- Jim Strickland sent word that Lindsay’s Technical Books is shutting down next year, not for financial reasons but simply because Lindsay is retiring. Their last print catalog has been sent. Order the stuff you’ve been procrastinating about for years–I will be. (Recommendation: Radio for the Millions.) Tip for those who haven’t heard of him before: Lots of steampunk-pertinent do-it-yourself there.
- Amazon can wipe any Kindle it wants to, anytime, without telling you. We’ve known this since the 1989 dustup over the rights to Orwell’s 1984. It’s still a risk, and you can trigger it by trying to sneak around region restrictions. Now, Ars Technica explains how to keep what you’ve bought by removing the DRM. I object to region restrictions in digital content because it makes piracy a safer way to acquire content. Don’t train your customers to be pirates. When are we going to learn?
- I knew this, but not in detail: Kodak had a working digital camera prototype in 1975, and it used a casette tape to store photos–which took 23 seconds per photo. Here’s more on the device from the man who invented it.
- If that sort of thing intrigues you, here’s the motherlode.
- In case you’ve never actually seen it (I hadn’t) here’s where you can stream the video of Doug Engelbart’s prophetic (to put it mildly) Mother of All Demos, during which he showed how a mouse could be used to help with various computer tasks like word processing.
- I bought the original Microsoft Mouse in 1983 and still have it. It still works. It had better, as I paid $200 for it.
- The placebo effect may be genetic–which is a far less significant question than how the hell it works to begin with.
- The first mirror for this telescope has now been completed. The finished telescope will have seven of them. I struggled to grind, polish, and figure a ten-inch mirror when I was 15. This helps me put the whole thing in perspective. Wow.
- Slate seems to think that humans would win fights with Neanderthals. Having seen a number of skeletal and muscle reconstructions of those gnarly guys, I tend to doubt it. Why, then, did they go extinct if we didn’t kill them? My guess: They killed each other. Why do I think that? I read human history and anthropology.
- You can now buy a brand-new, reinforced and factory rustproofed body for a 1940 Ford Coupe…from Ford. If they made an AWD minivan I’d already have one. Here’s hoping.
tablets
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in my entry for March 5, 2012. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You’re trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht, an automotive engineer, for the reminder.)
- I suspect it’s easier to produce wood gas (AKA “producer gas”) at a small scale than gasoline. In a future where large-scale oil refiners are no more, a Dieselpunk society could power internal combustion engines with wood gas. This has been done a lot around the world, especially during WWII when oil supply channels were disrupted.
- This has little or nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire, but if you’re a map freak, boy–budget a day for it. Wow.
- This looks like a good book, especially if you’re finding it hard to keep track of genre mutation within SFF. Will order and report after reading. (Thanks to Trudy Seabrook for pointing it out.)
- We found one of these in a drawer in my late grandfather’s workbench after my grandmother died in 1965 and we had to sell their house. I never knew what it was until it made the A-head story on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal , in an article about…olympic sheep shearing. My grandfather lived a quiet life in a modest house on a tiny lot on Chicago’s north side. There wasn’t a sheep for miles. (I hope he didn’t use it to cut my father’s hair.)
- I’ve noted some confusion about this: “Retina display” is not an Apple trademark, but a technical term: a display with such high resolution that the eye can’t make out individual pixels at typical reading distance. Here’s a good explanation of the whole retina display concept. The new iPad certainly qualifies, but it wasn’t the first. Asus’ Tranformer Prime was there some time ago. Retina-quality displays are made by several vendors, and will eventually appear in other high-end tablets.
- The Lytro camera has been mentioned in a lot of places, but here’s the first in-depth description I’ve seen. A camera that allows you to fiddle with the focus after the shot is taken is FM, if you know what I mean. I ditch about a third of my digital photos (mostly taken in bad light) for focus problems. It’s an awkward form factor, but if it’s the first of it’s kind, I’ll assume the next one will fit the hand a little better.
- The mad scientist in me cried out when I saw this. I need a castle. I need a kite. I need a monster.
Odd Lots
- Of all the essential elements of science, proving causation is by far the hardest. Correlation only points in a direction that further research should take; it has no value in and of itself. (The title of the article is very hokey, by the way: Science is not failing us. Human ignorance–and corruption–are interfering with the scientific process.)
