Category: Cool Stuff

For sale: One Magna Carta – gently used

Folks, I know some of you are collectors.  And some of you probably have a few million dollars to spare.  Of that small group of my amazing collected readership, I’m sure at least a few thousand are also historical artifact fanatics.  For those few, I would like to point out the impending sale of one original, signed, limited edition Magna Carta documents, up for auction by Sotheby’s.  It is one of only 2 copies known to exist outside of Britain – the other in the land of prisoners, kangaroos and dingoes known as Australia.

In the year 1215, a group of English barons handed King John a document written on parchment. Put your royal seal on this, they said. John did, and forever changed the relationship between the monarchy and those it governed.

. . .

While that original edict was initially ignored and John died the next year, its key ideas were included in other variations over the next few decades, most notably the right of Habeas Corpus, which protects citizens against unlawful imprisonment.

Of course, that most notable right is no longer honored in America, but many other democracies around the world still have ideas originated in the Magna Carta as the basis for their rules and rights.

So, how much will it be to take this treasure into your own home?

The document, which Sotheby’s vice chairman David Redden calls “the most important document in the world,” is expected to fetch a record $20-30 million.

Personally, I’m guessing it will go for more than that.  In recent years, so many things of real or imagined import seem to have gone for far more than expected by the auctioneers.  I’m going to peg this at $44-45 million.  What say we check back in two weeks and see how much this will cost Santa to deliver to some lucky and wealthy collector?  Same web-channel, same web-dork.

[tags]Magna Carter, Writ of Habeas Corpus, Birth of democracy,  Sotheby’s[/tags]

A watch I want

Those who know me already recognize my high-level of geekiness. Those that don’t know me figure out how much of a proud dork I am pretty quickly. I’m hoping to combine my lack of time-keeping device with my poor fashion sense to go to the next level and let people who see me but don’t meet me understand how non-functional I am in proper society. The solution to the needs-fix I have is this morse-code based watch.

If you want to deter that pesky friend who’s always peeking over you shoulder to check the time, then put a stop to it with the Morse Code watch from Tokyo Flash. This first ever design has three modes for telling time. Using a built in speaker that refracts sound off your wrist through the solid stainless steel case it sounds out the time in Morse code! But if that’s too hard to follow, you can easily press a button to see the time in Morse Code on the LED.

There are other cool watches that speak to my geekiness. But few combine the dorkiness I need with my desire to have something that keeps other people away while fulfilling a utilitarian function for me.

Paul Potts – Cell phone salesman, incredible opera singer

A cow-orker shared this with me a couple of weeks back, but I forgot to check on it until just recently. Those of you who watch American Idol may already be familiar with the British television show Britain’s Got Talent. It operates like our American Idol, Simon Cowell included (although I believe their show came first), except pretty much any category of performance can be seen.

Earlier this year, an unassuming looking fellow named Paul Potts was on the show. By profession, he is a cell phone salesman. He has a dream of performing opera. Watch him turn the disbelieving looks from the judges in to congratulations. Even Cowell is obviously impressed

After this performance, he continued on through the competitive steps of the show. Getting more recognition presumably set him up to dress more appropriately for the performance he gives. By this time, there is no doubt as to his talent, and here he is performing in the semi-finals for the show. Continue reading “Paul Potts – Cell phone salesman, incredible opera singer”

GIMP finally hits 2.4

If you are into heavy-duty image editing, but can’t afford Photoshop, you are probably already familiar with GIMP, and already know version 2.4 was release last week. If you didn’t know that, well now you do, and you can head over to the GIMP website for the download. In honor of the release, the GIMP team has updated the website with a cool new look, too.

Developers, artists and user interface designers from all over the world worked together to make GIMP more powerful and easier to use than ever. The changes from version 2.2 are too numerous to list here, please check the Release Notes to get an overview.

If you want to try out GIMP, but can’t or don’t want to install it just yet, you could also try out GIMP portable from the PortableApps collection. The version there is not yet updated to 2.4, but it will be soon. This is actually how I run GIMP on most systems where I use it. It’s just so convenient to use it from a USB key or to copy a single directory to a local hard drive and run it. I’m getting really used to just running everything portable that I can.

One last bit of advice. While GIMP is powerful, it can be a little tough to grok the interface. I highly recommend Akkana Peck’s Beginning GIMP book. It makes easing into the program so simple, and exposes the power of GIMP early. I have no idea why it is out of stock everywhere, but I assure you it is worth having if you plan on working with GIMP. For more details on it, check out the book website the author’s web site or the book detail page at Apress (where you can buy the ebook version) for possible help tracking it down.

