ThinkGeek now has perhaps the most disturbing childhood sleeping bag EVER.

Also, squeezable bacon.

(We suggest, gently, that you check the date before ordering.)

The whole “click to show, click again to hide” app behavior from the Vista task bar is kinda nice. I wish the Dock worked that way.

So I went to lunch, and since I was on battery, I closed my laptop before I did so.

When I came back, opened the Dell, and restarted my aircard, Firefox and TBird were back in business. However, Outlook threw an error stating, basically, that it was working offline now, and that to get Outlook back online, I should start Internet Explorer and tell IT to stop working offline, and that then Outlook would play nice.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. Who writes software this way? I’m beginning to understand the isolation common to MS developer types, since there’s no way you could get away with behavior like this if you were exposed to proper developers.

(What’s also amazing is the level of talent I see from MS in the field, via their consulting organization, where I meet genuinely brilliant people frequently embarrassed by their employer’s products. Somebody oughta figure out this disconnect.)

In order to resolve the USB boradband modem problem on the MiniDell I mentioned earlier, I had to:

• Un-install the modem driver
• Un-install the AT&T management software
• Reboot
• Re-install the driver
• Re-install the management software

Ah, Windows. It’s like I never left.

(I should note that in 2+ years of using modems like this on my Macs, this problem has never happened; further, in 10+ years of using Macs, this sort of take off and nuke the site from orbit problem-solving approach has been applicable maybe once or twice ever, as opposed to standard operating procedure. Sigh.)

The mini-Dell is already causing me grief: all of a sudden, it’s refusing to recognize my 3G modem. Worked fine last week, and has worked fine for more than a year on the Mac. Ah, the joys of Windows.

Don’t you want a Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab kit? You know you do.

And nowhere nearly nerdy enough.

The instrument is a Stylophone, a miniature synth played with a stylus.

Some folks are Georgia Tech are working on “ethical governor” technology designed to control the use of lethal force by unmanned, autonomous drones without any human intervention.

Clearly, this has some implications:

The 600 Series had rubber skin

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

You may commence quivering now. I for one welcome our autonomous robotic hunter-killer overlords.

So, nearly three years ago, my friend Rob and I got into a conversation about “which two cities in the world are the farthest apart?” At the time, we thought we’d hit pay dirt with Barcelona and Wellington, which are about 12,338 miles distant on a planet only 24,901 around at the equator. So that’s cool.

Well, comes now a slightly different web tool that will show you where on the globe you’d end up if you dug straight through on a diameter line; turns out, a small town in New Zealand (Wellsford) and a point just north of Gibraltar are antipodes; the point opposite Wellington is on the A-62 between Salamanca and Tordesillas. Sadly, the point opposite Barcelona is in the Pacific.

(Houston (and most of North America)? Indian Ocean between Australia and Madagascar. And, sadly, despite the “digging to China” meme, you’d pretty much have to be in Chile or Argentina to actually do it.)

Rands points out just how badass the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge was, which is something that folks outside the Northeast may not appreciate properly. Bridges on that scale were still in beta at that point — as he points out:

The Brooklyn Bridge was built from 1870 until 1883. A quick history refresher: five years after we finished shooting each other in the American Civil War, we started building [it].

Also, the article will give you an opportunity to answer the question “what’s a caisson?”, which is something you really want to know if you’re at all geeky. Trust me.

Both of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are in the water of the East River. Ever wonder how you dig a big hole in the bottom of a river bed? In the late 1800s? It’s called a caisson, which is a huge, watertight wooden box half the size of a city block. This monstrosity was constructed on the river, sealed with pine tar, and carefully floated to a specific location on the river. It was then slowly sunk to the riverbed by placing stone on top that would eventually become the foundation.

Done, right?

Wrong. With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

Get excited. Make stuff. It’s the American way.

For political reasons mostly boiling down to craven materialism, I have to carry a Windows laptop on certain client jobs to avoid angering the thin-skinned Redmondites, and never mind the fact that I have sixty-eleven MS licenses for software on my Macbook Pro, or that my employer’s products make MS’s better, or any of that; it’s sort of weird, but there it is.

