Cranezilla --Mark Crane's collection of rarely annotated links

Research Summary Obesity has increased in recent decades despite no increase in calorie consumption and a rise in dieting and exercise. While typically treated as a public health issue, obesity is also an economic phenomenon that is avoidable through behavioral changes. Economists expect these behavioral changes will be undertaken if their benefits outweigh their costs. In their Harris School paper, The Long-Run Growth of Obesity as a Function of Technological Change, University of Chicago researchers Tomas J. Philipson and Richard A. Posner examine whether the economic benefits and costs of obesity can be used to explain its variations across time and populations.

Exhibition of High Speed Photography

How My Electric Car Saves the World Wherever I go in the Insight, people wave, shout, honk, roll their windows down, give me the thumbs up, pull alongside. They always smile. Boys playing ball have dropped their bats and mitts and run after me. Bicyclers in the Berkshires have flagged me over to the roadside to talk. Firemen have stopped polishing their fire engines to ask how the car works. In parking lots, people leave me exuberant notes or they wait for me to return so they can quiz me. Honda reports having sold 7,084 Insights by July of this year; they are still rare, and enticing.

Meme Central - Memes, Memetics, and Mind Virus Resource

Special: Neo-Luddite Computer Solution Neo-Luddite Computer Solution
The computer industry is a chicken on growth hormones, sloshing around in a nutrient bath with its head cut off. Hardware is out of date as soon as it's installed. Program bloat is rampant, outstripping ever-larger hard drives. As sacrifice on its neophilic altar, featuritis demands the constant obsolescence of programs no one has had time to learn in the first place.

He Who Controls the Bootloader Although few in the Be community ever knew about the discussions, Gassée says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, preinstallation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS preinstalled, but made changes to the bootloader — rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer — before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.
Be was forced to post detailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled.
Bootloader as Trade Secret

Technology Item 11 "Palm Pilots" 1501 Total Responses I just discovered something interesting. With people who have PalmOS devices that support and run PalmOS 3 , you can change what type of battery your battery display indicator thinks it's measuring with a Grafitti shortcut combination (this was news to me!).
I'm using NiMH batteries in my new Handera, for example, and the battery display was just completely out to lunch. Here's what you do:
1) Open a blank memopad document
2) Grafitti the shortcut character (like a cursive lowercase letter l)
3) Grafitti a period (dot then dot)
4) Grafitti the digit 7
Your display should now say something like [Nicad]
5) Repeat steps 2-4 until it says the type of batteries you're using. Different versions of PalmOS support different types of battiers. 3.5 supports alkaline, NiCad, NiMH, and rechargeable alkalines at a bare minimum.
Ein

From Corey Doctorow:

"Timo, it's pretty straightforward. Meerkat aggregates something like 2500 different RSS (headline syndication) channel, that are clustered in categories. Anyone who operates a Website can publish its ongoing contents as a channel. People who've signed up to put their feeds in Meerkat have chosen a category for their channels, and that what you see in the "Categories/Channels" window. Choose which channels you want to see feeds from, choose how many hours' worth of content you want (Meerkat gets thousands of new headlines/day), using the "Show Me" window. Optionally, you can filter the results by entering keywords to either include or exclude from the headlines using the "Search For" box. Once you've told Meerkat which channels, how far back, and which keywords to look for, click the "Refresh" button and the page will reload to show the results, 50 headlines at a time. You can click on a headline to see the story. The other columns (Source, Category and Date) show you more info that you can use to refine your settings (for instance, if a certain source returns awful results, you can eliminate that from the channels you want to see). There's lots of advanced stuff, too -- you can create an account, which lets you save "Profiles" (settings for different purposes) and "Mobs" (collections of links that you want to save). Is that clear?"

