Dropsafe

I’ve installed two OpenSolaris machines now, both of which have had benefited from greater performance by increasing swap space – in one case from 512Mb to 4Gb, since the laptop concerned (Acer Ferrari 3400) has only 1G of RAM but 70-odd gig of disk… The method I used was as follows: su – root #…

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Boingboing posted this today: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/genetic-algorithm-ev.html Matthew sez, “This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial…

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It’s only taken me 20 years to find this after I first heard about it: YouTube – bad moon rising

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Hey all, I upgraded my big-ass AMD server box to OpenSolaris yesterday, and it’s durned pretty and dead useful – I am doing AVCHD to QuickTime video-transcoding on it[1] which is not something that is typically said about Solaris-at-home. A couple of things went wrong: * I did manual network configuration; this failed in a…

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This is from my Mail.app “Connection Doctor” when talking to GMail; I am not sure – it could be a Ricky Nelson quote, or a Reba Mcentire quote, or a morphed reference to The Office (US) … But it is a bit weird – not on par with “Avast, ye scurvy dogs!” or whatever some…

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There is just *so* much potential for things to go wrong with this scenario. Just think of the possibilities… Lenovo will let you kill a notebook with a text message Lenovo is working with Phoenix on a BIOS that will let you disable a ThinkPad notebook PC by sending it an SMS text message. The…

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UPDATE: to properly cite David Stephenson I can’t wait to see what Schneier makes of this, but I am disappointed with the thrust of what Tim quotes below, from David Stephenson. They appear to be suggesting that the government – say, for instance, the TSA – should be invited to tell people what to say-and-do…

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Xtracycle Conversion Kit – Subframe Originally uploaded by alecmuffett The Xtracycle conversion kit arrived a few days ago; here it is in relation to the “donor” bike (my 1993 Raleigh Amazon) so you can see how far back it is going to stretch the bike. I’ll do a rough-fit assembly next week sometime, and then…

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Dad in a whimsical mood, written in 1963, found online by my sister Louise: The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Reflections on a Harvard Tribal Gathering […] The Chief nodded his head and the contestants took the field. With him, three of his “yara” (household servants) moved sedately and ceremoniously to the middle of the…

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I finished Little Brother earlier this week. The book is free to download from the link above, or can be purchased at shops or online. I give it a good 8/10 as reads go; below the likes of “Snow Crash” but not by far. Frankly some parts of it are disturbing even for a hardened…

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Tests: The 50 Skills Every Geek Should Have I scored 41/50, not bad; I mostly drop points on the consol-games related stuff, in which I do not indulge: 13. Shove the guts of a modern game console into a retro game console 19. Enter the Konami code 29. Play any SNES game on your computer…

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Stovetop seduction Gastrosexuals?

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