Anyway, so, this means the firm was willing to buy me a Windows laptop, and since there’s no way I’ll travel without my Mac, it needed to be small. So I got a refurbed Dell Latitude E4200, which is smaller than you’d think was reasonable for a “real” laptop (i.e., not an underpowered netbook). It’s also almost unfeasibly light (about 2 pounds), even with its Lilliputian power adapter factored in. (Also, geek bonus: 128GB solid-state drive.) (Before you ask: Yes, Vista Business. Why I don’t have a netbook for this political officer is a whole ‘nother thing, but it basically boils down to needing a build of Windows blessed for IIS, and MS won’t let netbooks run anything but XP Home, which lacks that ability by design.)

So I get a new toy, which is nice, but it also means I have a Windows machine that is “mine” for the first time in a long, long time, which is weird. I also get to play with some other new tech to keep me from being in perpetual “it’s on the other machine” hell.

First is Evernote, a contender for “brain bucket” software I’ve been aware of for a while. I first played with it about a year ago, but its Mac client was a joke, and the iPhone’s wasn’t much better. In the intervening year I’ve experimented with other contenders, including Yojimbo, DevonThink, and Voodoo Pad, but nothing really stuck. (Yojimbo came closest, but it hasn’t been updated for a year, and Bare Bones are openly hostile to user requests for status, or updates, or new capabilities; I ran into this with BBEdit years ago, which is one reason I use TextMate now.)

But now, with the need to be multiplatform, I gave Evernote another look, and they’ve come a LONG way. Sure, it costs $5 a month (instead of $40 or whatever for a one-time Yojimbo license), but that includes the ability to search, edit, and create notes in a single database from any of four platforms (Windows, Mac, iPhone, and the Web). Totally made of Win, if you ask me. Even if you don’t have cross-platform needs, the ability to keep your “digital notebook” in sync across home and work PCs could be killer; it jumps in appeal again if you have an iPhone. Check it out.

The other thing is Dropbox, which allows me to keep a folder or folders in sync across multiple machines. The Dell is likely to be my “work machine” only when politics dictate it, but having my current work files always available on either platform, or even via the web, is pretty killer.

(On the project in question, we’re also using Windows Live Mesh, which is sort of a (currently) Windows-only multiuser collaborative file sync tool. It’s very slick and cool for what we’re using it for, so folks with a single-platform need for these kinds of things should probably check that out, too.)

And a final note: As I get this Dell up and running in a way I find acceptable, with all my various and sundry apps and files in place, I notice something I’d forgotten about the Windows ecosystem: Would someone please tell me why every fucking Windows app developer feels the need to drop one or more shortcuts on the goddamn desktop when their program gets installed? Seriously, guys, what the fuck? I’ve been jumping through the download-install-delete-shortcut hoop over and over today, and it’s pretty frakkin’ annoying. It’s obviously the idea of some idiot consultard/marketing drone, perhaps the same one who told Windows software firms that they could be cavalier about changing things like default search engines, and that drone should be tarred, feathered, and sold to gypsies just as soon as we figure out who’s behind those auto warranty robocalls.

Get on it, Heathen Nation. I’m counting on you.

XKCD knocks it out of the park today.

Moon landing footage you haven’t seen yet. Go. Watch.

Via Cracked: How the studios would’ve ended Watchmen.

This afternoon, I’m doing a little work on my laptop (a MacBook Pro), catching up on email and taking care of some software testing. Since we do Microsoft software, the testing is taking place inside a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine that’s running, among other things IIS and SQL Server 2005.

At the same time, the laptop is also ripping a CD (the Oxford American’s annual music issue just showed up) and downloading a couple TV shows via BitTorrent that I’ll watch on my trip this week — something I wouldn’t have to do if I could just copy the damn things from my Tivo, but whatever. Also, because it’s the sort of thing that happens from time to time, my TimeMachine backup is running.