I owe him $1.00 for that.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Microsoft lobbying campaign backfires; even dead people write in support of firm Letters purportedly written by at least two dead people landed on the desk of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff earlier this year, imploring him to go easy on Microsoft for its conduct as a monopoly.
The pleas, along with more than 100 others from Utah residents, are part of a carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign by the software giant that may be backfiring. Microsoft sought to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement, aimed largely at the attorneys general of some of the 18 states that have joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft

Beaming Data Holds Promise, With Limits, for Networking Dr. Kavehrad and a colleague, Dr. Svetla Jivkova, have been researching a system that sends pencil-thin infrared beams bouncing around a room, connecting computers to one another and to a central transmitter and receiver that is wired to a larger network. The researchers said the technology could transmit two gigabits a second, or about a thousand times as much data as a cable modem, with few transmission errors.

One man's trash is another's gold | csmonitor.com Mark (who didn't want his last name used) lives near Austin, Texas, and may be the king of dumpster divers.
He was a casual diver for years, finding clothes, dog food, microwaves - pretty routine stuff. But then he started finding computer equipment - high-end items that big corporations had chucked. He realized he was onto something.
He started selling 250-400 items per week on the online-auction site eBay. He's now turned the activity into a full-time business and has a network of 50 buyers. He dives from 4 a.m. until around 8 a.m. three days a week.
Mark recently found a bunch of Windows 2000 servers (1,000 to be exact) that usually retail for $800 dollars per unit. He thinks the company may have gone out of business before the servers were received, but he doesn't know for sure. He sold them for $90,000. He also found 23 units of IBM website-building software that retails for $10,000 per unit.

I, Cringely | The Pulpit And some readers, quite bored with the current rash of computer crimes, wondered aloud how they might do a lot more damage should they decide to undertake their own crime spree. "You are, of course, right about the fact that virus writers have been (so far) staggeringly unimaginative and shortsighted in their work," wrote one reader, clearly entering some kind of fugue state. "One can draw parallels with graffiti artists, or bacterial pathogens, or terrorists. But just to give one example -- if *I* were to make a virus, I'd for damn sure do something INTERESTING like, for example, seek out every Excel spreadsheet on the hard drive and change ONE randomly-selected "2" to an "8"...And not crash, interfere with anything else, or otherwise attract attention, except to spread. It wouldn't make CNN -- at least, not right away -- but once it did, the story would not be about how millions of people had trouble with e-mail. It would be more like how Merrill-Lynch had to declare bankruptcy."

Watch out for that guy.

CNN.com - Nuclear-testing supercomputer unveiled - August 16, 2001 "It opens up a whole new way of studying how materials behave, how they perform under different conditions, how they age," he said. "It's beautiful."

We have this problem all the time. Pine will misbehave as well. It usually occurs for me when I am using the default windows telnet client. Whenever I get on a machine I usually install "putty" or "tera term pro". Perhaps the default telnet client can be reconfigured as well, I'm not sure.

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html (tera term)

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html (putty)



----
http://www.louisville.edu/~mecran01



>>> mdcobb02@LOUISVILLE.EDU 08/17/01 02:28PM >>>
I have a couple of users in the libraries that are stating that there are =
differences in the way that they are able to function when they Telnet =
into Athena. Their complaints are that they can't edit pages, arrow keys =
don't function anymore, etc. Easy Editor now shows up on the top of the =
screen when they log to web pages now, and this was not always the case. =
Can someone offer me some assistance on this one?

Mioshi Cobble
Technology Consultant
OLT

Here's a review of the Archos:
http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/electronics/audio/MP3/Archos_jukebox_6000/page1_frame.htm

I'm serious: For $200 bucks I could have this USB file carrying box with images of disks, etc.

Right now I am trying to image machines in our labs for preparation for school on Monday. It's terribly frustrating because half the machines sit on one subnet, and half on another, and imagecast won't communicate across the subnets due to IP multicasting being shut off at the router level for some reason.

So I get one machine perfect, gather the image, and send it to about seven other machines at a time, because our sh*tty network is so slow that's all I can do. Meanwhile, people on real networks can image 30 machines at a pop.

Then I have to transfer the clone image to another imagecast control station on the *other* subnet. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to send 1.4 gigs over the network, at 3.5 mbps. Then I image a handful of machines on the other subnet.

