March 15th, 2016:
- Lee “ArtRaccoon” Madison has posted a new page on Cafe Press with all kinds of Sad Puppies 4 swag, featuring Isaac, Ray, Frank, and robot puppy Robert. Shown above is the 15 oz. coffee mug. Mugs also come in 12 and 20 oz. sizes.
- If you’re not familiar with Sad Puppies 4, here’s the main site.
- And if you missed my summary of the Sad Puppies phenomenon last year, take a look. It’s part of an ongoing series that began here.
- Rick Hellewell informed me that the $15 Pine64 single-board computer is shipping and getting some attention. It sports a 1.2 Ghz quad-core ARM A53 as part of the Allwinner A64 SoC, plus a 500 MHz Mali-400 GPU that can do 4K video. The $15 version has 512MB of RAM; the $19 version has 1 GB, and the $29 version has 2 GB RAM. The $15 version is shipping (though, as I expected, it’s out of stock) and the two more powerful boards should be shipping by May.
- Indie authors take note: Amazon has begun pulling Kindle ebooks that have the TOC at the end of the book, and demanding that it be placed up front. Authors have been putting the TOC in the back recently so that there is more “real” content in the 10% preview, but, alas, scammers are also putting TOCs in the back to game KU by encouraging readers to immediately click to the end of the book to see what’s in it. Walter Jon Williams got stung, as I assume were many others.
- Some T-shirt firm on Amazon has begun selling T-shirts with my most famous quote on it: “A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.” Alas, they didn’t cite me by name, and the underscore between the two sentences suggests it’s some sort of data-driven product bot.
- I’ve always been in the “rare Earth” camp, and intuit that Earthlike planets are rare. (There’s a book about this.) I’m not sure I ever imagined them as quite this rare, though.
- Not all cheap ham radio transceivers come from Baofeng. (See my entry for February 14, 2015.) I stumbled on a dual-band $69 mobile rig from Leixen that has promise, and can be programmed with CHIRP. What I’d really like (but don’t seriously expect to find) is a small, cheap rig that includes 50-54 MHz.
- How far back could you travel in time and still understand English? I would do better on Middle English than most, but on Old English I would be almost completely hopeless.
- You can have the ugliest house in America (practice your un-seeing exercises, folks!) for the trifling price of $850,000. Carol and I would set it up as a sort of culturally or decoratively haunted B&B, and make a fortune from people daring one another to spend a night in it.
- This is by no means news, but I’m amazed how many people are unaware of my favorite broadband speed tester. Make sure you test it using a browser with only one tab open, and ideally shut down any other machines on the same broadband line.
- A portion of the cheese you put in your omelette may be wood pulp, which is used as an anticaking agent in packaged shredded cheese. I started reading labels closely, and discovered a house brand of shredded Parmesan at the local Kroger chain, Fry’s, that doesn’t contain wood pulp. It does, however, contain calcium sulfate. Is that a win? I’m sure I don’t know. After all, sodium ferrocyanide is used as an anticaking agent, as is a lot of other scary sounding stuff.