How is the futurey? I was just re-installing a database tool on the Windows VM side and got annoyed that the computer wasn’t responding instantly.

Does a local blogger really need this many icons at the bottom of every post?

I’ve been online since before there WERE browsers, and consider myself pretty clueful, but I’ve got no friggin’ idea what most of those are even for. Considering that most readers are less sophisticated than I am, I wonder at the utility.

moose:~ chet$ while true; do sleep 1; date +%s; done
1234567887
1234567888
1234567889
1234567890
1234567891
1234567892

(Confused? Here you go.)

But for the intersection of “Democrats” and “Gamers,” the US Democracy Server Patch Notes – v44.0 will be very funny indeed.

The gaming press has been all a-twitter about the PS3-exclusive side-scroller Little Big Planet, largely because of how friendly the user-created content tools are.

Zero Punctuation’s review puts all this in delightfully snarky context.

Aloysius’s reaction to Madonna’s recent pinups suggests her as a companion for certain undead video-game monarchs, and includes the full-of-win comment “She truly is the distaff’s Keef Richards.”

Back when I was in the RFID business, we first started hearing rumblings of the colossally stupid notion of putting RFID chips in U.S. passports. Predictably and in true “Gummit Security” fashion, those in charge dismissed complaints from RFID and private-sector security experts with vague handwaving and unresponsive answers despite the fact that the approach was doomed to compromise almost immediately. No-contact data reads on a piece of ID? Why? And what the hell are you thinking?

Well, it turns out they really weren’t thinking at all, at least beyond “hey! RFID is cool!” A hacker has already put together a drive-by passport cloner/reader using only $250 worth of off the shelf parts. Color me completely unsurprised.

So, when I got my first Porsche, I had a great time. I wrapped it around corners and shot off the line at stoplights and in general drove like it was meant to be driven, recognizing that doing so was wasteful and silly and, thanks to the softness of Z-rated tires, expensive.

The analogy breaks down at the tire point, since there’s no lasting cost associated with this kind of showing-off, but otherwise this 200 apps open and Expose-enaged screenshot of a Mac is definitely in the same category of silly trick. You couldn’t do what I did in my Porsche in a Camry, and you can’t do this with a Windows machine, but neither activity is particularly useful.

But they’re cool.

1. I love my iPhone, and one thing I love about it is that it can join wifi networks when they’re in range. However, when I’m not at home, I end up having to keep this feature off because most of the wifi I encounter is set up such that the wifi network itself is only quasi-open; you have to open a browser and “log in” to get real access to the outside world. This is only slightly irritating on a laptop, but it’s a utility killer on a phone of any kind — I pull out my phone to check mail, and it’ll take me a minute to discover the “network” I’m on is useless, and that I’ll need to revert to cell. Fuck you, Starbuck’s.

2. I hate the entire “worse is better” state of affairs with outboard drives. USB 2 “won” by being cheaper (and, as a consequence, slower in practice) than Firewire 400, but the Achilles’ heel is that USB2 wasn’t meant to carry power, so the so-called “bus powered” no-power-plug USB drives frequently require TWO USB ports to function. Maybe this works for people on desktops, but my laptop only has two USB ports, and the Seagate I’m arguing with now seems to need to be plugged directly in, not via a (powered) hub. Goodbye, full-sized keyboard and nice mouse, at least for the next little while. Grrrr. Firewire R00lz.

Via Bynkii:

Being in IT is kind of like being a doctor with a patient who complains that “It hurts when I stick a fork in my eye.”

Go read this article, especially if you’re at all unclear on why crap like homeopathy isn’t dismissed with derision nearly often enough. “Alternative medicine” is to actual science-based medicine what creationism is to actual science. It’s hokum.

GoToMeeting has been my, well, go-to virtual meeting/screen-and-app sharing tool of choice for well over a year for very good reason; it Just Plain Works with nearly zero fuss, no matter what sort of firewall my client is behind. They point their browser to the site, click “join a meeting,” and in a moment or two I’m giving them a 9-digit number that connects them to the virtual workspace. (The service has a teleconference option, too, but that’s less often in use since many of my meetings are one-on-one.)