[tags]GIMP, Graphics, Image manipulation, PortableApps, Portable Apps[/tags]

Get your television fix online

I’m not someone who watches a lot of television. Typically, if I have spare time, I’d prefer to be doing something on the computer rather than sitting just watching television. Even if I do sit to watch television, I tend to have my laptop with me so I can work on other things in the downtime when I’m not focusing on the television screen. But there are a few television programs I enjoy enough to watch (although typically not when they are broadcast and usually not on the television set). Given my own viewing preferences and when I’m most likely to have time to sit and watch television, you can probably imagine how interested I was when I found this guide to alternative means of catching your favorite television programs over at LifeHacker.

It’s a good guide to six ways you can keep up-to-date on television shows when you can’t be sitting ready to watch them when they are normally scheduled. Downloading options are of course the easiest and make up the bulk of the article, but building your own digital video recorder is also mentioned. And while this list is mostly focused on free methods of viewing television, there are brief mentions in the article and in the comment of some pay-to-play options as well.

With the fall television schedule in full swing, many of us are back in the habit of plopping down in front of the tube at night to catch the latest installment of our favorite show when it’s scheduled to air. That means clearing your schedule to watch the show and then sitting in front of the TV for a whole hour just for 43 minutes’ worth of programming. That doesn’t seem very productive, does it? Luckily, this viewing season there are more ways than ever to catch the latest episodes of your best-loved shows without becoming a slave to the prime-time television schedule. So forget the fall lineup as you know it, because this year you’re going to watch TV on your terms.

There is no mention of TV Torrents (my preferred source), nor usenet downloads (I use EasyNews), so realize that there is more out there than what is covered in this brief guide. But if you aren’t already into online television options, LifeHacker does have enough to get you started. You can always use Google to search for other options once you get started.

If you are curious as to what a geek who shares my interests would watch, right now I am staying current with Heroes and House. I also like to catch Bones, Criminal Minds, and Numb3rs when I can. I’ve just finished watching the first season of Burn Notice (I absolutely love this show), and will be catching up on Dexter and Eureka soon. There are a few others I like, if you are interested, but these make up the bulk of my television viewing.

[tags]Television, LifeHacker, Download TV programs[/tags]

Build your own Sputnik

It’s been 50 years since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, shaming the American government into taking the space race seriously. In part of a look back BBC News has a retrospective on the Sputnik launch and a guide in brief on building your own satellite.

“Technology now is way ahead of what was available in 1957, and making your own fully functional Sputnik would now be very simple indeed,” says Jan Buiting, editor of Elektor Electronics, a hobbyist magazine.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you could build one in a container smaller than a matchbox, weighing about as much as a wristwatch. The components, including a transmitter, battery and the sensors you’d need would probably cost less than £50,” he says.

Of course, launching it into space, getting it to the right altitude to orbit, and keeping track of it might all require a bit more. However, the basics of building the device are clearly easily achieved in modern times.

[tags]Sputnik, Space race, DIY, Build your own Sputnik[/tags]

Potential universal installer for Linux

The pessimist in me expects this will become just another Linux/Unix/BSD installation tool, thus diluting the pool of installation and update offerings for the 27 gajillion Linux distributions. Maybe this time, however, the hoped for universal cross-distro package management tool and software installer will be found with recently updated Nixstaller tool that has been under-way for the past year and a half or so.

Nixstaller is an Open Source project with the goal to create user friendly and flexible installers that work on various UNIX like systems.

Main Features

  • Three different installer frontends, powered by GTK+2, FLTK and ncurses.
  • Support for many common UNIX like systems (see table below)
  • Can be fully translated (English and Dutch translations are already provided)
  • The installation files can be compressed with lzma, gzip and bzip2.
  • The installation files that should be used can depend on the current system.
  • Lua support is provided to configure the installer and to program the installation procedure. This allows very flexible configurations.
  • Very few dependencies: the end user and install creator only needs one of the supported systems. For compilation SCons (and python) is also required.

It’s an interesting project, and certainly not the first such undertaking. Given the slow track of progress, I’m extra skeptical, but I fully support any efforts to more closely unify Linux distributions. I feel anything that legitimately makes using Linux easier while not taking away capabilities from power-users that know their ways around is a good thing to have.

[tags]Linux, Universal installer, Nistaller[/tags]

Happy belated 2nd anniversary Modern Mechanix blog

I missed this a few days ago while my own site was suffering some internal errors, so couldn’t post this until I got everything back up and running. As of October 18th, 2007, the Modern Mechanix blog was two years old. Catch up with the site, see the first article posted there, and learn some of the statistics and operations that keep this amazing resource of yesterday’s tomorrow running so well.

