomely cool stuff from early computing days.

Posted by George on 05/02/08 at 07:54 AM
Geeky • History • (2) Comments • Link

Xubuntu 8.04 on IBM ThinkPad T-21

You wouldn’t think an eight-year-old laptop would be good for much.  Its PIII processor and paltry 512mb of RAM, plus its puny 30 gig hard drive just don’t add up to a lot of firepower.  This wasn’t a problem until a month ago when a couple new Microsoft patches came out that just bogged it down.  Even a fresh build didn’t help.

But the IBM ThinkPad T-21 is just too good to throw out.  It was a maximally-engineered model with a carbon-fibre frame, a crisp, easy-typing keyboard, and a great screen topped with a titanium lid.  And it was cheap: it sold for three grand when it was new, but I bought for my son a couple years ago for one-tenth that much.

I tried Ubuntu on it but running Ubuntu is a young laptop’s game.  Ubuntu is intended to compete with Windows Vista and it’s really needs a P4 with a gig of ram to run well.  (Vista needs much more) An older machine like this one needs a lighter, more stripped-down OS.  Then Webs05 sent me this email:

Xubuntu 8.04 is [great]!  There is no other way to put it! So far I am having super amazing results. And I am currently installing it on Katie’s laptop, which means they fixed A LOT of previous issues. Katie’s laptop is the old X23… Anyways, try it out. I am going to be writing a post soon.

Well that’s interesting because the ThinkPad X-23 is a smaller but otherwise very similar machine as far as the operating system is concerned.  And I did try it out, splitting the HD into two primary partitions and putting the /home in the second partition, with / and /swap in the first partition.  It works great, it’s reasonably fast, it suspends well, and the wireless works fine.  It even set up the Broadcom 54g wireless card with no problem. 

Xubuntu is Ubuntu without all the gingerbread; it doesn’t waste CPU cycles trying to be pretty.  And it works: this old laptop has a new lease on life.  I’m putting a new battery in it and giving it back to my son.

One little thing though: do you suppose the Ubuntu people could quite naming their releases things like “Feisty Fawn” and “Gutsy Gibbon”?  It just sounds kind of Disney, like a character on one of their “video-only” kids’ movie releases.  Couldn’t they call it something cool like “Great White” or “Leopard”?  Oh wait, that one’s taken…

Posted by George on 04/28/08 at 09:38 PM
Geeky • Software • (3) Comments • Link

Lots of accounts deleted

I just deleted over a hundred ‘Pending Accounts’ and some current accounts which appeared to be from spam domains.  However, my mouse hand is not steady and it is not always easy to tell, so if I accidentally deleted your legitimate account, please accept my abject apology and re-create your account.  Thanks!

By the way, registering an account is like a VIP card when you make comments - log in and you don’t have to wrestle with that “captcha” thing.  The other advantage of registering is that your blog URL is embedded in your nickname, which elevates your Google ranking!  I do not use the account information for any other purpose and your email does not display on the page.

UPDATE: I just found out that the ExpressionEngine system sent out a nastygram with the non-approval.  I didn’t know it would do that, but thanks to one of my accidental deletions for letting me know.  I just found that template and changed it to something nicer (and inviting correction) but my apologies to anyone who received one from the EE system.

Posted by George on 04/25/08 at 10:26 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (6) Comments • Link

Why I like SanDisk MP3 players

I don’t pirate music or other licensed content, but when I pay for something, I damn well expect it to stay paid for.  The thought of having to figure out a license scheme for music that I’ve bought and make sure it doesn’t get corrupted in the transfer from one device to another is… foreign to me.  At least.  So when I rip music from a CD, it goes to plain-vanilla mp3 format.  I am so not interested in any format that watches whether I fasten my ethical seat belt.

So as wondrous as iPod players are, their main format strikes me as a major annoyance waiting to happen.  Yes, I know they can handle plain mp3 files but there’s another problem: I don’t install software unless I’m forced to.  New digital camera?  The CD that came with it languishes in the box; it will never know the warm embrace of my computer’s drive.  This is because in my experience the software that comes with digital gadgets is usually awful, because it always tries to do your file management for you.  This is great (I suppose) until it fails and your files are a mess.  I have my own software and I’ll manage my own files, thank you very much.

