I found this while looking through a box of old photos, in an envelope marked Lunar Eclipse and developed in June 1994. Most likely the May 25, 1994 eclipse.
I’m not sure, but I think the bright splotch near the bottom is actually the moon, and the clear image of the moon up near the top is a reflection inside the camera. I have no idea whether the ring is an atmospheric phenomenon that got picked up on the film, or just lens flare.
Anyway, scanned because I thought it looked interesting.
I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.
So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…
Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).
I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.
So, if I’ve got all this set up right:
Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
I was looking up the proper term for a plasma lamp and stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for the Zeusaphone.
It’s a Tesla Coil that’s set up to modulate its discharges so that they produce specific notes. In other words, it’s a Tesla Coil that plays music using lightning!
Seriously… how can you turn down a description like that?
It’s also been called a “thoremin,” — another lightning-god-based pun, this one on the theramin,
The company that makes them has a couple of video clips on their website, but sadly they’re a little underwhelming on a 200-pixel window with computer speakers. I imagine they’d be seriously impressive in person.
Photo by Dracoswinsauer. Used per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Rather than looking at campaigns for specific browsers, I’m looking at a class of campaigns that are either promoting a group of browsers, or advocating against the current dominant player: Internet Explorer.
Browse Happy — the classic.
End 6! (end6.org)
Save the Developers (savethedevelopers.org)
(Yeah, I’m catching up on old draft posts.)
Orange County Historian Phil Brigandi writes about the first time he ever saw a rattlesnake bite in his many years at Lost Valley Scout Reservation. It reminded me of an experience I had one year that my Boy Scout troop went there for summer camp. This would have been around 1990, maybe 1991 or 1992. I don’t remember the exact order, and all my patches are in storage, but I must have been 14 or 15, and it was at least my fourth summer camp and at least my second at Lost Valley.
There are two kinds of campsites at Lost Valley, or were at the time: One type had simple wooden cabins, which held two bunk beds apiece*. This was the other type, with canvas tents. The canvas made up the roof and walls, and was tied to a metal frame with a plywood floor. (Note: this arrangement is not sealed.) Two cots lay on the floor. Scouts would typically lay out their sleeping bags on top of the cots, and stow their gear underneath.
The site was in a wooded area of the camp — mostly evergreen trees — below a hill, in the Camp Irvine section. Looking in from the road, there was a large rock formation to the right, which I remember a lot of us scouts would climb onto (It’s the 13th point of the Scout Law: A Scout Climbs Rocks). To the left, the land stayed flat at least as far as the next section of road. Straight back was a fairly steep hill which led up to more campsites and eventually the dining hall, if you were willing to go off-trail and cut through another site. Judging by the map, it looks like it was probably Indian Wells campsite. Edit: My dad points out that the stones had been grinding sites for the local Native American tribes, which may have been the source of the name.
My tent was toward the back. One night** as I was getting ready for bed, I set my canteen down before closing it and accidentally knocked it over. I quickly set it upright, then got down with a flashlight to look at the puddle of water spreading back under my cot, and see if I needed to move anything out of the way.
Looking back at me was a rattlesnake. It had apparently set up its own camp under my bed. I said, surprisingly calmly, “Oh, there’s a snake under my cot.”
“That’s nice,” my roommate, Geoff, who was already half-asleep, mumbled. Followed a few seconds later by, “WHAT!?!?”
I think he went to get an adult while I kept my distance and watched the snake. Or possibly the other way around. Or maybe we both went for help. I definitely recall one of those audio relays of boys saying, “There’s a snake in Kelson’s tent!” Someone went to contact camp staff, and the snake crew showed up. (Chances are pretty good that Phil Brigandi was among them.)
Keep in mind that it was dark. It was several hours into night, and the only light came from flashlights and propane lanterns.
Edit: My dad, who was there as a troop leader, adds a little more info:
They used the opportunity to make a point that little rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adults, because they’re less skilled at releasing their venom in small doses. (Otherwise, the snake has no venom for a second strike, in case it needs to fight another enemy.) So little rattlesnakes inject you with everything they’ve got.
Our biggest concern of course was that we didn’t want the rattlesnake to get away while we went and got the snake control guys. (Otherwise, you’ve got the trouble of wondering where it’s GONE!) Of course, nobody was going to try to catch it or anything, so the basic idea was to leave it alone but keep the lights on so we could keep an eye on it. We all counted ourselves lucky when we got back and found that the snake was still where we’d found it!
They don’t kill rattlesnakes when they find them, just relocate them. (Rattlesnakes play a part in the local ecosystem, after all.) Their equipment consisted mainly of a stick with, IIRC, a loop of rope on one end, and a large wooden box. Normal practice involved trying to pick up the snake with the stick, depositing it in the box, closing it in the box, then taking it out somewhere farther away from any people.
There was a problem, though: The snake was too small to pick up. It just kept sliding through the loop. Finally someone (possibly my dad, now that I think about it) picked it up with a shovel and put it in the box. They closed it up, may have loaded it on a truck, and that was the last I ever saw of the snake.
*It was in one of those cabins that I once rolled off the top bunk in my sleep and woke up on the way down, before I hit the floor. I don’t remember it hurting at all. I just climbed out of my sleeping bag, climbed back up, and went back to sleep.