- Marvelously wrought steampunk playing cards. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
- I went to high school with one of these guys. (Joe Lill.) Very impressive piece of work. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht–another high school colleague–for the link.)
- I got one of these for Christmas from Lee Hart. We’ll soon see if I can still write COSMAC binary machine code in my head, 35 years later. F8 FF A2…
- Carol presented me with Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I will report after I finish it. Pinker’s stuff is always worth reading, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time.
- The Ropers (my sister Gretchen, Bill, and her girls) gave me one of these for Christmas, and having tested it on a few Meccano parts downstairs, I suspect it may turn out to be the best hex nut starter I’ve ever had.
- This is the first waterproof (more or less) tablet I’ve ever seen, and in my preferred 4:3 format to boot. And a MicroSD slot for sideloading! Details are still sparse, but it’s the first CES 2012 announcement that hasn’t made me yawn.
- I bought a Nook Color last week; more in upcoming posts. I heard today that you can now get a Nook Color for $99 or a Nook Simple Touch for free with a one-year subscription to the New York Times or People. I don’t know if this is good for the industry or not, but it may well do wonderful things for the Nook’s market share.
- There are challenges to living in the best Effin town in Ireland. (But nothing like those of a certain town in Austria.) Thanks to G. McDavid for the link.
- I offer this interesting piece as a glimpse into my ongoing research into the drivers of climate. I have long intuited that climate is a chaotic system, and we see evidence of two states in recent geological history. What the attractors are, and whether there are other states are questions of enormous importance, as is the question of how bad a change to the other known state would be. Note well: My tolerance of Climate Madness is now close to zero. Please limit comments to the points made in the article. If you wander into politics or comment angrily your posts will be deleted without hesitation or regret.
A Rootlocked Industry
I just heard this morning that the ASUS Transformer Prime will be shipped with a locked bootloader. I wanted to spit; that machine was (until a few hours ago) at the top of my tablet prospects list. Then, about twenty minutes ago, I found the update: ASUS, having felt the Gates of Hell open upon its head for the last four days, decided that it will ship a bootloader unlocker for the product–though at the cost of your warranty.
This topic will be the tech issue of 2012: Whether or not our industry has a rootlocked future.
We’ve had hints about this for some time. I originally wrote off the fact that Android could not access the Xoom’s card slot as some weird failure at Motorola. Then I found that this was only true in the US. Europeans, once they got the Xoom, found full access to the slot. Only where the Xoom was a “Google Experience Device” was the card slot out of reach. So it wasn’t Motorola at all. It was Google declaring war on sideloading, lest sideloading thin out their revenue stream from various Google cloud services.
Looking around at promising tablets, it’s a rare one now that isn’t rootlocked. I evaluated and turned down the Nook Tablet for that reason. (The original Nook Color is still what I consider an open system–though for how long no one knows.) The Xoom 2/XYBoard no longer has a card slot. (Rounded corners are not enough to make me pull the plastic out.)
Put as simply as possible, all of the major vendors want to make the handheld market basically what the TV market is today: A completely locked end-to-end pipeline that guards content from server to screen. ASUS was very clear about that: They had to lock the TP’s bootloader to get Google to allow Google video rentals to operate on the machine. Motorola hasn’t confirmed it, but I’m sure it was the same for the original Xoom. Calling it “video rental” is a misnomer. It’s really pay-per-view, which Big Content has wanted to do for many years. The PC market evolved in too open a fashion to make that possible. The tablet market, by contrast, seems to be jumping right into their pockets.
Part of this is the idiotic “give away the razor, sell the blades” business model. Tablets are often cheaper than they would otherwise be, because their vendors expect to make money on content, with content subsidizing the device cost to the end user. People now expect a tablet to cost no more than a certain amount, and so getting a truly open tablet (without a locked content stream) on the market at a competitive price is far more difficult.
Side comment: Yes, I am an anomaly. I see two or three movies a year (at the theater) and do not watch TV at all. I do read a lot of books, and I’m certainly willing to pay for them, but I do not buy as many as I might if I were more sure that they would not simply evaporate on me someday, due to a corporate bankruptcy or some kind of patent or IP rights battle that doesn’t involve me. If an ebook costs more or less the same as a hardcover, I buy the hardcover. It’s unclear how prevalent my attitude is, but I’m sure it’s prevalent enough to depress digital revenues significantly.
