…I bring you Shock Tanks. They’re radio-controlled toy tanks that come in sets of two. The objective is to shoot your opponent’s tank with your tank six times. Each time you score a direct hit, your opponent’s remote control gives him an electric shock. Great fun for the whole family…Mom, Dad, and little Junior War Crimes too!
This one’s for nihilus:
Running MacOS X on a 25 MHz Centris
The machine is running Linux with PearPC installed on a 25 MHz 68040, with a minimal Panther install over PearPC. It takes–are you ready for this?–seven days to boot.
Man, I bet this guy gets ALL the chicks!
I was actually considering installing PearPC on my 800MHz Pentium III system, just to see how painfully slow it’d be, but geez, after this, there’s really no point, is there? Unless i want to install it on my 2MHz TRS-80 or something…
…the Fun Link o’ the Day: Cartoons inspired by spam subject lines. Funny, more or less work-safe, ganked from foxmagic.
First, mod your Xbox to run software not approved of by the High Corporate Office in Redmond. Then, install Linux. Then, compile and install the Linux PowerPC emulator. Then, config it. Then, create a disc image of the MacOS Installer CD. Then, stick the disc image on the Xbox hard drive. Then, run the emulator. Then, install MacOS X.
Oh, but don’t try any heavy lifting…the PowerPC emulation environment is so slow, running the installer takes around ten hours(!). On the good side, though, a display of geekery this excessive is bound to get you laid… 🙂
Saturday
Shelly and I went to the beach, and ended up staying until very late at night. On the way there, we sat in traffic for over an hour, as there’s only one bridge out to Clearwater beach from the mainland, and it was closed. There was a detour, which was closed as well. So we amused ourselves by inventing stories about the people–three men and a woman–in the car in front of us. I shan’t disturb you with the details, as they would…disturb you.
We’d planned to take a kite to the beach and fly it with the digital camera attached, so we could get some aerial photos. This plan was thwarted by the twin facts that (a) my heavy-lift kite is still in Boston (sob!) and (b) there wasn’t a breath of wind.
Once at the beach, we met this guy:
He looks fearsome until you realize that he’s, like, a quarter of an inch stem to stern.
Later, we had dinner on the beach, and I had my first exposure to raw fish (ahi tuna), which was nothing like I expected.
Sunday
Sunday, we went to a gun show with three-quarters of the Smooshlings. It was simultaneously interesting, creepy, and slightly horrifying.
Interesting: A dealer selling cannon. Real, working cannon–a six-pounder modeled after the bronze cannon Napolean used, a small bombard cannon that fired tennis balls filled with concrete, even a hand cannon that fired .45-caliber lead balls. Want want want the six-pounder and the bombard. Also a very nice H&K 9mm I’d love to take home with me, but not for $899 (ack!). A bookseller: the complete guide to manufacturing drugs right next to the complete guide to Ty’s Beanie Babies.
Creepy: Pro-Bush and pro-NRA propaganda plastered over every available surface. A booth selling bumper stickers reading “Loud Wives Lose Lives” and “Equal Rights for Southern Whites”. Posters and T-shirts proclaiming the right to “bare arms.”
Slightly horrifying: The booth selling Nazi memorabilia. An SS officer’s uniform, an autographed picture of Adolph Hitler, helmets and swords with swastikas on them.
We bailed for about an hour and went to the antique car show going on about a hundred yards down the road. Found a Ford Model T that had been retrofitted with a fully blown big-block V8 engine for sale for only $32,000. Just the thing for towing that Napoleanic six-pounder. Later, we went to dinner with the Smooshlings and other friends, and got to hear a tale of ketchup. (Ask datan0de about that one…)
And then, of course, the laptop failed, which was something of a down ending for the weekend. That’s what life is–a series of down endings. All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets…but I digress.
The laptop is still backing up as I type this. Will be done soon. Sentence fragments. Good device. Will be used more later.
Ganked from ladytabitha:
Search 4 billion digits of Pi looking for your phone number. The odds of finding any arbitrary seven-digit sequence buried somewhere in Pi are almost 100%. Wasn’t there a science-fiction story about God hiding a secret message somewhere inside of Pi?
Ganked from mobiusmuse:
Given its record of abject miserable failure, how can the Republican Party possibly persuade people to vote Republican? This hilarious movie, taken directly from the speeches of top Republican leaders themselves, spells it out pretty nicely.
Plusses and minuses:
+ Going to FantasyFest in Key West over Halloween!
+ Necronomicon starts next weekend!
– Shelly has a cold… 🙁
+ Tampa Fetish Party the weekend after Necro
– Shelly will not be going to San Francisco with me in January; school starts the same week as MacWorld.
+ I’ve got a quote for Alcor life insurance, and should have the insurance in four to five weeks, which means I’m well on-track to have my Alcor bracelet by year’s end. Yay!
+ Alcor will be offering whole-body vitrification soon!
+ We’ve drafted datan0de and merovingian to help develop the characters and art for the post-apocalyptic Flash cartoon that will (soon? eventually?) be hosted at Doomsday Sex.
…I’ve hust put up a complete FAQ on Windows XP security. I hope Microsoft doesn’t get too offended…
With a tip of the hat to gadget_girl:
Not just your typical bad art. This is art that is almost transcendent in its stunning, sublime awfulness. This is art that does for painting what Jonestown did for Kool-Aid. This is art that challenges the traditional conception of “art” as “expression which reveals the deeper mysteries of the human condition.” Many of the pieces in the Museum display a carefree–some would say “reckless”–disregard for the most basic elements of composition, form, and technical competence; the viewer is often left reeling. And the hard-hitting commentary that accompanies these works dares to ask the difficult questions, like “Are those mountains or ice cream cones in the background?”
My own personal favorite in the collection is here.
A microbe that grows in the Dead Sea is teaching scientists about the art of DNA repair.
Halobacterium appears to be a master of the complex art of DNA repair. This mastery is what scientists want to learn from: In recent years, a series of experiments by NASA-funded researchers at the University of Maryland has probed the limits of Halobacterium’s powers of self-repair, using cutting-edge genetic techniques to see exactly what molecular tricks the “master” uses to keep its DNA intact.
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“We have completely fragmented their DNA. I mean we have completely destroyed it by bombarding it with [radiation]. And they can reassemble their entire chromosome and put it back into working order within several hours,” says Adrienne Kish, member of the research group studying Halobacterium at the University of Maryland.
Slowly but surely, we’re getting there…
In light of smoocherie‘s and fatesgirl‘s comment on my recent grammar rant, I started thinking, and what I thought was, “hey, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate,” and then I thought about how much it’s not cool to be a chalky, powdery substance that settles to the bottom of a teacup, and then I started thinking…well, you really don’t want to know what I thought after that.
Nevertheless, they both have good points. So, in the interest of being part of the solution, I’ve decided to add a grammar cheat sheet to my Web site, so that if someone’s confused, it’s there and easily accessible. Any suggestions are welcome. 🙂
I also updated my BDSM and polyamory pages, while I was at it.