Posts in category 'technology'
Speaking of surveillance, the EPS is looking at employing facial recognition technology. @bevesslinger, how are you ensuring the EPS has proper oversight in their use of this technology?
More proof that surveillance capitalism is everywhere, and laws like CCPA and GDPR can’t come too soon. @Cooper4SAE, what are you doing to push for an enhanced privacy regime in Canada?
Well this is disturbing… we desperately need rigorous laws to protect personal privacy
With the proliferation of IoT (aka “smart”) devices, the #Futurama episode “Mother’s Day”, where robot toasters and staplers revolt against humanity at the behest of a crazed dictator, is starting to feel eerily prescient…
Well, I now have Jekyll automatically generating tagmojis from page categories in my feed to M.b. Mappings are configured in the site config and the rest is automagic!
I’ve been rewatching “Halt and Catch Fire”, and what I forget is, in the background, folks like Chuck Peddle, creator of the 6502, were the giants on whose shoulders Jobs and Gates stood. Thank you, Chuck!
Great piece on Brave. The Freeloading argument isn’t accurate, but the rest of it is spot on and highlights how Brave is regressive and disempowers content creators.
Posts like this make me want to finally learn how to program the FPGA on my shelf! So cool!
The XO Arriveth!
For those unaware, a couple months back I decided to get in on the OLPC G1G1 program, which allowed we priviledged members of the first world two buy two XO units, one which would go to a school somewhere in the developing world, and one that we could keep. The goal of the program was to spur interest in their work while encouraging donations, and let me tell ya, it sure worked on me! As it also did for two of my co-worker. :)
Anyway, I’m happy to report that a couple days ago, my XO arrived! And it’s a fine thing to behold. Compact and cleverly designed, these tiny, kid-focused, ruggedized laptops are a marvel of technology. Darn cute, too.
Anyway, there’s a ton of other pictures and material one these little things, so rather than going on and on about what makes them so cool, I’ll just post a photo and be done with it:
BTW, did I mention I typed this up on the XO? Well, aside from the photo upload, which apparently doesn’t work in the XO browser.
New Arrivals
Geez, three weeks since my last update, and… well, frankly, not a whole lot has happened. Odd how, when you become an adult, your life suddenly becomes a lot less interesting from day to day. However, it goes without saying that at least a couple noteworthy things have happened, otherwise, why the post, other than to regurgitate my varied and disconnected thoughts into the digital ether?
So, what news? Well, first off, a photo from the garden. A while back, I decided it was about time to get some various plants planted. This included the usual garden, a mix of the everyday peas, carrots, spinach, and some zucchini, with rogue dill fragrantly invading the empty spaces, a hill of potatoes, just a few to see how they do, some sunflower plants, and last but not least, berry bushes, specifically raspberry and saskatoon. Well, in the weeks following, much has been afoot. The sunflowers are at least six inches tall, the various garden vegetables are coming along quite nicely, but most importantly, my raspberry bushes have started bearing sweet, delicious fruit. And to prove it, I even have a photo!
Incidentally, these are just the most recent of the ripened berries. I’ve already enjoyed a couple early fruit, and let me tell ya.. they are delicious.
Meanwhile, on the technology front, I finally decided to take the plunge and by my very own laptop. To be honest, the fact I hadn’t done this already was just a little bit ridiculous, and after spending many hours hacking away on the company tanktop (big, hot, heavy, and ugly), I finally decided the time was right to just buy one.
So, what did I buy? Well, I could’ve gone for a regular ol’ consumer laptop, something fairly inexpensive and functional, but such gear tends to be a little heavier, have poorer battery life, and most importantly, be somewhat fragile. So I decided to splurge on some gear that I knew would be heavy-duty, light weight, and generally capable of withstanding the abuses I’m likely to put it through.
I bought a Lenovo (previously IBM) ThinkPad. The T61, to be precise, which is the latest model in the T-Series.