OK, I realize most consumers are more trusting than that.

Anyway, here’s how it works for me: say I download a bunch of MP3 files from the Skeptic’s Guide Archive to listen to at the gym.  Then I plug in my SanDisk Sansa C250 (catch one for about $45 on sale) to my cheap Linux computer and a device window full of folders automatically pops up.  I double-click on the one marked “music” and now can see my .mp3 files.  Then I copy the files I just downloaded and paste them into that “music” folder.  Add 15 minutes charging on the USB port and I’m ready!  No special software needed.

Notes:

  • Yes, I know iPods can play plain mp3 files.  My cheap Sansa is also an FM radio and a voice recorder.  And it has a little screen to help me pick the mp3 I want to play.  The comparably priced “Shuffle” doesn’t do any of that.
  • Skeptic’s Guide podcasts are free.  Enjoy!
  • Sansa auto-recognizes perfectly well in Windows XP also.

Posted by George on 04/11/08 at 08:32 PM
Geeky • hardware • (4) Comments • Link

Candorville on Offense

The main character in ’Candorville‘ is Lemont, a cartoonist living in modern times.  Incensed by the Secret Service decision to stop screening the crowd for weapons at an Obama rally in Dallas (of all places) he decides to travel back in time to 1865 to persuade a cartoonist named Thomas Nast to advocate for better security for Abraham Lincoln.  Nast agrees, but is shot down by his editor:
image

Thomas Nast… hadn’t I heard that name somewhere?  Turns out I had, in my dim memories of college history.  If you click his name link above, you’ll probably recognize some of his cartoons - they’re all over the history books.

(You can read the rest of the Lamont-Nast story at the Candorville link, for a while at least.  Comic sites usually keep stuff up for about a month.)

Posted by George on 03/29/08 at 12:46 PM
Geeky • History • (0) Comments • Link

I for one welcome our new mathematical overlords…

So why didn’t I make Lucas a guest author before?  Simple… I’m too dumb to figure out how member-status assignment works in ExpressionEngine!  But I finally found an EE Wiki that put it in blunt enough crayon even for me, and here we are.  Welcome Lucas!  Tell us about your many exploits on Barsoom…

(The title is a Simpson’s reference, in which newscaster Kent Brockman believes giant insects are about to take over the Earth...)

Posted by George on 03/28/08 at 08:23 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (1) Comments • Link

Facebook wants to be the next Microsoft

...at least in the respect of “Non standards-compliant, increasingly bloated, complex, and irrelevant”.  Not surprising since Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook.  Could 1.6% ownership be enough influence to steer them away from the emerging OpenSocial standard?

“Facebook is a supporter of open source and sees value in any contributions the foundation may make to the industry. Facebook is not joining this foundation, but the company remains focused on advancing Facebook Platform to benefit the developer community and help users communicate and share information more efficiently… Facebook will continue to work with other trusted partners to explore new initiatives around data portability,” Facebook’s spokesperson said.

Bblbbitt!  Yeah, a “new initiative” about every 11 months, with no connection to the previous ones.  In other words, “When we say; ‘data portability’ we mean ‘frustrating divisions between our product and enormous chunks of the market as a whole’”.  Seriously.  If you work with Microsoft software you know that it isn’t even compatible with itself over more than two iterations. I can open a Word 6.0 file on my Linux machine more easily than I can on my Windows box. 

Posted by George on 03/28/08 at 05:59 AM
Geeky • Software • (1) Comments • Link

OK, Dreamweaver is officially pissing me off

I’m trying to insert some level-specific style information into the header of a .dwt, right?  And Dreamweaver is not letting me.  I have spent the last two and a half hours wrestling with this finely engineered piece of bloated crap software, reading online documentation and trying everything under the sun in the hopes that it will let me put 54 damn characters into a frakkin’ template. 

I would prefer to complete this simple task in about one minute in a code editor like BlueFish or Notepad++.  But DW is our standard, and I need to be fluent with it.  I am tired of being a dope with an important piece of software that everyone here uses. Besides if I get hit by a truck, it’s important the work I leave behind meet institutional standards. 