**I think it was the same night that I took my camera and a tripod out to one of the large meadows and experimented with taking pictures of the night sky. I got some fairly decent (for a first-timer) shots of Sagittarius, Scorpio, and the Milky Way, which I’ll have to see if I can find sometime.
Well, Flash 10 is out with new features, security updates, and a fix for a Firefox video problem that I never noticed because it only affected Windows, and only sometimes.
It seems a little less stable than version 9 on Linux, at least 64-bit (it’s kind of complicated, because they only have a 32-bit program, so you either need to run a 32-bit version of your web browser, or use a wrapper that will let the 64-bit browser talk to the 32-bit plugin. nspluginwrapper does this for Firefox and other Gecko browsers, while Opera has a wrapper built in). But the annoying part: WordPress’ image upload no longer works.
Current versions of WordPress use SWFUpload to provide an enhanced file uploader. If you don’t have Flash installed, it will just use the standard upload dialog built into your web browser, but then you’re stuck uploading one image at a time — a real pain if you’re making a photo gallery post. Unfortunately for upload libraries, Adobe removed the ability for the Flash API to open a file dialog for security reasons.
So now, you can click on the button, but the dialog never opens. WordPress is tracking the issue in ticket 6979, which mentions that SWFUpload is discussing workarounds, and the YUI Uploader has already released a new version that works with Flash 10.
An update of some sort is likely to happen soon. In the mean time, WordPress users have two choices: hold off on updating Flash, or stick with the browser uploader for now.
Update October 31: SWFUpload has a new version in beta which works with Flash 10, and WordPress is working on integrating the update. It’s targeted for WordPress 2.7, which comes out in a little under two weeks, though the 2.7 writeup lists it as a feature that “didn’t make it” and might be in 2.8. (This seems like something that would affect enough people that I’d hope they would include it, even if it means pushing back the release a few days for more testing.)
There’s also been talk about implementing a file uploader using Gears, which I’d find really appealing if I weren’t 64-bit Linux both at home and at work.
Update November 1: I’ve tested WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 (not on this blog) and can confirm that the fix is included, as I was able to upload two images in one transaction.
Mobile goals:
Limitations:
Options:
That G1 is looking pretty good. I’m not prepared to be an early adopter, but it might be worth taking a serious look at it in a few months.
It’s always something.
Last month it was my computer that needed rebuilding. This month it was Katie’s. It’s an old G4 PowerMac, but it’s still plenty for iTunes, web, email, word processing, etc., and we’ve got a newer Windows box for things like games. It failed to boot after a system upgrade, and subsequent troubleshooting determined that the drive was going bad. (This time I ran some more diagnostics, confirming that the rest of the hardware was fine, and Tech Tool Pro found dozens of bad blocks before I stopped the surface scan.)
So: New drive, reinstall system, transfer the data and apps that we can. Which led to this question:
The Leopard or the Tiger?
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist phrasing it that way!)
Last fall I bought the multi-license pack of Leopard so that we could put it on both Macs. We ended up not upgrading the desktop. She was under the impression that the hardware was too old, and I only remembered that Leopard had dropped support for Classic apps. The first problem was easy: I’d checked the specs before ordering, and would only have bought the single-license box if it hadn’t been supported. The second was also easy: in the past year, she’d converted all her documents from old classic-only apps, and wasn’t playing the classic-only games anymore.
So: Installed Leopard, transferred data from old drive & backups.
Side annoyance: transferring a user with the Migration Assistant did not work. First it wouldn’t copy over her account, so I had to create another account, log in, delete her (new) account, then do the transfer. Then, every time it ran into one of the 5 or so corrupted but inconsequential files, it would freak out and remove everything it had copied. Drag and drop copy didn’t work because the alternate account didn’t have permission to read everything. (Remember: admin != root.) I finally resorted to the UNIX commandline, which worked. For reference: sudo cp -rp oldpath newpath Prob. should’ve used tar instead of cp, but I’m not sure how much Mac OS X uses symbolic links in user accounts. In any case, it’s been working, so I’m not going to worry about that.
The real problem: A week later, while doing link maintenance on this site, I stumbled across my blog post about upgrading the laptop, which mentioned the fact that Photoshop 7 won’t run on Leopard.
*facepalm*
So, what are the options?
We’re going with (c) for now, starting with the OSX version of GIMP.
After several years of inactivity and a quiet relaunch earlier this year, the Dillo web browser has finally released Dillo 2.0.
The open-source project started in 1999 with the goal of creating a small, fast, highly efficient graphical web browser that could run well even on low-end hardware and software. It’s a UNIX application, and runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. Things stagnated when it became clear that GTK1 was going to vanish, and GTK2 would not fit the project goals, and eventually the browser was ported to the Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK).
If you’ve used Dillo before, some of the improvements in this release are multiple character set support (the old versions were Latin-1–only), tabbed browsing, HTTP compression, anti-aliasing, improved rendering and UI, and smaller(!) memory usage.
It does have its limitations, and a few major items stand out as missing when compared to other modern browsers:
That said, it’s useful to keep around on an older system, or for situations where speed is more important than rendering, or to test how a website works without styles, scripts, and plugins.
I started building RPMs of Dillo for my own use back in 2002, and became the official RPM packager for the project the following year. I’ve posted Dillo RPM packages for Fedora 9, RHEL 3, RHEL 4, and RHEL 5. Other distros will have to wait until I get my build system out of storage or figure out how to convince mock to let me build two packages together.
