Category Archives: Geek Miscellany

Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.

Robotic dexterity

The progress of robotics over the last few decades has seemed fairly slow to me. Robots today at their best seem to shuffle or stumble along like zombies, their movements more scripted and controlled than dynamic or lively. I watched a video today, however, that makes me feel like some real progress is actually being made.

Here is what I watched… and be aware that this is a robotic appendage reacting in real time to visual and tactile data, *not* a strictly scripted series of movements.

Cyberwar? No, malicious script kiddy

According to the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, the U.S. should launch an all out retaliation against North Korea for their role in the recent cyber attacks on American and South Korean internet targets. Unfortunately for the American people, Mr. Hoekstra is either an idiot, willfully ignorant, or intentionally twisting reality for his own political ends. The best experts in the industry agree that the attacks were launched by an attention-seeking amateur.

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New age health: Neti pot and Salt crystal lamps

I’m not really a gullible person. I tend to prefer claims backed up by multiple reputable research sources. That said, I am willing to try things that are a bit “out there” if the potential negatives are balanced out sufficiently. I mean, even if something doesn’t really work, if it does little or no harm it may help purely via the placebo effect.

This brings me to a couple of things I’ve invested in recently. The first actually has a fair amount of supporting medical research to support it. The second is pretty much debunked. Yet I’ve adopted both into my life, well aware of the limitations of each. I’m referring to the use of neti pots (or nasal lavage) to improve sinus health, and the second is the use of Himalayan salt lamps.

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Facebook landrush: 3 million names registered in first day

I’m not really a Facebook user. I set up an account sometime in 2007, and then promptly forgot my login ID and password. Nothing about Facebook really appealed to me: I’m not sure why, perhaps at least partly because a lot of what it does I had already more or less been doing for a decade with my own website/blog.

However, I heard a few weeks ago that the Facebook folks were going to start allowing people to set up personal or “vanity” urls. So instead of “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=39395883”, you could have something like “http://www.facebook.com/cooldude”. I thought I should probably lay claim to some kind of recognizable URL, and so I dug through my old notes and tried to dredge up my old Facebook account information.

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I have Gravatars?

I installed a new WordPress theme several weeks ago. I noticed a couple of days ago that posts had funny looking “blank portrait” images beside them. I right clicked on them, and noticed that the images were linked to Gravatar. I remember reading about “Gravatars” (globally recognized avatars) quite some time ago, but I more or less dismissed it as not relevant to my interests. I think when I read about it, there may have even been charges associated with the service

Well, apparently it is relevant to my interests now. Automattic (the company responsible for WordPress) has acquired the service, and now you can set yourself up there for free. If go to the Gravatar site or alternately have an account on WordPress.com, you can associate an image with your email address… or apparently several images with several different email addresses. Anyway, once you’ve done that, if you use that same email address to identify yourself on a blog or website that supports Gravatars, your image will appear there without further setup.

All of this was news to me, but apparently Gravatar support is actually “baked in” to WordPress since version 2.5, and any “compliant” WordPress theme inherits this support. I didn’t notice it earlier probably because I was using a non-standard theme. None of this probably means much to most of my visitors but… I found it intriguing to discover something I had completely missed. Sort of like discovering an old friend of yours has been hand carving collectable duck decoys for years and you never had a clue they did any such thing. Exactly like that… except completely different.

Why are so many computer users skinflints?

A couple of days ago I responded to a review of a Twitter application I use with the following observations:

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The review I was referring to was one in PC Magazine about a BlackBerry Twitter application I use and love called Tweet Genius. Twitter’s 140 character constraints make it a bit tough for me to be completely clear, but my point is this: why is the $10 cost of a highly useful application considered sufficiently noteworthy to be mentioned several times during an otherwise positive review? And why is it that this “it is great, but a major drawback is that it costs something…” kind of notice is so common in software reviews these days?

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Shifting my Twits around

I’ve moved my Twitter feed from the right side to the left side navigation area on this page. The “balance” was starting to bug me (i.e.: too much vertical “stuff” on the right versus the left), and for some reason it just seems to make more sense under “recent comments” then above my photo gallery block.

I have not yet really slowed down my rate of “tweeting” yet: by the way, I prefer calling individual Twitter posts “twits”, but apparently that is bad form- sorry. I started on May 14th, and I’m posting somewhere around six to eight updates per day. if you look at my follow cost I seem to have stabilized at just below 400 milliscobles. I’m not feeling any compulsion to tweet: I just do so when something catches my eye and I think other folks might want to hear about it. Probably my main “vanity” when tweeting is that I respond to a few people like badastronomer (Phil Plait) and wilh (Wil Wheaton) on occasion. In part I do this because I’m hoping they might say something back- but generally I actually *do* have a question, I just probably would never have the courage to ask them to their face.   

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Knowledge workers vs Working with your hands

I am a “knowledge worker”. I design multi-media “webcast” applications and services, and lead a small team of smart, engaged developers- I occasionally get to write some code, but most of my “real” work involves middleware and server maintenance activities to keep our applications operational. My work is largely intellectual, and this is after I spent several years altering my career path so I could work more directly with the technology.

There was a period when I was perilously close to slipping into management, and another time when I performed the role of a proposal solution architect, but fortunately I recognized that these roles were not satisfying for me. I like having a more direct connection with the technology, with actually making the solution work rather than philosophizing about how it might work. I’m willing to make sacrifices in order to keep that proximity to “reality”, and so it was intriguing to me to read an article describing why even more “physical” work might be the smart choice after all.

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Shiny….

I like new gadgets. This isn’t really a general desire for new things, but rather new technology. Sometimes this desire can be beneficial: as a direct result of my interest in technology that is desnew, I am arguably more aware of the current state of the computer, game console, and smart phone markets. Other times, though, my interest becomes a bizarre kind of fixation, one which I often can not logically justify.

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