I forgot to keep tabs on the Netflix queue, so the last three films we received are just whatever we queued up, say, six months ago. This bites. I need to stay more on top of keeping the queue well-balanced....
I've appointed myself as chairman of the explatory committee for finding a replacement for our old camera. So far I haven't found too much. So your help would be appreciated. The requirements I've got so far are:ultra-compact point-and-shoot form factor quick time from power-on to first shot (<2s if possible?)...
...sorry. I started using her Sony DSC-T1 back in 2005 when we first got together. The drive motor and battery on my trusty Pentax Optio S had started wearing out right about then so it made sense to switch over to the then-newish Sony. Judging by my photo archives, it...
Northrop Grumman have apparently built this comparatively lightweight LASER for weapons use. Besides very helpfully noting that solid state LASERs are "powered by electricity" (thanks) they mention that this particular unit is equipped with ... Ethernet connectivity? Call me old-fashioned, but I actually prefer that this be usable only with...
I didn't bring the charger for the portable hard drive I use to dump photos for my camera's memory card. Although I've got a 60GB drive in this thing, I was only able to dump the 512MB card ~5 times before the battery on the X's Drive died. That's less...
I found a bug in the firmware on the Sony DSC-T1 camera, produced in 2003. When the internal four-digit image counter rolls over the 10,000 mark, it starts over twice: once after rolling over, and again after the first time you format the memory card. The sequence goes like this:9998...
I studied Japanese at school but it was primarily because I had an interest in languages (any of them, really) and because I needed a hobby. I've gotten back into it on and off in the years since I finished my undergraduate work, but nevef got too far since my...
I sampled all of these coffees at the Kauai Coffee Company. This is the second photo I took in this spot. The first was to snag a shot of this awesome shirt....
Top three reasons why I might not:The Large Hadron Collider was turned on, created an uncontrollable black hole, and swallowed the earth Trampled by elephants Elvis reincarnates in my bedroom and gibs me because I was sleeping in his respawn point Update: Kyle recommends a site for receiving up-to-the-minute status...
ACM sent me this totally awesome von Neumann mug for being a member for 3 years. I'm totally going to rock this at the office. Wait, it's only been 3 years?...
"Webmaster" and "sysop." I work in technology, but they just don't come up very often. I don't even see them in the (decently often) interaction I have with my web hosting provider. "Tier 2," on the other hand, is daily vocab....
I heard earlier tonight (in a taped discussion on legal discovery of electronic documents) that as many as 67% of emails go unprinted. If true, that means that at least 1 out of every 3 emails is printed. Who the hell prints email?...
Those of you who have used a laptop with a pointing stick have probably noticed that occasionally, the cursor will (infuriatingly) drift in a direction you're not pushing the stick. It turns out that these pointers correct their own drift, but only if you take your finger off the stick....
This is the first weekend in quite a while when I've been able to unwind completely and do absolutely nothing. Normally I don't like to do nothing but it was sortof a necessity after doing something for the last several months. So for the last two days I've been doing...
It took 3 hours to get this working. I'm not sure who to blame: Belkin, for a potentially crappy DHCP server, or Roku, for a potentially crappy DHCP client. Either way, switching over to my Linksys access point for DHCP fixed the problem. Of course, I added the Belkin in...
The Netflix player arrived yesterday and Layla was able to get it set up on our Wifi easily enough, but it fails to "connect to the local network" (whatever that means). It does request a DHCP lease so I know the layer-2 stuff is working just fine—and DHCP is difficult...
We tried Netflix's Watch Now option a while back, but it was kindof clunky and getting the PC wired into the TV was always a hassle (the Xbox 360 is the only way we pull Media Center into the living room). So I ordered the Netflix Player a few days...
There's been something of a brouhaha amongst the Microsoft technical bloggers in the last few days about this post by Eric Brechner, a director of engineering learning in the Engineering Excellence group at Microsoft1. The short version is that Eric asserts (hah—puns abound) that asserts in code aren't good ways...
This is a 250W halogen bulb from a set of cheap (and extremely effective) work lamps I bought a while back. When the bulb blew, the filament melted completely through the glass shell and left a really neat hollow strand protruding out the bottom. The bulb is flipped over in...
Holy hell. Phil tells it like it is....
Spotted over at Kotaku....
Am I missing something here? My non-smart phone is good for calls, occasionally taking crappy pictures while snowboarding, and telling the time. Is a smartphone worth the expense, UI frustration, and (most important) size/weight? I just don't see how else I'd use this damned thing. P.S. I'm not old....
A number of years ago I switched from using the mm/dd/YY date format to YYYYMMDD format—if you can't figure that second one out, it would result in today being rendered as 20080323. It's the most internally consistent date format I can find, it's rarely ambiguous, and it doesn't rely on...