I’ve already mentioned that Android isn’t an OS in the same sense that Windows is. Vendors and carriers can make mods to Android that basically fork the open-source base and turn it into separate OS species that are more “Android compatible” than anything like a single OS. Android isn’t a GPL product. It uses the Apache 2.0 license, which does not compel vendors to release changes back into the community. So Android is a hybrid of open and closed technology that makes the sealed content pipeline possible. (Otherwise, the community would just edit out what it didn’t like and recompile the OS.)
2012 will be an interesting year. The top vendors like Apple, Motorola, and Samsung have enough market share to get away with this. Smaller vendors like ASUS (and down from there) do not. My hope is that we will see smaller vendors offer truly open high-quality Android tablets that do everything but offer pay-per-view content, and are capable of booting into other versions of the OS, or another OS entirely. I’d pay more for such a tablet. A year from now we may know. Stay tuned.
Odd Lots
- Here’s a great site on older toy and hobbyist robots; if you’re a collector or just a nostalgist, it’s a must-see. (Maybe some here have never seen my late 70s robot Cosmo Klein.) Alas, the link came from an old email sent by the late George M. Ewing WA8WTE, who suggested it as an Odd Lot. Better late than never.
- We used to giggle at the name in the mid-60s, but the founder of Blonder-Tongue Labs is still alive, and maintains a site full of interesting tech information about crystal sets and old radios, as well as the firm’s patents and products from long ago. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link; again, set aside more than a year ago and never used.)
- No tablet here yet (waiting to see what if anything pops up at CES 2012) but I’m tempted to get a Nook Color so I can at least quit reading ebooks on my dinosaur of an X41. My friend Erbo has learned a lot about rooting it and running CyanogenMod, and has much good to say about the combo.
- If you’re considering that step, consider the peculiar nature of the Android OS itself, which may not exist in precisely the same way that Windows exists. This is still good, but you need to understand it, as it’s a newish thing in the computing universe.
- I’ll never buy one of these, but I admire the concept: An off-the-shelf smartphone-controlled video-equipped RC helicopter. And I admit: If it weren’t for OWS I wouldn’t have heard of them at all.
- Henry Law called my attention to the fact that County Down in Northern Ireland is often called “Drumlin Country” because of its landforms. Odd then that “The Star of County Down” is one of my favorite Irish folk songs, and has been since I first heard it circa 2000–which is precisely when I wrote “Drumlin Boiler,” the first tale in the Drumlins Saga.
- And of course, when the starship Origen is marooned in the Drumlins system, it is the mere handful of collectible print books on board that allow the castaways to gradually re-create a modern society on an alien world. The cheap consumer-grade tablet PCs in every passenger pocket were all dead inside of fifteen years (most far sooner than that) and nobody thought to create printing presses before they were gone. No wonder that the cult of the printed book rises as the age of the printed book fades. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Talk partisan political hatred all the time, and prepare to reap the wind.
- Can we please add “Google is your friend,” “denier,” and “talking points” to this list? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- And with that, the curtain falls on 2011. May the impact of the curtain give it multiple broken bones, concussions, contusions, internal bleeding, hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and whatever else it might take to keep this year from darkening our doorsteps ever again.
Odd Lots
- The Nook Tablet is no longer rootable, thanks to a recent stealth update applied automatically when the device connects to the Internet. The big deal with the mod is that sideloaded apps can no longer be installed; all you get are what’s available from the B&N app store.
- Lose a few, win a few: Amazon no longer blocks rival ebook apps on its Kindle Fire almost-a-tablet.
- I always roll my eyes when people say things like <YEAR> will be the Year of the <WHATEVER>. However, I’m inclined to believe that Android may finally begin coming of age in 2012, and I’m hoping to score a 10″ ICS tablet once I find one with an external card slot and (ideally) USB charging.
- Xoom 2/Xyboard is off my list because it doesn’t have an external card slot. I also agree with the review (having a Verizon-issued Droid X2 now) that the Verizon app store is hideous.
- This may well be the smallest possible USB thumb drive. No, I don’t want one. I might inhale it.
