Odd Lots
- Wow. Dig with a backhoe, and then spray a target with a machine gun. Only $384. Writers should get out and do all kinds of things that aren’t part of everyday life for writers. I’m not a big fan of Las Vegas, but I could see myself doing this.
- Ok, this is clever. Forgive me if I don’t believe it will work.
- Here’s a service that the world needs, but I don’t give it even a year, especially now that Wired has launched it into high visibility. Big Print doesn’t want us too comfortable with the notion of scanning books we own to ebooks.
- Here may be one reason why: A consortium of tech book publishers is going after two anonymous Usenet posters who have posted literally hundreds of thousands of books (including several of mine) on alt.binaries.e-book.technical, not once but many times over the past several years. I’ve monitored that group since 2008 or so. It’s astonishing.
- Yes, I’m a crank. I hope to be a crank who lasts awhile. Shorting sleep will kill you. There are some excuses (small children at home being the biggie) but I also wonder if college life makes us night people. Most of the morning people I know (Carol and myself included) lived at home during college. (Thanks to Alan Zeichick for the link.)
- And though I’m not a necromancer, I know that you’re bound to answer when I propose: Everything’s SCO’s!
- Baby armadillos are cute, but I’m not sure I’d hold one, because they can carry leprosy. (Ok, ok…just wash your hands afterwards!)
- After all, armadillos are all that’s left of my favorite Pleistocene megacritter, the glyptodont. (Pssst: Mister pinch-hitter, that’s not a good stance to take!)
- Paywalled, but read it if you’re a subscriber: Ford is putting buttons back on their dashboard. I’m having some reliability problems with my new knob-less car stereo, and if I return it I may insist on something with a volume control knob at very least. They exist.
- And they exist in half-height too. Now I’m wondering if I can get a 2M/440 mobile rig that will fit in the other half of the bay…
- I had one of these once. I was called a “young punk” on occasion, by those who had reason to think it was true. So I was a steampunk long before it was cool.
- I was a little early for the Lego phenom, and was quite happy to be a Meccano kid. Here’s a great overview site for all the metal constructions sets I’ve ever heard of. (Except for Buildo, which was obscure even in 1960.)
- That said, don’t tell Certain Small Girls, but one of these may be under A Certain Christmas Tree this year.
- Colorado and Washington State will make this at least possible. But…but…what if your dog is under 21?
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · health · linux · piracy · steampunk · wine
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ACK, SCOX’ trustee trying to keep
his payments coming from the rotting corpsehis case against the big bad Blue Meanies alive.Time to break out the full stop-the-undead arsenal: stake to the heart, beheading with a silver blade, boil ’em in holy water, burn the corpse at a crossroads and scatter the ashes in running water (OK, too many Hammer horror movies growing up, but c’mon, ten years and these idiots are still trying to make a case?)
And, for ten years, they’ve kept a cloud over Linux as a result of their stalling, stonewalling, and refusal to back down in the face of facts.
Best marketing investment Micro$oft ever made…
Read a book on Father Damien at Molokai recently, they now know that most people will not develop leprosy after being exposed to the bacteria — you have to have a genetic pre-disposition that allows the infection to bring on leprosy. Found it very interesting.
Really good Odd Lots Jeff. Armadillos have been common road kill a bit further south for as long as I can remember, but until very recently I had not seen them within about 90 miles south of Atlanta. I have seen a couple this year for the first time in the metro Atlanta area. I guess they are on the march! We think of Armadillos as just a version of a Possum on the half shell.
For a small 2m/440 mobile there is the Yaesu FTM-10R. It is made for motorcycles and such, but it has a small front its Size is 4.4”W x 1.5”H x 7.0”D. Weight: 2.9 pounds.
The metal construction site was cool, but I didn’t see the Russian one we have.
The usual way around the WSJ paywall worked fine for that Ford article. Use the headline in a Google search and then go to the article from the Google results.
Dig with a backhoe, and then spray a target with a machine gun.
Dunno if you have ever been to a summer Berserker at the Wicker Sands. One year someone rented a skid steer loader, which was great fun to play with on the sands.