I could use the archos and at least hand carry the image over to the other imagecast control station, saving an hour here and there.

I'm ready to sit down and learn ghost, and just image each machine with an autobooting CD. Setting it up would suck, but it would only take three hours total to image 85 machines, as opposed to all of the dribs, drabs, false starts and file swapping with Imagecast on our crappy network.

Once I get these things imaged, I'll be set, because we have deep freeze installed so the machines won't degrade over time or get filled up with weird crap that people download. I'm starting to understand the whole appeal of thin clients. PeeCee's suck.

Here's a review of the Archos:
http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/electronics/audio/MP3/Archos_jukebox_6000/page1_frame.htm

I'm serious: For $200 bucks I could have this USB file carrying box with images of disks, etc.

Right now I am trying to image machines in our labs for preparation for school on Monday. It's terribly frustrating because half the machines sit on one subnet, and half on another, and imagecast won't communicate across the subnets due to IP multicasting being shut off at the router level for some reason.

So I get one machine perfect, gather the image, and send it to about seven other machines at a time, because our sh*tty network is so slow that's all I can do. Meanwhile, people on real networks can image 30 machines at a pop.

Then I have to transfer the clone image to another imagecast control station on the *other* subnet. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to send 1.4 gigs over the network, at 3.5 mbps. Then I image a handful of machines on the other subnet.

I could use the archos and at least hand carry the image over to the other imagecast control station, saving an hour here and there.

I'm ready to sit down and learn ghost, and just image each machine with an autobooting CD. Setting it up would suck, but it would only take three hours total to image 85 machines, as opposed to all of the dribs, drabs, false starts and file swapping with Imagecast on our crappy network.

Once I get these things imaged, I'll be set, because we have deep freeze installed so the machines won't degrade over time or get filled up with weird crap that people download. I'm starting to understand the whole appeal of thin clients. PeeCee's suck.

Free Software Hippy Sells out--but in a good way. Recently, I changed my mode of dress to be a bit more traditional, and I cut my long hair. I did this in part because my fiancee wanted me to, but also in part because I realize that non-hackers are sometimes threatened by the "typical hacker style." This actually wasn't my idea; I got it from Jello Biafra, a social commentator and spoken-word artist (who is most famous for leading the now-defunct punk band "Dead Kennedys"). Jello pointed out that the "Halloween costume" approach (i.e., wearing clothes that seem like a costume to you, but are "normal" to most people) can really work when trying to reach people who don't agree with you. Some people are uncomfortable enough with our ideas, and if our dress, clothing, piercings, or mannerisms turn them off, they won't even take the time to listen to our ideas. Since I was never that attached to long hair and my "t-shirt and jeans," I decided to make the changes, in case it might help to reach such people who would otherwise be turned off. I kept the beard, though, because I really don't want to shave every morning!
That's an example of a superficial change that I've personally done to make myself more accessible to non-hackers. I also think a lot about how our work can improve everyone's life, and I always try to address my points to a person's individual concerns.

I felt this way when I cut my hair. But at some point you become the costume, don't you?

Testing BlogBuddy.

Salon.com People | Samuel Mockbee In the last century of American homebuilding, there may no other time when architects were so irrelevant. Less than 10 percent of single-family residences are designed by architects now, and most of the rest come from mass-produced blueprints that make entire neighborhoods identical. The small percentage of homes architects actually do design go overwhelmingly to the wealthy. And while many charities such as Habitat for Humanity address low-income housing needs, the notion that poor people could ever inhabit unique pieces of architecture anymore is almost laughable.
Somebody forgot to tell this to Samuel Mockbee.

Nonzero Any book with a subtitle as grandiose as "The Logic of Human Destiny" is bound to have some mealy-mouthed qualification somewhere along the way. We might as well get it over with.

I remember an isolated phone booth in Honeyville, Utah, where my grandparents once lived. It was beat to pieces most of the time, but probably one of the last analog lines in America. I wanted to go play with phreaking toys there, but never did. The local boys used to tease me for my long hair. They're all underemployed alcoholics now. I'm an underemployed academic. At least they get to go shoot rats in the dump at night.

