Odd Lots
- Someone's invented a glass jar with a screw-on lid on both ends. Makes sense: By the time you reach the bottom of the peanut butter, most of the oil is gone and what's left is as hard as a rock. Or, alternate lids and gradually work your way toward the middle. If you keep alternating which end is up, the oil won't be as likely to collect on either end and the peanut butter may stay softer until it's all gone.
- Bruce Baker directs us to a Webring of homebrew CPUs. No VLSI. No LSI. Maybe TTL chips. Or discrete transistors. Or relays. I wire-wrapped a COSMAC machine with 2K of RAM back in 1977, and I thought it was a job. Wow.
- As an individual with a “special relationship” to calculus (and a special fondness for filk) I damned near bust a gut watching this. The Slashdot commenters (who are interesting all by themselves) need to get a life, or at very least a sense of humor. Most of them weren't even alive when Disco was first-run, and so I suspect the comedy shoots right by them.
- Epson has been demonstrating a proof-of-concept model of an A4-sized e-ink display with a mind-boggling resolution of 3104 X 4128 pixels, in monochrome. 385 DPI is more than enough for monochrome graphics (though gray-level depth is not stated) and within a few years, a full-sized letter/A4 ebook reader will not only be possible but inevitable.
- From Jan Westerlink comes a pointer to a wonderful gallery of home-made kites, including one I especially like, especially in light of yesterday's entry: A 4-cell tetrahedral made by rubber-banding 24 bamboo shish-kebob skewers together. Scroll down to pictures 24 and 25. Beautifully done, if a little prickly: If that thing dives toward you, duck!
Posted in: Odd Lots.
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