Category: Random Ramblings

Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.

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]

iPhone outselling Motorola RAZR?

Before the iPhone launched, I said I didn’t see it doing as well as Steve Jobs expected. I thought it might sell well initially, but once the early adopters had their hands on it the market would slow. Well, I believe the difference between Steve Jobs opinion and mine shows why only one of us is disgustingly rich and in charge of a tech-company growing ever more revered.

Motorola said it shipped 900,000 RAZR2s during the quarter, falling well short of Apple’s 1.12 million iPhone shipments during the same period. This, despite Apple being limited to only U.S. customers and having one carrier. Now, Motorola’s no lightweight when it comes to the mobile phone industry. Overall, the company still shipped 37.2 million phones during the quarter and managed to a snatch a worldwide marketshare of 13 percent, behind only Nokia and Samsung.

So one of the more popular phones on the market is getting outsold by the iPhone, and I’m clearly a moron in at least this aspect of reality (possibly others, but I’ll hold off on those for a while). I still don’t get the appeal of the iPhone nor understand why it is performing so well, but as I’ve said before – I want my gadgets to do one task very well rather than several tasks less well, so I’m clearly not the best to judge this trend.

[tags]iPhone, RAZR, iPhone outsells RAZR, Apple, Motorola, Apparently I’m a moron[/tags]

Glenn Beck declares conservatives hate America?!?

Since the first time I watched his show, I’ve liked Glenn Beck. Sometimes I disagree with him, but often I think a lot of what he says makes sense. So I find it exceptionally odd that Glenn would chose to say that conservatives hate America on his program.

“I think there is a handful of people who hate America,” Beck said. “Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”

Now of course, many folks would hear that, think “Ahhh – California is a bunch of liberal nuts” and guess Beck is talking about Democrats losing their homes. The reality is that the places hit hardest by the fires currently are California’s 49th and 50th districts, which are more in the 3/5 to 2/3 conservative range. So generally speaking, if you hear some unknown person lost their home to the fires, the safe bet is to guess the unknown person is conservative.

Furthermore, if you listen to what Beck actually says (roughly the last 30 seconds of the clip), he ends his comment saying “There are a few people that hate America, but I don’t think the Democrats are those.” So in an area that is over 60% conservative, people who are not Democrats hate America and are losing their homes.

No matter who Beck is talking about, the comment is unnecessary and idiotic. A person’s political views should never lead someone to imply they deserve bad circumstances. Sadly, rather than own up to making a stupid comment, Beck tries to explain it away as if it were some joke and that liberals are just hating on conservatives. If you can go listen to the clip linked above and explain the joke to me, I’d love to hear it. I just don’t find the funny in there.

[tags]Glenn Beck, Beck says conservatives hate America?, California fires, San Diego[/tags]

Please – kill Sylar off for good (and other chatter)

So I really got in to Heroes last season, and I’m staying up-to-date (give or take 2 days) with each weeks’ episodes this season. I was so glad last season when they finally killed of Sylar. Now I’m so disappointed that he’s back. Worst. Villain. Evar! I expect he’ll be in the show the rest of the season, but I do keep hoping they’ll kill him off soon.

On a different note – I finally got a PSP last week. I bought the Star Wars pack not realizing it didn’t have a memory card (no, I didn’t read the box – thought Daxter and Star Wars boxes had the same extras except for the Family Guy UMD and which game was packed in), so now I have a game I’m not interested in and had to buy a memory stick. Bleh on that. I did just get the new PSP Castlevania today, and it feels goooood to play it. I’ve always liked the Castlevania games, but this one is a throwback to the days of my TurboGrafx and TurboDuo systems (which, by the way, I still have and which are still functional).

This one never was released in the US, but I did eventually manage to get an image off the Internet for it that worked on my (registered) Magic Engine emulator. I never played it much then, but I’m already playing it quite a bit on my PSP. It’s tough (but not Ghost n’ Goblins, Sinistar, or Ninja Gaiden tough), but there are lots of goodies and exploring to make it worth playing. It’s certainly not a dumbed down, anyone can win game like so many are these days.

[tags]Castlevania, PSP, TurboGrafx, TurboDuo, Gaming, Heroes, Useless[/tags]

Did you know drug handedness can affect potency?

I have no idea this was something that mattered, but recently drug companies have been releasing updated versions of drugs that are spatially altered to improve effectiveness and/or minimize side-effects. This means more better you-ness, with less worser unwanted-nessitude.

This is a bit heavy: Stereoisomers are molecules that have the same chemical formula and bonds, but a different arrangement of atoms. Enantiomers are a type of stereoisomer that are mirror images of each other — just like a right hand is the mirror image of a left hand. R-stereoisomers can be thought of as “right handed” and L-stereoisomers can be thought of as “left handed”.

This is clearly an instance where the DuPont slogan rip-off “Better living through chemistry” applies. And while you are there reading about this cool drug twist (no pun intended), be sure to vote for Shelley as your favorite science blog writer.

[tags]Drugs, Handedness, Better living through chemistry[/tags]

Dealing with monkeys

There is a problem with monkeys in Delhi.

The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi has died a day after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys.

Now we at the Blahg don’t normally make light of the suffering of others (yes, yes we often do), but that’s got to be one hella tough story to tell when arriving in the after-life.

Experts in the area are searching for a response that will curb the monkey problem. I have an idea what NOT to do, but the so-called experts are going to try something I’d recommend not trying:

One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

Jeff Goldblum would disapprove in a Jurassic Park universe, I think. And as brilliance expert Bill (of DQ fame) pointed out – That has Kim Possible written all over it.

[tags]Monkeys, Bad dates, Death by monkey, I know an old lady who swallowed a fly[/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]

Site update mostly complete

I have finished most of the necessary steps to rebuild the Blahg. I’m now running under the new setup. If you notice any broken images or links back into the site, please let me know in the comments here or via the Contact Me page. There are a couple more things which I know are not currently implemented, and will work to correct them. Look for real site activity to return tomorrow afternoon and pick up steam again beginning Monday or Tuesday.

Damn leprechauns

I know many of you will read this poor gentleman’s sad tale of Irish tragedy and think “There but for the grace of God.”

I, however, read it and realize that some day that could be my picture in the paper. I can’t tell you how many times leprechauns have tricked me in to cars that weren’t mine.

A man was caught Tuesday morning inside a car with his pants down.

. . .

Investigators said Leblanc told them he had done drugs and believed that a leprechaun had let him into the car.

Oddly, the leprechauns only open car doors for me when I also am wandering through the streets without any pants on. (via boingboing)

[tags]Leprechauns, Always after me lucky charms, Pantless, There’s an explosion – IN MAH PANTS[/tags]