I feel sorry for the box art designers who work for motherboard and video card vendors. They've got tons of variations on each product, can't really reuse graphics (the RT-XG3500 has to be distinguishable from the RT-XS3500), can't really picture the object in question (it's boring), and typically have no...
For the most part, I really really love my non-smart Samsung slider phone. But the driver package necessary for connecting it to my workstation has two problems:Why is a driver package necessary, again? Build in a USB hub, and then connect a USB mass storage device, and connect a tailored...
About once a year, I run across some hardware vendor who does something incredibly stupid like packaging their drivers up into a RAR archive. Today's contestant is Promise Technology, Inc. and the drivers in question are for the Ultra 133 TX2 card I've got in my file server. This is...
It turns out that the second channel on my ALi IDE controller was, in fact, torched—just not as torched as the first channel. So now that I've sunk the $5 into a replacement from PC Recycle, I'm finishing my Windows Home Server installation. Although, I got into an argument with...
Even though I first mentioned my server woes practically two weeks ago, I've just now gotten my shiny new copy of Windows Home Server running on my crappy old hardware. The difficulty? It turned out to be one of the PATA channels on my crappy ALi PCI IDE controller, which...
I recently bought a replacement inkjet cartridge for my printer/scanner, and noticed that HP had thoughtfully included a postage-paid return envelope in which to mail back and recycle my spent containers. "This is pretty neat," I thought, "and it seems like HP's responsibility department was able to wrestle some money...
Things I've broken in the last 24 hours:The mini-USB cable to my USB hub. This is acceptable—I've got a million of these little cords. My wireless keyboard. I dropped it on the floor, and the batteries appear to have been leaking acid all over the connectors for months. I had...
A pox on any land-before-time PATA harddrive PCB or label designer who didn't include text or diagrams for master/slave jumper settings. You should have known better....
As you may have heard, the Zune 2 hardware and updated Zune software launched today. For me, the big news is that the updated firmware and desktop software all work seamlessly with my oh-so-last-year Zune 30. Highlights include wireless sync (supported by UPnP, the Vista implementation of which is owned...
We carved pumpkins for Halloween. Although, it appears to me like Darth needs to spend some time on the stair climber. He's looking a bit flabby and ... misshapen....
I used to abhor HTML mail. It was typically ugly stuff, took forever to load, and didn't render particularly cleanly on my pine terminal. And plus, people who wrote mail in HTML editors were unsophisticated wannabes who lacked hardcore. And then I climbed out of my dungeon of nonproductivity and...
Haha! Noses on sticks! For those of you who can't immediately tell (those of you who can are dorks), I'm Phil Ken Sebben, a minor character on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. Goofy quotes abound! And Layla is a lolcat, found most prevalently at icanhascheezburger.com. Layla has dozens of velcroable...
Seeing as I don't actually use OS X, it took until today for me to run across this. I'm going to refrain from commenting except to say that I'm disappointed....
While browsing through Netflix's Watch Instantly selection of comedy films, Layla remarks: Oh, this is what they think comedy is? OK no, I want something that will make me laugh. Too true....
For a few days last week, Dell and Amazon offered the Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote for a deep discount off the ... somewhat exorbitant $250 list price. At $115, the Harmony 880 isn't exactly a steal, but I've been dying for a robust universal remote to replace the four...
This amuses me greatly. I'm quite curious to see if anything comes of this. P.S. My home theater features audio by Radio Shack....
Layla and I have tried out two IPTV services this weekend.Internet TV Beta in Windows Media Center is surprisingly cool. The beta opened up on Thursday to Vista Ultimate and Home Premium customers in the US, and everyone running those SKUs now magically have an "Internet TV" option on their...
Once again, I ask: someone please let me know if I'm missing some huge advancement in consumer power technology. But instead of big computer power supplies, I'm talking today about small wall-wart (I hate those words) consumer electronic chargers. I'm really disappointed with the lack of leadership in this space....
Apparently Samsung features a product called Wiselink, which allows their consumer electronics to read MP3 and JPEGs off of UFDs. Yes, Wiselink appears to be branding for "USB+FAT32." Anyway, I ran across this documentation for Wiselink that states that the recommended image size is ... "600 mega pixels." For you...
...it's a nuclear sockpile....
Someone please let me know if I'm missing some huge advacement in consumer power technology, but it seems that the electrical juice we're receiving today is being processed in exactly the same way it was 20 years ago. After the widespread introduction of switching power supplies, I can't think of...
It appears Marathon 2: Durandal has just been released for Xbox Live Arcade. This is ... kinda cool, actually. I'll always remember Marathon as one of the sweet Mac games that I never had for the PC, which isn't entirely accurate because I think it was the only sweet Mac...
