Hardware Beyond the Hype
Oh my god, looking at the PDF pages of this 1971 Centuri rocket manual lit up so many of my boyhood memory circuits, I swear I have smoke comin’ out of my ears. I was the Vice President of the Chester, VA Model Rocketry Club, which isn’t saying much in that I think we had three full-time members. I lived for rocketry and poured over every square inch of this 16-page manual. It’s such a brain-tickle to see it again after so many years.
[Via Make]
Not tech related, but I saw this on the American Dialect Society’s e-list and thought it was interesting — and scary. Please, dear Gopod, do not add this nightmare illness to the laundry list of ailments that already assail me, your humble cyborged servant:
If you don’t know what a cluster headache is, thank God or whomever or whatever you believe in. Clusters differ from migraines in that, in the case of the former, there is no aura, no increase in sensitivity to light and sound, no nausea, and no throbbing. A cluster headache is just pure, unadulterated pain that has to be felt to be believed. In any case, here is the tiny vocabulary of cluster headache-specific jargon:
Clusterhead: a person who suffers from cluster headaches
Cluster headache: a kind of pain that beggars description, generally affecting only one side of the head and face
The Demon: the personification of cluster-headache pain
The Dance: one’s physical reaction to cluster pain, whatever that may be
Shadow: a kind of premonitory pain that tells you to get ready, because The Demon is about to strike
Fun, loose-brained interview with BEAM guru and robot toy designer Mark Tilden on You Review Network. Contains some details on the next generation of robots coming from Tilden/Wowwee Toys.
I also found out via the piece that there’s a “doc sci-fi feature film” about Tilden that’s been making the rounds. Hope that’s made widely available at some point.
Jamie, Adam, Grant, and others in the MythBusters posse are interviewed at Starwars.com. The piece is supposed to be about busting the “myths” of Star Wars (Can you drive an opentopped Podracer at 900 mph? Can you fall 50′ into a snowbank? Can you survive a freezing night inside a dead animal’s carcass?) This interview part of the piece is surprisingly lame, but the rest of it, about the MythBusters’s work at ILM and their work on the show, is worth the read.
A builder of my Mousey the Junkbot, as featured in my robot book and in Make Vol. 2, has posted his step-by-step building instructions on the Instructables website. Really nice job on the documentation, with some additional tips and tricks not covered in the two previous builds.
I’ve been having a blast recently engaging in a unique form of multimedia… ah… edutainment that I thought I’d share with the group.
If you haven’t heard of the 33-1/3 Series of books, each of which explores a single influential album of the past forty years, you really should check ’em out. It’s an awesome concept and some of the titles are brilliant. I’ve been buying one of the books, ripping or downloading the album it covers, and then listening to the recording on my iPod at night as I read the text. Most of the books are written so that each chapter covers a track on the album. It’s fun to read about a song’s context, composition, and recording and then listen to it. It can really get you inside the music in a very deep, insightful way.
Colin bought himself a new Intel MacBook. He told his boss he would be able to boot into both the Mac OS and XP. He’d like to make good on that promise, so he’s started a contest to award prize money to the first person who can figure out how to dual-boot Windows XP and OS X on the new Intel Macs. He seeded the purse with $100 and asked others to chip in. As of this writing, the pot has US$7,115 in it. Gentlegeeks: Start your Logic Probes!
Okay, look, I love the Mac as much as the next Applehead, but this is just sad: Step by step pics on Flickr of the Duo Core Intel iMac being removed from its box. This might be even remotely interesting if the experience was in any way different than removing the pre-Intel iMacs from the box, but it isn’t. Do other people just have a lot more free time on their hands than I do?
[Via TUAW]
So it turns out that the new Apple ads promoting their Intel chips looks very similar to a music video by emo band The Postal Service, who are crying foul saying “We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed …” The music video and the Apple ad were apparently directed by the same person, so it’s pretty easy to figure out who to blame. Some folks think it’s copyright infringement, some think it’s not, others think it should be considered parody, and others still don’t care much one way or t’other. I happen to think that whether or not it’s technically copyright infringement, it’s a crappy thing to do. There is an irony to it though – the US Postal Service actually wasn’t all that pleased with the band using their name, but they resolved it amicably by licensing the band the use of the name in exchange for the band agreeing to ship their Internet orders via USPS. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s how most trademark disputes should be resolved.
If you want to understand the controversy, check out this handy comparison video.
via BoingBoing
Cedric Shock has written a nice tutorial on how relatively easy it is to recover data (or at least make the attempt) from a non-bootable Windows hard drive using a Knoppix Linux CD. Many non-Linux users may be intimidated by the idea of delving into Linux to solve a Windows problem, but the CD-bootable Knoppix is one of the easiest Linux distros for newbies to deal with and Cedric’s tutorial shows how even the most moderately tech-savvy user can at least attempt recovery of a lost HD using this method.
[Via TechBlog]