And I once got to fire a Thompson at a gun range. (One magazine – at $0.10 a round, it could get expensive, and ammo prices have gone up a lot since then, I think.)
Ok, this is clever. Forgive me if I don’t believe it will work.
Even if it works, it’s out of date. The supply of cork is limited, and the world wine market has expanded tremendously. This has forced some not-low-end vintners to adopt screwtops.
And it is becoming clear that screwtops are just fine, even for high-quality wines.
Here’s a service that the world needs, but I don’t give it even a year…
Very important question not answered by any of the reviewes: is the scanned material raw image or text? The review suggested image, as the files are enormous. Scanned images are better than nothing, but there are a lot of things that are only available in mediocre or ginormous image scans. (I recently found that that some election results I might want were available on line. As as a 500+ page PDF, where each page is a scan of a sheet of 17 x 11 lineprinter output, with one column of data on it.)
I have another objection: this service will allow scanned copies of works to proliferate (that is, many different scans of the same book). A lot of these scans will be defective in various degrees, which means a lot of gaps and errors will be propagated. I don’t see this as a Good Thing.
And though I’m not a necromancer, I know that you’re bound to answer when I propose: Everything’s SCO’s!
How do they pay the lawyers to keep the lawsuits going? Is someone slipping them money under the table to damage Linux?
How do they pay the lawyers to keep the lawsuits going? Is someone slipping them money under the table to damage Linux?
They got a pot of ‘investment funds’ from Baystar, who’d been, um, suggested to do so by Microsoft. Read that as you like.
As far as the lawyers are concerned, they were paid a lump sum to take the case to final appeals, so they’re on the hook to see this through. They’re probably hoping the new judge finally ends this charade just to staunch the cashflow.
All of this from the excellent site Groklaw which has followed this from the beginning, and is now also tracking the various patent-troll suits against Android.
Armadillos and leprosy is worrisome.
But I have a though about something much worse.
Around here there are many skunks with rabies. A friend recently had to go through the ordeal of the very expensive shots after an exposure.
What worries me is you often see skunks as roadkill hereabouts. So what happens to the rabies virus when someone runs a dead and squishy skunk over and the spray enters the vents to the passenger compartment??? Could this be a danger? I certainly don’t know.
Maybe I just think too much :-/
As to the threaded cork, I’m sure it adds significant cost, hence its use on $8-15 wines. I’m inclined to favor the synthetic ones, especially as so many retailers now keep their inventory standing upright.
There are quite a few books I would love to have scanned, but not at the expense of having them carved up for ease of handling. That’s one of the big issues I have with the service.
SCO?? After all these years? As an aside, am I the only one who finds it sad that an OS developed over 40 years ago is championed as the be-all and end-all? Yes, I know there have been changes, tweaks and whatnot, but really, 40+ years of experience and learning can’t do better?
I had an Erector set, the 1953 version of the No. 7-1/2. Somewhere, I also acquired a small collection of additional pieces which I always suspected were Meccano. However, thanks to the site you linked, I can see that there were a few pieces that may have been AMB, and some others that were almost certainly Lynncraft. There were also some pieces whose origin I have not been able to identify. Flat strap-like pieces, with an embossed zig-zag pattern probably intended to provide some stiffness (it didn’t, they were pretty soft).
You know, I’ve made this observation recently: It looks like pretty much every operating system in common use these days that is not either Windows or some sort of IBM mainframe dinosaur OS* is a variant of Unix.
Think about it. Mac OS X? Based on the Darwin kernel, which is BSD-derived, hence it’s Unix. Solaris? Explicitly Unix. Linux? Of course it’s Unix. Ditto for FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD. iOS? A variant of Mac OS X, hence, Unix. Android? Based on the Linux kernel, so it’s Unix, too. Blackberry? BB10 is based on QNX, another Unix-alike. PlayStation 3? Its native OS, CellOS, is believed to be a branch of FreeBSD. Have I left anything important out?
The basic concepts behind Unix have stood the test of time, and the fact that there’s so much Unix code now freely-available only contributes to its overall dominance. Not to mention so many developers that have experience dealing with the Unix model.
* – And even the mainframes can also run Unix, in the form of Linux, these days.