Having something like this Just Work is fucking HUGE, since for years everybody and their brother has been trying to make it happen with often spectacularly awful results. Microsoft’s LiveMeeting/NetMeeting product has eaten more billable time in my career than some projects I’ve been on — people wander into the room, and then everyone spends 20 minutes trying to get the thing to work before giving up and doing without. LM is a little better now — I do business with MS, and they use it — but it’s still awkward and clunky, and completely hostile to any OS that isn’t Windows.

Well, GTM has been Mac-friendly as a participant for a while, but I discovered today that Mac users can now be full-fledged screen-sharing hosts. I don’t typically go this route — I prefer to sandbox my screensharing inside a VM for privacy reasons — but it sure is nice to have the option. I still interact with plenty of other online meeting tools, but GTM seems to be getting better and better all the time. It’s cheap, too — flat fee per month. If you need this sort of thing, it’s a Godsend.

Sometimes, helicopters just shake themselves to pieces in a matter of seconds.

Eeek.

So, the official mobile telephone and Internet platform of Heathen HQ is the iPhone. It’s fantastic. I’ve used WinMo and Palm and Blackberry, and none of them have the total package of capability + usability the iPhone brings. I’m sore about the walled-garden aspects, but I’m also reasonably confident that as Android spools up, that’ll stop being quite such an issue.

Anyway, one aspect of the iPhone that was vexing out of the gate was the lack of any contact search. If you’re a hipster kid with 100 friends, this is a non-issue, but I have 710 contacts in my address book, and this is AFTER I did a huge cull last year. Scrolling by letter was painful.

The 2.0 update gave us a search option, but its implementation was sub-optimal; there’s a search box, but you have to scroll all the way to the top of the address book list to get to it. A better option would have been to keep the search box on the screen at all times, so it’s always accessible. (This is one area where the Blackberry is definitely superior; on a BB, you can pretty much start typing a name from anywhere and have it do a live search for you, but never mind that.)

Anyway, someone’s found a way to at least sort of solve the problem, and in a way I would’ve laughed at if I hadn’t tried it first: the Melodis Voice Dialer is a thing of beauty, and more or less Just Works. Even better: it’s FREE. I just downloaded it today, so it hasn’t had heavy use or anything yet, but my gut is that it’s gonna be a winner.

How to turn a mini-mag flashlight into a laser you can burn shit with. The intarwubs RULE.

We launched Voyager 1 in September of 1977. By January of 1979, it was sending back amazing shots of Jupiter and its moons (including the first evidence of volcanic activity on Io). With November 1980 came Saturn and its moon Titan.

As of now, in late 2008, Voyager is still at work. It’s long since passed the planetary part of our solar system, and is now more than 107 AU from the sun, or about 9.94 billion miles, making it the farthest man-man object by a vast margin. It’s also significantly beyond the orbit of Pluto (30-49 AU; shut up; it is too a planet); signals from Voyager 1 now take in excess of fourteen hours to reach earth.

Sadly, it has not yet produced any contact with Godlike extraterrestrial intelligences nor hot bald alien women.

The computer lab at Alabama I first worked in was actually a roomful of terminals hooked to an IBM 3081d mainframe. One wall of the room had a long shelf attached, on which was approximately 12 linear feet of documentation for VM/SP, Rexx, Xedit, Mail, FORTRAN 77, and God knows what else, all in one enormous expandable “binding”. You don’t see that anymore.

It was that culture of documentation that led IBM to ship each PC with a commensurately excellent set of docs weighing in at something like 4,000 pages.

My MacBook Pro came with a thin brochure. Of course, there was no Internet to speak of in 1981, either.

But also Lopp, a little: Girl with Perl Earring.

Oobject.com is a fantastic site filled with picture sets of awesome things, like 8 Classic Nakamichi Cassette Decks or 23 Classic Pininfarina Designs (which includes, naturally, the Daytona — but also something very special at #15).