For those of you who may have missed it two weeks ago, it appears that kids who were given the OLPC used it to ... surf for porn. I'm really really amused that this problem wasn't solved up front. I mean, did anyone seriously think kids would use this thing...
Manuel recommended the local K1 go-karting track recently for one of my bachelor parties. Well, it's a serious load of fun, so a handful of us went back this last week for a few more rounds. The thing about K1 is that they charge a good deal ($20 a person...
For Thursday's week of housework project, I built a box for all of my networking gear. The impetus came from the giant mass of cables and power cords that lives in one of the corners in my office. The cable outlet is in the middle of the wall, and so...
Raven put together this absolutely kickass Forza Motorsport 2 replica of Kyle Busch's NASCAR-mobile—not kickass of its own accord, but kickass because the replica is [expletive deleted] amazing and was done entirely by hand in FM2's layer editor. Holy crap, dude. This was way better than the ricegasm I sent...
Ignore the crappy cameraphone picture of the flyer left in my office kitchen, and instead refer yourself to I-DESIRE.org, some sort of weird motivational support group thing from India. It seems like these guys are trying to accomplish the right thing, but I can't help but giggle a little when...
Let's all 1337 like it's 2003....
I'm sure you're all getting a facefull of the iPhone madness today. The twins of gadget blogs have been posting non-stop about all of the excitement leading up to the product launch...which is all well and good, except that I'm finding it difficult to get my daily fill of low-thought...
I ran across something called supercooled water today. I've got no idea if this is completely legit or not, but here's what I've heard: Water, contrary to what you'd expect, takes some coercing to freeze properly. If it doesn't fall into the correct lattice structure when it reaches its freezing...
I ran across the Freakonomics blog earlier today. Lots of amusing stuff there. And holy crap, this guys posts more often than I do. Awesome!...
I'm sure you're all (mostly?) aware of the Lego Mindstorms NXT microcontroller and associated peripherals, which give your Lego creations some level of programmable robotic behavior with a bare minimum of hassle. It's a well-targeted kit that weighs in around a few hundred bucks and delivers a programming experienced that's...
The phone on my camera goes "click, whirr" every time I take a photo. My understanding is that this is so you can't secretly take photos with your phone—which, I also hear, is something of a problem in Japan. Whether this is simply a gentlemen's agreement between phone manufacturers or...
For those of you without IE running with JavaScript enabled, here's a screenshot of yesterday's post. It's more fun when it's interactive. Man. Coding the map up was easy—but damn do I hate hacking up CSS and onload crap....
var map = null;var pins = new Array(new Array( 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ), new Array( 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ), new Array( 1,...
Layla and I were playing Hoopla earlier (yes, just the two of us—we're just that cool) when she had to pantomime Mecca. After I failed to guess what the heck she was praying towards ("east?") she got me to guess:Clown? No wait, Pee-Wee Herman Pee-Wee's Big Adventure? No, Jambi? Yes!...
A while back, I bought a generic utility knife. It looks an awful lot like the one pictured at right. Yes, I scanned through a bunch of images of utility knives on the web before settling on that picture. The thing is that I lost this utility knife right the...
Everybody remember the Kursk, which sank in 2000 after it was damaged by an experimental torpedo? Well, English Russia has a salvage-boat load of pictures of the Kursk out of the water, and the damage is amazing (cached). It's really rare to see the interior of a sub like this,...
Over the last week, my Samsung SGH-T809 slider phone has started crapping out. The UI (and seconds later, the whole phone) will completely freeze after I've typed in more than three digits, making it completely impossible actually dial a number that isn't already in the phone's memory. Oh, and it...
Layla asked me earlier this week if farts are characteristically funny to all men, or if there's just something wrong with me. So I'm glad to respond with a story about what happened to me at the gym earlier. I was stretching after my workout tonight, and in the room...
Exhibit A: the lottery. Exhibit B: people who circle parking lots at walking speed looking for a convenient spot. I realize there's an end case where a lot is completely full and there's absolutely no parking nearby—and in this case, your strategy for finding a spot is probably going to...
I'm a keyboard snob. For years, all I used was a Lexmark/IBM Model M, unmatched in its spring pressure, tactile response, and roommate-annoying racket it made when you really got going on it. It's an absolute brute of a keyboard, but it had oustanding durability, fantastic keypress consistency, and sported...
...with big, nasty, pointy teeth! As a surprise, Layla snagged a pair of the murderous bunny slippers and got them to me last night. Hoorah! Unfortunately, my honkin' huge stompers are a bit too large (err, size 10.5) for the slippers, so one of them immediately split a seam as...
