Inane World

Tim's silly commentary on inane things and interesting geeky stuff

Browsing Posts in Technology

This too me quite a while, and you may have noticed the downtime on this site as a result.  I thought I’d share my process and solutions in case anybody else is trying to do something similar.  These are my working notes from the migration, so please excuse any lack of polish.  Word to the [...]

Yay! After several days of tedious work, inaneworld is now running on it's new server.  It was running on windows 2003 with IIS.  Now, it's running on Ubuntu with Apache.  I used the turnkeylinux.com "wordpress" appliance.  A word of caution: watch the memory usage.  Docs say that you can run this with 256M of RAM [...]

People like to complain about the specter of Big Brother – our government watching our every move, “protecting” us, regulating us, and generally sticking their bureaucratic nose where it doesn’t belong.  With technological advancements, this sort of thing becomes easier to do and more monitoring becomes possible.  The scary part is this is now expanding [...]

Why yes, I AM sure, that’s why I selected “delete” in the first place.  Now don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good to confirm things which may be questionable, such as “Are you sure you want to launch the ICBM?”.  However, deleting a file doesn’t really delete it.  It just puts it into the [...]

For the last few years, I have been doing my annual pilgrimage to the gadgets gallery looking for a gadget that will take a URL of a webcam generated image, and will display it on my desktop, refreshing it on some schedule.  You wouldn’t think this would be a difficult thing, would you?  Every single [...]

Well ok, not everybody in sunny Southern CA needs to think about snow.  I happen to live in the mountains, and so it is a factor for me.  I thought I’d share my recent thoughts & discoveries in this area as ski season approaches.  Every year, we get “flatlanders” who drive up the hill woefully [...]

I wrote a bit on the Lytro “light field” camera back in July.  The first version of their nifty new camera technology is now available for purchase!  Here is a neat article from ArsTechnica which describes a bit about how this technology works.   At the moment, you’ll need a Macintosh computer to work with [...]

I ran across this blog by Ed Burnette today: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/its-the-platform-stupid-says-google-engineer/2382?tag=mantle_skin;content He’s talking about a tirade by Steve Yegee of Google (click here to read it).  Warning: It’s long, so get comfortable.  On the other hand, it’s also right!  As Ed says in his blog above, people are missing the point about Steve’s rant.  He’s not [...]

So with the latest disappointment from Moller, I did some poking around to see what other people are doing.  I turns out that quite a few folks are working on VTOL, but in a different way!  It’s a shame that none of these products, even though some appear to work quite well, seem to make [...]

Today is the day Moller Interational was supposed to demonstrate untethered, manned flight with their Skycar M400X prototype.  There have been no announcements on their website, and the blog section where this (among other things) was being discussed has been taken down, supposedly due to abusive fake postings by people impersonating Moller employees.  Hmm… doesn’t [...]

WordPress Appliance - Powered by TurnKey Linux