Now, I know, ThinkPads tend to be a bit pricey, but for that, I got:
- A titanium roll cage,
- Best-in-the-business keyboard,
- Good battery life, which is even better with the Ultrabay battery I purchased,
- Quite thin and light, at just shy of 5 lbs,
- Quiet as heck.
Basically, exactly what I was looking for.
As for specs, it’s a 2Ghz Core2Duo, 2GB of RAM, 120GB hard disk, 1440x900, 14” wide-screen display (I would’ve prefered 1400x1050 standard-def, but they can’t be had… apparently the LCD manufacturers are shoving wide-screen displays down laptop manufacturers’ throats), nVidia Quadro NVS 140M video chipset, 802.11abgn, and a DVD-RW. Plus the usual assortment of USB ports, VGA out, a pair of PCI-Express slots, the Ultrabay, modem and NIC, etc.
As for software, it came loaded with Windows Vista business (which, for the record, isn’t nearly as bad as people claim, though I turned off Aero and SuperFetch pretty quickly), with the usual assortment of goodies, such as Office, and to my surprise, SQL Express 2005. In addition, after shrinking my NTFS partition by 40GB, I threw Ubuntu Gusty in, which, after a rough start, has worked fairly well (although sound doesn’t work at all, and I can’t adjust the screen brightness within X, which is pretty irritating). I even got suspend-to-RAM working after a bit of fiddling with settings in xorg.conf. I must admit, as a desktop OS, Ubuntu performs quite admirably, and is easily the closest I’ve seen to a truly mass-accessible Linux distribution.
So, overall, an excellent and worthwhile purchase! Of course, that basically blows my toy budget for the rest of the year.
Update:
I lied. The bastards gave me a trial version of Office. Oh well, OpenOffice it is!
Things I've Stumbled Upon
Why did I install you, StumbleUpon? WHY???
Okay, so a little background, StumbleUpon is this browser extension that adds a toolbar to your browser. If you hit “Stumble”, it’ll search for websites it thinks you might like. Then you rate them. It has categories, so you can select particular subject matter, and you can even post comments and read what other people have to say.
Well, as you can imagine, this is an immense time waster. I mean, it’s really bad. It’s like the Del.icio.us front page, except less work. And the stuff I’ve found? Well, here’s a few gems:
- Taylor Hall Planet Perplex
- Kid Creatures
- The above lead me to: The Monster Engine
- Gummi Bear Sculptures
- T-Shirt Stencil Tutorial
- Crazy Bathroom. StumbleUpon actually found a blog entry on this subject, and some co-workers tracked it down on Snopes.
And those are just the things I thought were really cool. I just wish I hadn’t found yet another way to procrastinate at work.
Update:
I just came across this. It has photos and virtual tours of various Asian temples and other buildings. Very very neat.
Fun With Google Code Search
So, today, one of my “friends” at work was so kind as to post a Google code search, with my name as a search term, on our internal IRC server (thanks a lot, Jeremy… jerk!). For those not aware, Google now has a specialized search engine that allows one to search through publically available source code (the bits that comprise the blueprint for a piece of software). It’s pretty handy for many things (computing various code metrics, finding interesting code snippets, and so forth). But, as it happens, it’s also a great way to find code authored by specific people. And, in this case, that specific person was me.
Well, this got me thinking: Imagine you’re applying for a job. Further, suppose, in your younger, less experienced years, you made some of your work available online. Perhaps you contributed to some open source project. Or maybe you released something of your own. Well, your potential employer now has a very easy way to find these bits and bobs, and may very well choose to include them as part of your evaluation. Now, that’s fine if all you’ve ever made available online is top-quality code. But for hacks like me, this can be a problem.
Of course, since the advent of the search engine, an employer has always had the option of digging around on the Internet for information about prospective employees, which is why it’s important to be careful about what you post online. But, for those in the tech sector, Google code search means their past work can now be more easily tracked down and evaluated.
And in case you were curious, you can see what Google has to say about me here.