I want to give a huge thanks to my roommate Simone for all of her help on this site. Without her there really would not be a Modern Mechanix blog. When I met Simone my magazine collection consisted of a few old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1950’s. I had bought them simply because I loved reading them. Originally my idea for the blog was only to post early articles about things that had become everyday. Basically, the whole blog was meant to be what is now the Origins category. I was thinking of naming the blog “Prior Art” or “You heard it here first”, both pretty lame. Simone and I had talked about my idea for the site and for my birthday she got me a pile of Modern Mechanix mags from ebay and Modern Mechanix the blog was born. Later she came up with a name I liked a lot better, “Retrospectacle” but we had already developed a small following and I didn’t really want to change the name midstream. I noticed recently that someone else came up with that name as well. I actually still own the domain.

I sit here in envy of what MM has achieved in two years of existance. With nearly the same run time for the Blahg, my best day ever for the Blahg saw just over 600 visitors, and recent downtime and a slow posting period have cut my readership at least 75% from that high. Hopefully MM will not let up and will keep posting some of the great insights of what we should be living with today according to the experts from 30 to 100 years ago.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Happy anniversary, Yesterday’s tomorrow today[/tags]

Image manipulation experts helping track down a child abuser

There are scumbags out there who think it’s cool to sexually abuse children. Some of the extra stupid of them post pictures on the internet of themselves with children they’ve abused. Thinking that simple photo manipulation will keep their identities secret, these idiots thankfully don’t realize that such editing can be undone. Recently, Interpol posted one such partially restored image and asked the public to help identify an abuser who has for years posted images of himself with many different children.

msn_interpol_hmed_630a.hmedium.jpg

Interpol sought public help Monday in identifying a suspected pedophile, revealing a technique to unscramble digitally altered images to show the face of a man seen in Internet photos sexually abusing young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia.

. . .

[Interpol child abuse database overseer] Persson said he personally had opposed making the photos public because it demonstrated to criminals that police can now unblur pictures. But that consideration and the risk that the man could face public humiliation or even violence now that he is recognizable were outweighed by the desire to protect other children from abuse.

Points for the good guys, and hopefully they’ll catch this bastard soon. Sadly, people like this, when caught, are often kept in solitary confinement to protect them from other prisoners. Even among criminals, child abusers are looked down upon. According to folks I’ve known in law-enforcement, child abusers tend to be especially abused in prison if not kept separate.

[tags]Sexual abuse, Interpol, Hunting child abusers, Image manipulation[/tags]

Wi-Fi detection via shirt

Walking around looking for a Wi-Fi connection to leech off of, you’d probably wish for some kind of portable wireless network connection detection device. But those suckers are bulky, not very good, a little pricey, and often have poor user interfaces. Thanks to ThinkGeek, you now have the answer in the ultra-portable, easy-to-understand, take anywhere Wi-Fi detecting shirt.

wifi_shirt_anim.gif

Here at ThinkGeek we’re pretty lazy when it comes to technology. We expect our gadgets to do all the busywork while we focus on the high level important tasks like reading blogs. That’s why we hate to have to crack open our laptops just to see if there is any wi-fi internet access about… and keychain wi-fi detectors, we would have to actually remove them from our pockets to look at them. But now thanks to the ingenious ThinkGeek robot monkeys you can display the current wi-fi signal strength to yourself and everyone around you with this stylish Wi-Fi Detector Shirt.

The shirt isn’t available yet, but should be in just a couple of weeks. You can pick one up at the product page for just $30 (minus a penny).[tags]Wi-Fi, Wireless detection, Think Geek, Geek shirt[/tags]

DIY – build your own portable MP3 player

If mp3-stick-complete.jpg you have some real talent with hardware project building, you might be interested in this article about building your own portable mp3 player. Just be aware that it is not for the meek.

Project description – This is not a beginner project!

mp3-stick-partial.jpg

The MP3stick is a simple and small portable MP3 player. A microcontroller Atmel AVR ATmega128 is the heart of the circuit. MP3 decoding is done by an VLSI VS1011b decoder IC. A MMC/SD card works as memory medium for MP3 files, playlist files and skin files. The player is designed to draw his power from a LiIo/LiPo battery with 3.6V. a charger cicuit, based on MAX1811, is included. All information will be shown on a Nokia color LCD with 128×128 pixel and 256 colors. The player will work in text-only mode and if a skin file is available, also with nice graphic skins. A docking port allows outside connectivity for serial control signals, audio signals and charger voltage input.

All the necessary hardware is detailed in the guide following the introduction. A number of pictures are included to see various phases in the build. Firmware information is given. Even finaly build size (22x39x64mm) and approximate battery life guidelines are included. The work on this is impressive, and if you have the talent to build, this looks like a great project to get involved with.

[tags]mp3, DIY, MP3 player, Hardware project[/tags]