Odd Lots
- I confess to some surprise at reading that we really don’t know yet whether antimatter falls up or down. Falling up might explain why we don’t see a lot of antimatter in these parts.
- By now I’d guess you’ve all seen the movie. Now see how it was made. (We used to do animation with that few pixels. But the pixels were, well, a lot bigger.)
- There’s been much discussion recently about bitcoin mining using GPUs, including some systems designed specifically to mine bitcoins and not do much of anything else. Such systems basically turn electricity into money, and you have to make sure that the bitcoins you get are worth more than the juice you have to spend to mine them. So…how about using solar panels? I have easier ways to make money (and don’t trust the bitcoin infrastructure to begin with) so it’s not an experiment I’m willing to make, but with enough solar panels and a bitcoin box, how long would it take to break even? Bitcoin math is pathological, but I’m aware that the more people start mining with such rigs, the harder the mining becomes.
- Here’s more cautionary advice on bitcoin.
- Somebody thought that mining bitcoins on user PCs while they play your games could a new business model. Mmmm, no.
- We are already shoveling our way through the second-coldest spring on record. If May doesn’t warm up quite a bit (it’s still going below freezing at night here) we will soon be facing the coldest. The photos of my deck under 4″ of snow on May 1 continue to boggle. I may have one of them framed.
- Suing your customers for criticizing your business is epic dumb, as Chicago’s tort-happy Suburban Express has discovered.
- I don’t use Visual Basic so I’m unlikely to try it, but OsenXPSuite could be useful for creating embedded database apps without a great deal of coding. The screenshots are intriguing. $150 for a single-seat license. They also have a freeware SQLite management app that I will try.
- There’s nothing healthy in most “health foods.” (It’s PR.) I like the bit in Men In Black III. K: “Do you know the most destructive force in the universe?” J: “Sugar?” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- From The-Ghosts-of-Friendships-Past Department: LinkedIn just sent me a message telling me that a friend had just celebrated his fifth anniversary at a local firm–even though he died four years ago. This led me to check my Facebook friends list, and sure enough, there are two dead people there as well. This is a weird business.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: hardware · health · programming · science · weather
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We are not below freezing down here, but after the warmest winter in quite a while and going from severe drought to flood warnings in just a couple of months we are far below average for this time of year.
I suspect that when our “blackberry winter” ends the temperatures will jump into the 90’s and all rain will stop. It seems like the weather has become a binary state system.
We could still use some water up here, and the forecast shows rain for the next three days. It was a long, cold, dry winter until March, after which it got wetter but even longer. Mid-May is a long time to be waiting out the snow.
A problem with social network websites is they do not know when someone dies. We’ve lost too many friends these past few years and their pages still generate traffic.
LinkedIn still sends me things about another friend, one you may have known or known about (Kevin Weeks) who is no longer with us.
There was an article a few years back about how to handle the ins and outs of someone’s death and how to notify the virtual friend base. That is all well and good for those with families but what about those of us who only have a spouse or may be single.
Oh boy. I hadn’t known about Kevin Weeks. He wrote a lot of really good stuff for PC Techniques in the first half of the ’90s. After that he stopped writing computer articles and starting writing about cooking, which I think is how he’ll be remembered.
And he was only 58.