- Joe Bryer, who sent me the coal samples I described yesterday, has posted some nice videos on YouTube about using coal for home heat.
- The chemical structure of coal (granting that it’s not a uniform material but a mix of many hydrocarbon compounds) looks something like this. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for spotting this for me.)
- My very talented Taos Toolbox 2011 colleague Lisa Nohealani Morton had her name tattoed on her arm–in binary. I myself am no stranger to binary, but if you don’t believe me you can translate it using a binary-to-text translator.
- What if you’d been at my high school lunch table in the spring of 1970? This is what you would have seen. I boggle a little at my then-habit of drinking milk and lemonade at the same meal, but I’ve done (and worn) far weirder things in my life.
- Be careful what stuffed animals you pose with over at the photography studio, especially for your Christmas photo cards. Peace on Earth and all that…
- 42% of the 100% must think they’re part of the 1%. Or something. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- Offered without comment: The continents can be rearranged to form a chicken.
Odd Lots
- You’re getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned–I’ll try and explain tomorrow, if I don’t run out of Aleve.
- Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C’mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
- Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, it’s going to be called the Droid XYboard to distance itself from the Xoom brand, which was done in because Somebody Didn’t Want It To Have a Card Slot. (Don’t know who. Have suspicions.)
- Charlie Stross makes a good case that DRM on ebooks (as required by the Big Six) is a stick handed to Amazon with which to pummel the Big Six. Read the piece, follow the links (make sure you know what a “monopsony” is) and then read the comments.
- Schumann resonance waves can apparently be detected from space. This is surprising, as my earlier readings suggested that they only exist by virtue of a sort of immaterial waveguide formed by layers in the Earth’s atmosphere–the same waveguide effect that allows hams like me to bounce signals around the world.
- Femtotech? I postulated a “femtoscope” in my novel The Cunning Blood, but it was used to plot quantum pair creation and did not rely on exotic matter. I’m not sure such things are possible, or could be done in any environment where we could live or even work through proxies. But as with a lot of things (especially LENR) I would hugely enjoy being wrong.
- I torrented down the brand-new Linux Mint 12 Lisa the other day, and like its predecessor it will not detect the video hardware correctly on my 2009-era Core 2 Quad with NVidia 630i integrated graphics. Somewhat surprisingly, it will install on an older Dell GX620 USFF with (as best I can tell) no video problems. Not sure if I like GNOME 3, though. MATE, a GNOME 2 fork, has promise.
- I may have made this point once before, but hard steampunk authors should have the Lindsay Books catalog on hand, or at least have the site bookmarked. These are books explaining how to actually do steampunk technology, often in the form of reprints of original Victorian-era reference texts. Thermite, brass, steam engines, and loads of other goodies just as great-great grandpa learned them. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the noodge.)
- One of my German friends told me that plagiarism in German doctoral theses is so widespread that it’s spawned a crowdsourced mechanism for detecting it. That’s the abbreviated English-language version; if you have a reasonable amount of German, go to the richer, fuller main page.
- Very spooky time-lapse video of a little-known physical phenomenon. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I originally thought this was a hoax. On the other hand, I have a Tim Bird and I love it. It’s hard to believe that such things actually work as well as they do.
- Sometimes you wear what you eat–or at least a reasonable facsimile.
Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht sent a YouTube pointer to some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can’t have flying cars here in the 21st century, well, this is better than nothing.
- Linux Mint 11 does not handle the integrated graphics on the Dell Optiplex SX270. Even the liveCD version doesn’t detect video correctly and is basically unusable. Kubuntu 11.10, by contrast, works correctly on this admittedly creaky machine. (Xubuntu is up next.) What is Mint doing wrong on the video side?
- Cyanogen will have an Ice Cream Sandwich version of their bootable Android distro in January.
- Back when I built telescopes, I used black spray paint for the inside of the tube. NASA now has something maybe a little bit better. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I have been unable to figure out what the active devices are on this audio power amp, but they’d better be good ones: It’ll cost you $650,000. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Nothing makes you feel old better than recalling that when the world’s first commercial microprocessor was released 40 years ago, I was already a sophomore in college. Hey you kids! Get off my accumulator!