Anyone know any secret incantations to make Dreamweaver CS3 listen to simple instructions?


Updates:
  • The normal procedure is to open the Assets panel, select the template in question, and click on the “edit” button at the bottom.  But this did not work with the template that prompted this post.  It appears the template has to be created from the higher-level template using the “Nested Templates” function to make a template you can actually, uh, edit. This aspect was less than crystal clear from the documentation to say the least.
  • And my biggest problem with these omnibus Swiss-Army-Knife programs is they make for sloppy, disorganized code and even worse file management.  It’ll make sure something ends up on the web but it can’t think about taxonomy, etc.

Posted by George on 03/19/08 at 04:21 PM
Geeky • Software • (3) Comments • Link

Quick review of MacBook Air

My son got his hands on a macBook Air and sends this brief review:

I’m using a friend’s MacBook Air.  This thing f*ing rocks!  The keyboard is great, the screen is crisp and bright.  I can lie on my back and hold it over my head, while still using it.  Of course, this is the one with the $1000 add-on of the 64GB HD.  A bit out of my price range, but Apple really did a great job on this thing.  It comes with a “manilla envelope” facsimile made out of vinyl-coated fabric. It fits inside quite nicely.  A little too cute…

Just in case you’re wondering what 2-lb laptop would be good for, it has lots of uses! Seriously, I’ll make a prediction that five years from now nobody will buy a laptop that weighs more than three pounds and most will weigh half that.

Posted by George on 03/16/08 at 06:52 AM
Geeky • hardware • (1) Comments • Link

$160 Xubuntu platform

I have an old computer that blew some caps on the motherboard.  Webs sent me a link to this Tiger Direct combo deal.  It’s a motherboard, AMD-64 cpu, and 1gig memory that came out to $128 including the shipping.  After rebates it goes down to $100, plus $10 for a heat sink and $50 for a new power supply so that’s $160.  The CD burner and hard drive were OK and I didn’t bother hooking up the floppy drive. 

Then I installed 32-bit Xubuntu which seems to be considerably faster than straight Ubuntu.  Next is to experiment with the Xsane scanning application and see how well Xubuntu supports a Canon scanner.
Updates:

  • I only have two killer apps in Windows, and one is the Notepad++ editor.  The lack of a Linux version is a real downer for me but I’ve been experimenting with Bluefish and it ain’t bad.  In fact I might get to like it a lot.  Although it is not as minimalist as NP++ it does seem well suited to working with .html and .css

Posted by George on 03/08/08 at 12:09 PM
Geeky • (1) Comments • Link

Frozen (laptop) Memory

There have been a lot of news articles about the discovery at Princeton that cooling the RAM chips of a laptop to -50C enable a quick restart from sleep mode, and potentially allowing retrieval of encryption keys residing in the chips.  The news media has been treating this as a major vulnerability.

You take the stolen, sleeping laptop, remove the cover to the RAM chips, freeze them with an inverted can of “canned air”, and then “cut the power and then re-attach the power, and by doing that will get access to the contents of memory - including the critical encryption keys.” It’s being touted everywhere as a “major vulnerability”

Umm, sure… I do it all the time and the encryption key just pops right up on screen in a blinking box labelled “Encryption Key”.  Movie and TV writers, freshly off-strike, are probably dying to use this in a story.  That math guy on “Numb3rs” will pull it off in the bad guy’s apartment with whatever stuff is lying around and the seconds ticking off toward disaster. 

Essentially what the hacker needs to do is remove the chips from the laptop, put them - still frozen - in another laptop that is running a memory-analysis utility, access the chips and “dump” the memory contents to the a file on the hard drive.  Or somehow load a new operating system into the first laptop without writing to any of the memory in its RAM chips.  Simple! 

What Professor Felton and his team found was that cooling memory chips “enhanced the retention of data in memory chips.” That’s a long way from a usable hacking technique.  So you have to power completely down if you think your laptop might get stolen and it contains a huge database of people’s personal information.  Or… don’t carry stuff like that around on laptops! There.  Problem solved. 

Posted by George on 03/05/08 at 06:33 AM
Geeky • Security • (5) Comments • Link
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