September 19th, 2011:
- Maybe it’s some of the recent solar storms (the sunspots were not spectacularly high) but I heard both Guyana and the Cayman Islands on 17m the other day–the first time I’ve seen any significant life on that band in several years.
- I have yet to find an Android ebook reader app that will open and render an MS .lit file, of which I have several. No surprise: Having blown an early and promising start in ebook reader software, MS has recently announced that it is withdrawing the app. Reader is actually a nice piece of work, and the first ebook reader program I used regularly. DRMed .lit books are now just noise, and the rest of them will have to be translated by something like Calibre. DRM, especially when it’s abandoned, trains people to locate cracks and become pirates. Way to go, guys.
- SanDisk just announced a thumb drive about the size of its own USB connector cap. 4, 8, or 16GB. I’ve now broken two thumb drives by leaving them plugged into the rear edge of a laptop and then tipping the laptop back. If that’s a common problem, this is definitely the solution.
- What do you do with the Moon once you rope it down? (Watering it would be interesting, though Mars needs it more.)
- This guy thinks like I do. Just ask Carol. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- I recently found a PDF describing the first computer I ever programmed for money. It was a…1 MHz…8080. It cost a boggling number of 1979 dollars, so Xerox ended up using most of the initial production run in-house. The 3200 cast a long shadow: I got so used to sitting in front of it that when I built a computer table later that year for my S100 CP/M system, I made it just high enough that the keyboard was precisely as far off the floor as the 3200’s, a height that I use in computer tables to this day.
- How long did it take you to figure out what this really was? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Russian President Medvedev has taken a liking to ReactOS, a long-running and mostly ignored attempt to create a driver-compatible, win32-friendly (via WINE) open source Windows clone. He’s suggesting that the Russian government fund it. Now if Medvedev can convince Putin, we could have quite a project on our hands.
- I’d never thought much about how you recycle a dead refrigerator. Now I know.
- Begorrah! Zombies are not a new problem. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- And if that machine gun in your hollow leg won’t slow them down, send them into sugar crash.
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