- I inherited about a microgram of St. Francis of Assisi from my godmother, all mounted in a cool little monstrance. Alas, under the microscope it looks like dirt. If you want a bigger (and more self-evidential) piece of a saint, you can have St. Vitalis’ skull for as little as 800 euros. (Then again, considering his specialty, they probably got more for his pelvis.)
- Yes, death is nearly always fatal, poor guy.
- And if he was taking Avandia, he should call his lawyer, (very) long distance.
Odd Lots
- Does anybody here use true peer-to-peer chat? I don’t use chat much, and when I do it’s with a very small number of people, typically one-to-one. By peer-to-peer I mean via direct connect from one IP to another, without intermediation at the server level, as with things like Trillian, Skype, Jabber, etc. I know that WASTE does this, though I’ve never tried it. What else might work? I don’t want to mount a new server if I can avoid it.
- New research suggests that low-salt diets increase insulin resistance–and thus propel otherwise healthy people toward diabetes. (Via Fat Head.)
- More on Amazon’s rumored Android tablet. Print Replica (as I discussed in yesterday’s entry) has almost nothing to do with it.
- Note well: Sony’s new tablet is not really sideload-able, since the device cannot render content directly from an inserted SD card. You have to copy all material from the card to internal storage. Also, the weird cross-section makes it almost inescapably a landscape machine. No thanks.
- Interesting short piece on the other Delphi–as in, Oracle of.
- For those who asked: The 400W power supply I just bought for my Core 2 Quad is the Antec Neo Eco 400C. So far…love it!
- Having sold out all the TouchPads there were at fire-sale prices, HP now intends to…make some more. Something flaky here: Lose a little money on each sale, and make it up in volume? Doesn’t add up…unless it was a slick and risky attempt to build a demand base.
- Didn’t know this before: Setting a .jpg to quality setting 7 in Photoshop degrades the image’s quality. Stay at 6–or bump to 8.
- How about Han Solo Carbonite Slab ice cubes? Brilliant gimmick, though I wonder (given that the product is marked as “unavailable”) if they’re really out of stock or just didn’t close the deal with Lucasfilm.
Odd Lots
- A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I’ll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you’ve seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.
- More photos from the workshop: Christie Yant has established a single page linking to all four of her Flickr albums from Taos Toolbox 2011.
- Several people sent me invites to Google+, and I established an account several days ago. (I already had a Google account, so it was no big deal.) Google being insanely paranoid about how real your name is, look for me as…Jeff Duntemann.
- In the wake of Tuesday night’s epic natural gas leak here, I discovered that the ethyl mercaptan molecule resembles a balloon animal weiner dog with its hindquarters on upside down. Hey, I wonder if a balloon artist has ever done balloon hydrocarbons? (Google comes up empty.)
- Motorola is finally rolling out an Android upgrade that enables use of the Xoom’s SD slot. Guys, why was that so hard?
- Only a handful of people ever make it to 114 years old. And, weirdly, that’s when virtually all of the oldest of the oldest of the old actually die.
- Here’s a photo of the largest cannon ever built. No points for guessing who built it.
- And while you’re browsing Gizmodo’s Monster Machines category, don’t miss the largest Diesel engine in the world. Your flip-flops got paddled across the pond by something very like that.
- This SSD might well make that seven-year-old PC a little bouncier…but I still recommend maxing out RAM to 4 GB, cleaning the registry, and getting rid of crapware. I’m less convinced than some people that hard drive speeds are a serious bottleneck when your registry looks like an empty lot in a war zone.
- QBit, who on beach walks favors dead fish but will gladly settle for seaweed, has refused to answer the question: Why do dogs roll in stinky stuff?
- I doubt that this would ever work, irrespective of its cool halfway-to-dieselpunk looks. It does make me wonder what other cool stuff might have been drowned out in the racket coming from WWI. (Thanks to Gary Kato for the link.)
- And I know damned well that this wouldn’t work, but it goes all the way to full-bore, balls-out dieselpunk fantasy. (Thanks again to Gary Kato.)
- Perhaps you’ve seen the Dyson Fan on TV ads. Here’s how they work.
- The site is in German, and is well-known in Europe for high-end licorice. Pete Albrecht assures me that the name of the company really does translate as “Bearshit Pharmacy.” Wow.