Just a few thoughts.The most frustrating part is my own music collection. For example, one track from a Secret Chiefs 3 album is tagged with different album information than all of the other tracks. So playing everything in order, I get tracks 1–7 and 9–16, and then track 8. Annoying....
I think an awful lot of people mistakenly refer to a, "desert island," when they really mean a, "deserted island." And due to a quirk in the English language, neither "desert" nor "deserted" (both words that describe areas void of anything important) imply the other. Desert things aren't necessarily deserted...
I've got a collector/organizer personality. I like long lists or arrangements of things, and I like the layouts to be uniform. This is probably most obvious in my music library, but applies to this journal, too. You may have noticed. Now traditionally, the media library has been a major source...
Layla got me a Zune for Christmas. Yes, it's brown. I've wanted one of these for a while—the battery life, capacity, and build quality of my mobiBLU DAH-1500i leave a good deal to be desired...and come to think of it, the FM reception on it sucks, too. The Zune has...
This came to me from NPR through a coworker through another coworker. I hadn't yet heard it. But, it's tubular. It's the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, and it's some of the best unsigned online music I've heard since Brad Sucks. You can play Code Monkey at the list...
I took this picture a while back at the local aquarium. It shows a picture of how to squeeze ... err, milt (sperm) from a fish and into a beaker. And then dumping all of that into a bucket of eggs. Oh, and those eggs were harvested from an ostensibly...
My experience is that optical drives fail far more often than nearly any other PC component (with the exception, of course, of small fans). In the last, say, ten years of working with computer parts, I've lost one motherboard, two or three power supplies, only one hard drive (despite typically...
When I first met Freeman Dyson today, it was at a bank of urinals in a restroom in the building that houses a good chunk of Microsoft Research. Back in the meeting room, Dyson gave a fantastic lecture today about genetics and bioengineering and provided fantastic responses to the somewhat...
I remember first hearing about this whole, you know, cup stacking phenomenon about five or so years ago—although in reality it's been around at least 25 years. Apparently the sport revolves around conning kids into developing near superhuman abilities in stacking and unstacking plastic cups. If you haven't heard of...
For those of you who haven't seen the TV comedy Arrested Development, do so. It's sharp and hilarious, and tragically cancelled. Those of you who have seen the show (or at least the third season) will probably recognize the name Bob Loblaw (say it quickly now), so-named was Scott Baio's...
I mentioned last night that I, err, got a helicopter from Layla. This is it. It's tiny. Tiny is awesome, because I can fly it indoors and use it to chase cats. It's actually quite clever—it's got counter-rotating rotors, which means that a tail rotor isn't necessary to keep the...
Part of the total awesomeness that Layla busted out for my birthday involved a completely sweetass radio-controlled helicopter. Thanks to a handful of AA batteries, I've spent most of the day tormeting felines. But the part I think you all will find most amusing is the cornucopia of Engrish smattered...
I spotted this a few days back on NASA's Earth Observatory RSS feed. It's an image of most of North America with population densities overlaid. To me, the most remarkable part is the wild, wild west. Or accordingly, just how popular the east half of the US is. I mean...
Don't fear: Captain Boomerang and his trusty sidekick, Private First Class Virtual Boy are here to save the world from terrorists! As far as I can tell, the idea behind the VeraTech Aero Phantom is fairly clever: it's a bodyless helicopter with a camera crammed rather unceremoniously in the crotch...
If English isn't your first language, tell me, how dizzying is this statement (lifted from a ranty post from last week): Learn as much as necessary as quickly as possible After I wrote it, it seemed like it could be damned confusing. P.S. Leaving town. As usual, updates will be...
I spotted this earlier today on Lake Sammamish. It's a Surf-Jet, a surfboard powered by a small Subaru marine engine. There's a hilariously old-school website devoted to the Surf-Jet and other powered board contraptions. This at least the second bizarre watercraft I've spotted—I remember seeing a WetBike in a junk...
My name is Dan, and I'm a recovering Wikipediaholic. That's right—I was addicted to Wikipediahol. I first started making serious edits to the Wikipedia in June of 2004. I remember going to look up the Prague Orloj (which I had recently seen in a trip through Europe) and found that...
I mentioned yesterday that I had my retinas imaged to look for defects in the nerves, capillaries, or retinal surface of my two peepers. This was an optional part of my treatment and even though Microsoft's medical insurance company covers it (most company's don't) the nurse nevertheless asked if I...
I've always worried what the long-term consequences of staring into a terminal for more than an hour or two at a time. Surely, staring at approximately the same focal distance without much blinking is going to cause some sort of damage if it happens for years on end. And to...
Doing something complicated the first time is always exciting, interesting, and engaging. Doing the same thing the right way the second time is so much more....
Doing something complicated the first time is always exciting, interesting, and engaging. Doing the same thing the right way the second time is so much more....