No, really. It’s a live streaming webcam on a litter of puppies.

Dear Intarwub: please buy us a Van De Graaff levitation wand.

(Incidentally, I just discovered in checking the name’s spelling that Robert Van De Graaff was born in Tuscaloosa and attended UA for his undegrad degree. How could I have possibly escaped knowing this?)

This is hilarious only if you know where “Azeroth” is.

Among nerds of a certain age, there is no better calculator for any amount of money than an “oblong” Hewlett-Packard from the 10C series. This excellent family of robust, compact, workhorse calculators debuted in 1981, and included:

• The 10C, a basic scientific model; and
• The 12C, a business/financial calculator — and the only one still in production (it’s also one of the three named calculators allowed in the CFA exam); and
• The 15C, an advanced scientific model; and
• The jewel in the crown for nerds like Chief Heathen, the 16C Programmer’s model.

These expensive calculators (a 12C is still $70) were objects of nerd gadget lust more than a decade and a half before the iPod or PalmPilot. Even better, their strict adherence to RPN meant being able to use one marked you as a member of a certain tribe — a tribe made very sad by HP’s eventual decision to stop making all but the 12C.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, that several enterprising folks have gotten 10C-series emulators into the iPhone App Store. At the astounding (for the App Store) price of $20 you can have the “SCI-15C,” “PRG-16C” or “FIN-12C,” complete with simulated LCD screens and brushed metal bezels (from Thomas Fors LLC; no real web site). Yes, we’ve already got a 16C on the HeathenPhone.

(A competitor, R.L.M., has another 12C on offer for $10, but a quick survey of comments suggests that Thomas Fors’ versions are superior — and even at $20, it’s still far less than one of these actually cost back in the day. I do sort of wonder what a $9.99 emulator on a phone will do to HP’s ability to sell $70 12Cs, though.)

(Incidentally, it’s the Fors verisons we commented on previously, on 5/15/08.)

Randall Stross has a piece in the NYT bemoaning the slow boot time that’s still the rule for most machines. Even pushing it down to 30 seconds is too slow, and he’s absolutely right about that; in today’s world, we should all be able to get our information appliances up and running almost instantly, like our phones. That an iPhone (e.g.) can do this just makes system startups even more annoying, and it’s apparently annoying enough for Stross to give it significant space in the New York Times.

Except, of course, that he’s missed an important development. I don’t know what the state of these things is in Windows, since I haven’t used Windows as a main machine or a laptop in nearly a decade, but on my Mac, boot time is also slower than ideal (call it a minute). The thing is, though, that boot time is now irrelevant, since I never shut the machine down. I just unplug peripherals, shut the lid, and stick it in my bag. When I get where I’m going, I just open it again, and within a second or two I’m ready to roll. I haven’t actually shut down my laptop in months — and that was for a RAM upgrade. With increased stability and some clever work between hardware vendor and OS developer, this kind of sleep-stability (and its companion, constant availability) should be achievable by anyone — though if my Windows colleagues are any indication, sleep isn’t any more reliable in 2008 than it was in 1998. They’re all shutting down and rebooting every time they pack their computers up. My colleagues are smart people; I’m assuming that if sleep actually worked, they’d be using it.

Windows people, is it really still that broken? Is it reasonable for a nontechnical Windows person to keep his or her laptop booted in perpetuity, as I do with my Macbook Pro? I understand — and revel in! — the fact that Apple has a significant advantage here in owning both the hardware and the software, but surely this problem is solvable for the heterogenous Windows laptop world. What about the Linux folks (of whom I think there are maybe two here)?

WWW::Mechanize.

It’s a geek thing. You wouldn’t understand. Unless you already do. Perl 4 life, yo.

Who can tell us what’s going on here?

chet@nogators:~$ cal 9 1752
   September 1752   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

(More here.)

This will be screamingly funny to like three of you, and completely incomprehensible to the rest. Hint: if you know what “saving throw” means, go ahead and click. SFW.