Windows, Windows Everywhere For instance, Apple Computer continues to do well, but not for its stockholders. The company gained tax-exempt status as a religion in 2015. Authorities were convinced the designation was appropriate after many users took to flagellating themselves in public when Steve Jobs failed to make any significant new-product announcements at Macworld in Boston. Apple evangelists have become common in shopping malls and airports. The cult tends to attract very nice people, and they've managed to integrate into society quite well. The rest of us simply avoid talking about technology around them lest we get flooded with irate e-mail

dooce.com "You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and your going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you."

From Rushmore.

The Art of Mehndi -Part 2 - Henna Paste Recipe

Comm 690 Syllabus Readings
The following texts are required.
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
The Rise of the Network Society by Manuell Castells
The Wired Neighborhood by Stephen Doheny-Farina
A coursepack available at Gray's College Bookstore

HPV Drivetrain Analyzer

Awk gear inches calculator

Cassettes from Harris Cyclery

Salon.com Technology | Holding up the rear Denied a chance to indulge himself in what Lewis calls "butt pedestals," he decided to investigate just how prevalent Aeron addiction had been in the dot-com world. "It became this casual thing that we could do in our spare moments, you know," he says. We would "check into the auction sites and see what was available, and sometimes we could track down a phone number and ask a few innocent questions."


"How long you guys been in business," Lewis and his friends politely inquired. "What happened? And do you have any Aeron chairs?"

Rebels in Black Robes Recoil at Surveillance of Computers A group of federal employees who believed that the monitoring of their office computers was a major violation of their privacy recently staged an insurrection, disabling the software used to check on them and suggesting that the monitoring was illegal and unethical.
This was not just a random bunch of bureaucrats but a group of federal judges who are still engaged in a dispute with the office in Washington that administers the judicial branch and that had installed the software to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography.

'Igniting Fear With Flying Metal' Most people would never think to make a "hurricane of fire" by molding five jet engines into a circle.
The jets have about 130 pounds of thrust apiece, so when they are turned on, they create a stationary tornado with wind speeds up to 300 mph. Gas then gets shot into the wind, where it is ignited creating, well, a hurricane of fire.

Copy lines containing "*" in word!!a>

Slashdot | Is This How to Carry Your Gadgets? If you want the ultimate computer geekware, let me clue you in. NOTHING. No phone, no PDA, no other crap. A real geek doesn't need toys. Wherever he goes, people hand him THEIR toys, all he needs is his mind. And besides, a real pro wants to be SHIELDED from all the annoying calls, pages, etc.
I have often tested this principle when I do consulting gigs. I call it the "Naked Consultant Game." Whenever possible, I go in to the site carrying nothing but a pencil. Occasionally a client will be puzzled, asking where's my phone, laptop, etc. I ask them if they want me to fix their stuff, or if they'd rather look at a bunch of cheap plastic toys. I tell them I'd gladly carry a bunch of crap to gawk at, but it will cost them extra, and take me longer to get onsite carrying all that crap.

Utilikilts Company: Products...

TDK's TMBG archive

Winamp Generated PlayList
Some interesting tunes.

See Steve Ballmer dance like a monkey:

download via SwarmCast

Freshmeat.org palm apps sorted by rating!

Envelope Glue - Make your own - stamp pads, art paper, envelopes, glue, rubber stamp cleaner, embossing powder, embossing fluid, wax seals, and more TO MAKE REGULAR DYE INK: (non-embossible)
To make the "ink" you'll need:
A baby food jar OR an old film canister
Rit POWDERED Dyes, in various colors
Rubbing Alcohol
Directions:
Baby Food Jar: Add your entire package of dye to the jar, add alcohol to the top of the jar, replace lid and shake. Film Canister: Fill canister 1/4 way full of dye, add alcohol to the top, replace the lid and shake.

