Just a friendly little demon song for the children. What ISN’T appropriate about singing barnyard animals thanking Jesus they weren’t possessed by demons and flung over a cliff?
Minecraft is a game that’s essentially digital legos. You walk around, you hit trees to get wood, you turn the wood into tools, dig out stone to make stronger tools, and build stuff out of the terrain. In this case, someone has built an 8 bit processor using electrically conductive redstone blocks.
Kinect is Microsoft’s new little doo-dad for the XBox 360. The sensor is pretty impressive for the price of the hardware. It combines several microphones, an RGB camera, and an infrared camera to allow for “full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition capabilities.” The X-Box just uses it for controller-free video games. The open source community wanted to play with it, enough to offer a $2000 bounty to the first person to write a PC driver for the Kinect sensor. (Microsoft is unhappy. They “don’t condone the modification of their products” and have threatened legal action. Lame. Donate to the EFF.)
Less than a week later, someone posted working drivers. There’s no telling what kinds of cool stuff people are gonna build with this hardware.
CSWISOTI means “Cool stuff what I see on the internet.” It’s pronounced Swiz-ah-tee. We’ll see if I do this more than twice.
Internet comic xkcd talked about writing a script to buy random things on eBay. This guy made it. You can see what the script is buying on twitter. A fun and clever little experiment.
Everyone hates those stupid captchas. They’re hard to read, and they’re inaccessible to the blind. My favorite human authentication system, the KittenAuth is less irritating, but it’s completely useless for the blind. A better solution is this cool text-based captcha system that is based on answering simple logic puzzles, such as “What color is the purple house?” or “What is four plus 10?” or “What is Mary’s name?” Less hassle, totally accessible to the blind, better in every respect. At least until spammers work out how to incorporate logic puzzles into their spambots.
One of the joys and frustrations of living on my own is having to cook for myself on a regular basis. Last week, I was feeling adventurous and decided to turn this:
into this:
The recipe is the Hearty Meat Lasagna from The New Best Recipe. It turned out really great. But, I am a single person and can only eat so much lasagna at once. So I converted a little more than half the pan into food bricks for eating later.
I also had a little extra “meatloaf mix” (half ground beef and half ground pork), some extra ricotta/Parmesan sauce, and a small bowl of tomato sauce (the “Fast Tomato Sauce” from How to Cook Everything) from a previous meal. So I made this with the leftovers and some extra noodles:
I’m almost more pleased with this than I am with the lasagna. I tend to follow recipes fairly rigidly, partly out of inexperience and partly out of wanting to make sure that the recipe I’m making is the same as what the author made. The stuff in that last picture was more free-form than my usual cooking–just throwing together leftovers in pan, really-and it turned out really well too. I am Pleased.
I have fixed my MP3 blog unzipper python script from the 30 Days of Python, so now it works under Windows as well as under Ubuntu. I’ve also made it so it automatically unzips any zip files in the same folder as it, so you don’t have to manually change the script whenever you drop in a new file. (Note: it doesn’t do any detection of whether or not the zip file is in the format that Caitlyn uses. Using it on other zip files will produce unpredictable results.)
Apparently I have not posted a new blog entry since July. A lot has changed for me since then: My family has moved to Tennessee, I’ve personally moved to Rhode Island, and I’ve gotten a new job. When I haven’t been working, I’ve been hanging out with friends–several of my friends from my internet gaming group live here, and they’re as cool in real life as they are online–or I’ve been taking care of stuff around my new apartment. Or I’ve been playing video games on my new gaming PC. Keeping busy.
If the eFuse failes to verify this information then the eFuse receives a command to “blow the fuse” or “trip the fuse”. This results in the booting process becoming corrupted and resulting in a permanent bricking of the Phone. This FailSafe is activated anytime the bootloader is tampered with or any of the above three parts of the phone has been tampered with.
It requires a hardware fix, apparently, only available through Motorola, of course. This is the equivalent of a MacBook detonating some core component if you try to install an OS to dual boot.
That’s right: If you try to jailbreak a Droid-X, it will destroy a chip inside itself, requiring you to crawl back to Motorola for a replacement. I had no plans to jailbreak the Droid-X, but now I’m not going to buy the phone on principle.
Once I buy a phone, it is mine to do with as I please. If I want to replace or modify its operating system, that is my right.
Besides, who’s to say that the self-destruct mechanism will be perfectly implemented? What if it goes off under normal use?
Time to look at Droid phones that aren’t made by Motorola. I hear the Droid Incredible is pretty nice….
