Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 56 of 70).
Milwaukee’s city government is very tech-savvy, with its Google Maps transit integration and fresh, easy-to-navigate webpage and all. Turns out the city also has free municipal wifi in a few of its parks.
Its a model I’d like to see Raleigh emulate some day.
World-famous chair-balloonist Jonathan Trappe just checked into MT.Net and offered a quick report of his recent flight. He also provided a link to his website, where you’ll see the thorough preparation he put into his flight.
Thanks for stopping by, Jonathan, and congratulations!
Remember my mythical weather balloon project? Its become totally lame in light of Jonathan Trappe’s trip in a chair tied to 55 balloons. Saturday, he strapped himself in at the Franklin County Airport and flew 50 miles east, reaching an altitude of 14,000 feet. My put-a-camera-on-a-balloon idea just doesn’t measure up.
And how is it that a guy can risk his life tied to an office chair floating at 14,000 feet but he can’t put up a webpage chronicling the project? There’s not even anything on Youtube yet.
Update 28 May 2010: Jonathan’s crossed the English Channel!
Remember the Neuros Recorder2, the tiny MPEG4 recorder I’ve raved about?
Old and busted! The new hotness is the FlyCamOne2. It is a gadget with 640×480 video and audio recording, built-in camera, and an infrared motion sensor. It records straight to an SD card. Heck, it even charges from a USB port! And the whole thing is just 100 bucks!
This thing might be small enough to mount on my mythical weather balloon project.
Update: Nevermind….the FlyCamOne2 is old and busted, too. That didn’t take long. The new hotness is the Oregon Scientific Action Cam, which apparently has better video (and the upcoming 3K release supports 4GB SD cards). The 2K model can be had for $92 at Circuit City.
Check out the videos [warning: self-playing flash] from the ATC 2K, including this cool model rocket video.
I’m always amazed when our scientists discover extra-solar planets, such as the one announced yesterday. Just a few years ago these kinds of discoveries were unheard of. I’m fascinated at how science can pick out these tiny specks orbiting stars that are light-years away.
On a related note, I’ve been unable to find a website listing of all discovered planets. NASA doesn’t seem to have a page, and the various universities and researchers tend to put out press releases with their announcements but don’t seem to collect them anywhere.
Anyone have a good resource showing all the known planets?
Update: Thanks to Wikipedia, I found exactly what I’m looking for: NASA’s PlanetQuest! PlanetQuest even has a widget for your desktop showing the latest planet count. Cool!
We’re up to 292 exoplanets now, for those of you keeping score.
The new Netflix partnership with set-top box maker Roku caused a buzz in the geek community and rightfully so: a $100 box that will make Netflix even more convenient than it already is with no increase in subscription costs is a good deal.
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Linux users often like to poke fun at Microsoft Windows for being prone to security attacks. Now the joke’s on Linux users: at least Debian and Ubuntu ones. It seems for over two years these distros were hashing their SSH/OpenVPN and other OpenSSL-generated keys using entropy that wasn’t quite entropic. Thus, the keys are easily guessable – a colossal security mistake.
My friend Mike B. sent me a link to DailyTech’s excellent description of the gaffe. It’s well worth a read.
I was thinking today about the recent wild ride the returning International Space Station crew received last month when their Soyuz capsule went ballistic. This crew was lucky to be alive, after their Soyuz burned through the atmosphere facing the wrong way. The explosive bolts that normally separate the modules did not fire, pointing the capsule’s heat shield away from the Earth.
Seems that has been happening frequently, subjecting its passengers to G-forces of up to 8 times gravity. A normal landing puts a far more manageable 4.5 Gs on the cosmonauts inside.
The problem is that – flawed as it is – Soyuz is the only option between the time the Space Shuttle fleet is retired and NASA’s new Orion vehicle is ready. In the meantime, please watch for falling (and smoking) astronauts.
I wanted to get set up where I could easily record and digitize video, so I purchased a Neuros Recorder-2 this week from Buy.com. The Recorder-2 is a tiny MPEG-4 recorder which records video straight to a CompactFlash (CF) card. Its the size of a deck of cards and it is awesome.
Its designed to snarf video from any composite video source. This means it has no TV tuner in itself. However, hook it up to your VCR, satellite TV receiver, or video camera and it will compress anything its fed to an MPEG4 file silently and professionally. You can choose resolutions from 176×144 at 15 frames per second (fps) to above-VHS-quality 640×480 at 30fps. It records sound in 128Kbps mp3 stereo, too.
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Remember how I wrote recently of how dry my office is? Something happened today I’d never seen before. I returned from getting a cup of coffee and forgot to ground myself before touching my computer.
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