Odd Lots
- My 2020 novel Dreamhealer was at heart about lucid dreaming. Now a startup is attempting to create a wearable device that can trigger lucid dreams on demand. I wish them all the best, but my own research on lucid dreams and dreams in general suggest that it may not be as easy as they make it sound.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 has been a huge success since its release in October, but it runs hot compared to older versions. Here’s a review of RPi5 cases and coolers (and cooler cases) from Tom’s Hardware.
- I missed this piece last year, but it’s an overview of what software can be had to make a Raspberry Pi usable as a desktop PC. Most of this I’d at least heard about, but the notion of Zoom running on an RPi threw me back in my chair.
- This may strike some as clever. It may strike others as deranged. But what better way to make ice cream cake the standard dessert for Thanksgiving dinner than making dessert look like…thanksgiving dinner? BR’s Turkey Cake is an ice cream cake in the shape of a turkey, with caramel glaze and two sugar cones for legs. But it gets better: There is also Turkey Fixins Ice Cream, which contains spiced sweet potato, honey cornbread pieces, and swirls of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. Yum? You tell me.
- On the other hand, a similar effort from Brach’s is certifiably deranged: Turkey Dinner Candy Corn. Each bag includes six different flavors: Cranberry, Green Bean, Stuffing, Roast Turkey, Apple Pie & Coffee. I burned out on candy corn when I was 9 or 10. Green-bean flavored candy corn will not bring me back into the fold. I will give thanks that this, um, turkey is not getting anywhere near our house.
- The largest lighter-than-air airship since the Hindenburg is about to begin testing. What surprised me the most is that the German dirigible firm Luftschiffbau Zeppelin is still in business (since 1908!) and built the new airship’s gondola.
- New(er) research suggests that Viagra and Cialis are not preventive against Alzheimer’s Disease, as was reported with much fanfare back in 2021. Bummer.
- Who could have seen this coming: Microsoft’s MSN news portal is pumping out tons of news pieces created by generative AI, and quietly pulling the items reported as false or simply absurd. Sigh. People who pretend to think seem to be drawn to software that pretends to think.
- They’re having a problem in Montana: Overfilled railcars spill grain on the tracks; rain wets the grain and starts it fermenting; bears lap up the ferment and get drunk and try to outrun the trains. The race ends as you probably suspect. The state wildlife people aren’t sure what to do: The railroads want full cars, and the wildlife people want live bears. Getting there could be a challenge.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Here’s a review of RPi5 cases and coolers (and cooler cases) link points squarely at lucid dreaming
All fixed. That happens to me sometimes, especially when I’m in a hurry. I’ll leave this here to remind myself that I made a mistake.
The article on the dirigible was interesting. The linked-to IEEE Spectrum article has more pictures, including some of the internal structure and keel.
I have always felt there were profitable niche spaces for airships, both tourist & commercial, good to see something getting pass the “Hindenburg barrier”.
The rehabbing of the Moffitt Field hangar looks great, new skin & new floor. Sadly another hangar, in Tustin, just burned down, a total loss.
Something for your next ‘Odd Lots’:
Something for amateur sky-watchers to find:
Astronauts dropped a tool bag during an ISS spacewalk, and you can see it with binoculars
The tool bag is now orbiting our planet just ahead of the ISS with a visual magnitude of around 6, according to EarthSky. That means it is slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun. As a result, the bag — officially known as a crew lock bag — is slightly too dim to be visible to the unaided eye, but skywatchers should be able to pick it up with binoculars.
To see it for yourself, first find out when you can find spot the space station over the next few months (NASA even has a new app to help you). The bag should be floating two to four minutes ahead of the station. As it descends rapidly, the bag is likely to disintegrate when it reaches an altitude of around 70 miles (113 kilometers) over Earth.
Article here, among other places. https://www.space.com/astronauts-international-space-station-tool-bag-visible
Jeff, your updated Assembly book got released nearly a month ago. It wasn’t until I looks at the title covers on the right that I realised the old cover was gone. How are sales going? I will definitely order it myself for christmas.
I won’t get real sales figures for some months yet. It’s been in Amazon’s Assembly Language Programming stack rank top 20 most of the time since it was released. No reviews yet, but I’ve gotten five or six emails about it, all of them very positive. The book has its own WordPress page, where you can find the (correct) link for the listings archives, sample chapter and TOC, and errata. Here’s the page:
https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?page_id=5070
Hope you like it; I spent most of a year putting it together. Hard work, but I learned a lot, and now I can share that with my reader. x64 is just, well, better.