Slashdot | Is This How to Carry Your Gadgets? You will know the Truth, and the Truth will lift you of a great Weight.
This is the Truth: You don't need so many gadgets.
Truly. Honest. I stand up and say "My name is Geek and I am a gadget addict". But now I'm cured. Or almost.
You don't really need to carry along the mobile phone. If somebody wants to speak with you, will call again. If you want to talk to somebody, then I recognize it's damn useful, but again, it's so urgent? They are very convenient in traffic jams, but again, I have found that having a book with me it's almost as good, and the jam does move faster when I get interested!
And you may be surprised, but there is life beyond the PDA. Come on! Do you really to have with you at all times ten thousand addresses?
If you really need special clothing for carrying all your iron, IMHO it's time to rethink your life. Your lower back will thank you for that, at the very least :o)

Real Water Rockets 1 - the 250 ml starter. Water Rockets - 250 mls

If you have never seen one of these things fly, and perhaps doubt that they can, this is the one to start with. This page will tell you how to put together a neat little rocket, make a connector that you can then use as a nozzle and then launch it using a bicycle pump to gauge the pressure. This baby is simple to construct, small enough to handle reasonably safely but demonstrate the basics of water rockets.

Cars The popular Mini Sonic is a fast pusher propeller racer. Top speeds of over 7 m.p.h. can easily be reached with the Mini Sonic.

White House Protests "whitehouseprotests.Com is a full service, web based corporation that enables you, from the comfort of your home or office, to organize a demonstration using a custom designed, full size banner to be displayed by our staff directly on the sidewalk in front of the White House or Capitol buildings in Washington, D.C. A full size 8 x 10 photograph will be taken during the demonstration of your message which will be mailed directly to you."

The Village Voice: Features: Tech Wars in Meat Space by Erik Baard The technology exists for real flying saucers to project laser messages onto the sides of buildings or display text on their underbellies with light-emitting diodes.
The Institute for Applied Autonomy, the techno-artist collective that makes the remote-controlled GraffitiWriter, sees nothing ahead but growth. "[T]he IAA has identified the already emerging market of cultural insurrection as the most stable market in the years to come," says their Web site. "IAA research has examined the primary behavior patterns of this market and is developing technologies that best serve the needs of the burgeoning market."

Water Rockets - Clifford Heath I couldn't stop laughing for days after firing my first water rocket. It flew hundreds of feet vertically (I've measured 135 metres or 450 feet), and cost a few bucks and a bit of pumping.

Bigfoot Water Rocket Launcher Systems

How to Build a Water Rocket

Build your own paper rocket! Build your own paper rocket!

PC Forum 2001 Transcript This past year, we went to the Cebit trade show and saw the first-ever, large-scale, utterly canned demo of Bluetooth melt down. Not only did it not work well, nothing talked to anything. We had waited for the industry to give us a wireless peer-to-peer networking standard, but they failed. Then we go to San Francisco, and some guy has got an open AirPort Base Station running Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). We fire up our iBooks and we're connected to the Internet. So we say, "Why are we waiting for Bluetooth? Let's bring our PCs into the workplace all over again." That is what arouses enthusiasm. It also arouses skepticism, because the business press says, "Why are you enthusiastic about this?" And the technical people say, "We are enthusiastic about it because it's returning us to our roots as a nerd pride culture." And the business press says, "But where's the market opportunity?" And the technical people say, "But it's cool!" [Laughter]

PC Forum 2001 Transcript Cory Doctorow, OpenCola We've heard a lot of talk about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "cornucopia of the commons" in the context of peer-to-peer architectures. The interesting thing about the commons in a P2P network is that it's full of cows that shit grass - every cow that grazes the commons provisions the resource that it's grazing. It's like Metcalfe's Law, squared. [Robert Metcalfe noted that the value of a network grows as n-squared, where n is the number of users.] Not only does the network gain value because more people are connected to it, it gains capacity. I think that's a really radical departure from any architecture we've seen so far.

Salon.com News | The rigged missile defense test There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it. In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was rigged.
No wonder, then, that Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the Air Force officer who oversees the NMD program, told the Washington Post on the eve of the test that he was "quietly confident" about the outcome. The general knew about the GPS beacon, while the reporters didn't.