Despite general warnings to avoid looking directly thereat, I advise you to view these photographs of the sun immediately, as they are powerfully cool.

Blizzard Entertainment is the powerhouse game developer behind some of the biggest and best hits in computer gaming. With competitor Westwood (who did the Command & Conquer series), Blizz essentially owned the real-time strategy game market with its seminal Warcraft (1994), Warcraft II (1995), and eventually Starcraft (1998) and Warcraft III (2002). These last two are still widely played today, which — in a world of flash-in-the-pan hits — should tell you something about their quality.

Blizz’s other major line started in the midst of all that RTS goodness with Diablo in 1996. It’s still viewed as a high point in the constantly evolving “D&D” hack-and-slash dungeon crawl genre. A sequel followed in 2000 even more successful than the first (many of Blizz’s games have set sales records, only to be later beaten by other Blizz games). Blizz, of course, found even greater heights of success by combining the lore of Warcraft with the dungeon-crawl motif in their genre-dominating entry into the MMORPG market back in 2004.

So, anyway, the stage is set: company makes consistently excellent products going back 14 years, right? In today’s world, you’d sort of expect them to stumble and start to suck, most notably in terms of customer service. Well, turns out, not so much.

They announced a third Diablo game this summer, so I’ve been vaguely wanting to replay D2 again for a while, but I had no idea where my disks were. When I accidentally found them today (when looking for something else), I was momentarily elated until I realized that they dated from 2000, in an era well before OS X, and would require an OS 9 or “Classic” capable Mac to play. (Or a PC, naturally — Blizz has consistently also released its games on the same day for both PC and Mac, and put both versions on all the disks.) Classic is now a long time ago in the Mac world, and Intel-based Macs can’t even run it. This meant I couldn’t play, at least with these disks.

I pointed my browser over to Blizz, and discovered that D2 was available for download for only $19.95, which made me kinda happy (not because I could give them money; because it was available at all), but then I thought to call to find out if I could get a new download based on my 8 year old license key. As it turns out, yes, yes you can; you just create an account at the Blizz store and use their “add game” feature; you type in your license key, and thereafter you can re-download that game (in its most current and up-to-date version) from their site whenever you like. This works for Starcraft, Warcraft, and all the expansions, apparently, in addition to Diablo, Diablo 2, and its Lord of Destruction expansion.

The whole process make so much sense I can’t stand it. It’d be so easy for Blizz to just blow off people in my situation — it’s not a significant revenue stream either way, and God knows I’ll keep paying my WoW bill, and will probably buy both D3 and all three games of Starcraft 2 when they’re released no matter how they handled this. Instead, though, somebody at Blizz realizes that surprising customers with good service is always good business, and that’s a lesson far too often lost.

Cool.

Richard Garriott has joined the “crazy wealthy space tourist club.”

I’m vaguely curious how many Heathen know who Lord British is without clicking the link.

Right, so, Heathen is under persistent spammer attack right now; we’ve trapped 2000 spam comments in the last 48 hours, so even a fraction of those getting through is enough to create a noise problem. With Mike D., I’m in the process of migrating to a new system that sucks less, but I’m also about to go out of town for business for a couple days, and I don’t want to keep getting swamped with 100+ spam comment alert messages in my email, so:

I have drastically altered the comment policy. Posts get locked up now after 10 days; say your piece before then, or suck it. Also, you have to have an AJAX capable browser to comment, which means you have to have Javascript enabled. This ought to drastically cut down the spammery.

Mrs. Heathen knows very well that our house would look exactly like this if we also absurdly wealthy.

via here:

10² + 11² + 12² = 13² + 14²

Really.

Really, what part of Cooking with Warren Ellis could possibly go wrong?

George Takei and Brad Altman, his partner of 21 years, married over the weekend in California:

Walter Koenig, who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original Star Trek cast, and Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Lieutenant Uhura, served as “best man” and “best lady,” Asianweek said.

Best Star Trek wedding EVAR.