I don’t know if the world really needs another IPC mechanism, but there it is.
MS WCF (client) open-sourced
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Category Archives: tools
RMS is online
Richard Stallman finally figured out a way to get online that was ideologically acceptable.
…he now connects to websites from his own computer – via Tor and using a free software browser. Previously, he used a complicated workaround to more or less email webpages to himself. The announcement brought a surprised gasp and a round of applause from the 300-plus attendees.
“At one point, I used to believe that the Firefox trademark license was incompatible with free software, I found out I was mistaken – it does allow the redistribution of unmodified copies,” he said.
Microsoft RDCman
Using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.7, I can open 61 separate server consoles on a Dell Optiplex 390 with an i3 processor.
System performance outside of RDCman turns to treacle, but inside it the consoles are quite usable.
I had a bunch of PuTTY SSH windows open, and a fair number of tabs in firefox, too.
blackboard skillz
Blackboards are better than whiteboards. Even if they’re green blackboards.
How a lead-acid battery works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhIRD5YVNbs
lego bug racks
Technically tuned to torturing transfixed termites.
“We believe the insect specimen manipulators presented here are a valuable addition to any entomologist’s toolbox and that the use of any insect manipulator is in the interest of anyone dealing with valuable specimens as the actual handling of the specimen is reduced to a minimum during examination.”
Homeopathy as the least worst choice
Interesting thing about homeopathy, that I learned from visiting the Mary Baker Eddy Museum in the Boston Christian Science Reading Room: less than 200 years ago, the best medical treatment you could get was probably homeopathy. It was unlikely to outright kill you, and would keep you well hydrated. The next best treatment was almost certainly prayer (because it might have psychological benefits and at the very least it didn’t involve bleeding or the administration of poisons) followed by herbalism (which could definitely kill you, but might also heal you) followed by a dog’s breakfast of other therapies which mostly involved greatly increasing your chance of an untimely death in the name of healing.
Over time, the bits and pieces of things that actually worked (such as keeping patients hydrated, and various herbal remedies such as willow bark and etc.) became the basis of modern medicine, mostly through the efforts of snake-oil hucksters and patent medicine companies who found ways to profit from them. The profit-driven system has mostly worked rather well (despite numerous debacles like aspirin, thalidomide, Coley’s cancer cure, etc.) because you couldn’t make profit from dead patients (until the development of mass media campaigns, anyway).
Today the snake oil industry has metastasized into modern corporate medicine, which primarily exists to sell pills. But most of those pills actually do something, so it’s a huge step up from the days of homeopathy, when the last thing any sick person needed was any treatment that actually did something.
Today it’s popular for self-aggrandizing Internet commentators to hold up homeopathy as a “fake science” that they lump in with whatever other targets of opportunity they think will make them look scientific and clever, such as chiropractery if the pundit is left-wing, and “global warming” if s/he’s right-wing. And invariably these critics know almost nothing of the history of medicine, and they’ll usually characterize medicine as a “science” (or possibly a “Science”) rather than the praxis that it is. But to my mind, today’s corporate medicine is very much the same as the homeopathy of Mary Baker Eddy’s time – it’s the least worst choice.
Boarding Axes
No, this isn’t another link to “Oh my god, there’s an axe in my head“. It’s to the very interesting (and very narrowly focused) Boarding Axes in the Age of Sail website.
The boarding axe was a combat tool and weapon from the fighting age of sail and has become one of the rarest survivors from that period. Once a common implement found in large quantities on all armed sailing ships, it has almost, by virtue of its lowly status, become extinct. Even the major arms and armour museums […] can boast only a handful of boarding axes.
mousebox
I suppose this was inevitable.
Accurately named network distortion tool
“Comcast is a tool designed to simulate common network problems like latency, bandwidth restrictions, and dropped/reordered/corrupted packets.”
Antikythera mechanism on your wrist
Despite my well known obsession with the Antikythera device, I somehow didn’t notice Loz Blain’s excellent 2011 sildenafil samples Successful samples of generic viagra treatment: You always want a treatment that had been withered away for a long time. Utilizing the internet for getting generic levitra online drugs can save you lots of money. Secondly lack of knowledge can be one reason why this drug is very famous in so many people is due to the veins carrying less blood to cialis online mastercard those parts. Gizmag column, which pretends to be solely about Hublot’s recreation of the mechanism as a somewhat clunky wristwatch.
Inside the Instruments
German studio photographers Mierswa & Kluska shot these beautifully lit images from the inside of musical instruments for Bjoern Ewers and Mona Sibai as part of an advertising campaign for the chamber ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009.
SatNOGS wins Hackaday prize
Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.
Microsoft climbs aboard the WordPress bandwagon
If you were thinking to yourself “what my PHP-based content presentation system really needs is an expensive backend from a company that has historically done incredibly poorly with PHP” then Microsoft has got your number.
Android 5.0 is out
It’s got better support for filesystems and for SD cards, despite Google’s claim that file managers and removable storage are simply too confusing and difficult for their user base. Google’s been flooded with complaints about their rejection of SD cards (and Android tablets like the nVidia Shield that support SD cards are massively outselling Google’s offerings) so perhaps calling their customers clueless wasn’t such a great business move. I haven’t heard anything about the app permissions debacle, so I’m assuming that’s still horribly broken.
DIY Ground-based Ion Cannon
Hobbit’s netcat can be used to vomit forth network traffic as fast as your machine can generate it. We don’t need no steenkin’ LOIC!
Anyway, I needed to test a WAN pipe to see if Comcast was delivering the bandwidth we’re paying for – we’re supposed to have a 200 Mbps link to Boston.
[root@monster ~]# yes | nc -4 -u -v -v -n remotehost.boston.com 9
The yes command just screams “yes!” incessantly, like a teenage boy’s dream girlfriend. We pipe the output to netcat, and force it to use UDP and IPv4 to send all the yes traffic to a host in Boston. UDP port 9 is the “discard” service, of course, so the machine at the other end just throws the traffic away. We already constantly monitor all the routing nodes in the path so we can see and graph what happens to the packets in real time.
Turns out the host can generate 80Mbps, sustainable indefinitely. That goes into the 200Mbps Comcast pipe… and only 4Mbps comes out the other end! Thanks, netcat! Time to call Comcast!
Don’t do this if you aren’t ready to deal with the repercussions of completely smashing your network. Saturating interfaces, routers and pipes will severely impact normal business routines, and should be saved as a last resort.
Don’t answer the phone.
Courtesy + civility = emotional intelligence?
The problem with this video is that it restricts itself to business settings – in real life, it’s always difficult to ignore purposeful rudeness, whether you’re in a meeting or not. If someone is talking to you, and you do anything with a phone without first explaining why your phone is more important than what’s being said, you are being extremely discourteous.
My friend Pedro, who is on call at all times, invariably says, “Excuse me, hold on a moment, let me see if I have to take this call” and checks his screen – if the person calling is an important customer, he’ll say “I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call. I’ll make it as short as I can” and then after he gets off the phone he will apologize briefly but sincerely for the interruption.
These simple apologetics invariably waste less of Pedro’s time than his incoming call wasted of anyone else’s time, and cost him literally nothing. Nonetheless this small gesture of courtesy and respect, this trivial acknowledgement of an inconvenience, has a huge impact on how others see him and act towards him.
If you want others to treat you with courtesy and respect, you need to start by treating others that way. Answering your phone while another person is taking the time to talk or listen to you is purposeful rudeness. It’s ignorant and disrespectful, and it makes you look shallow and stupid.
Haban Sickle-Mo
Example of a small sickle-bar type mower, and why they are great for stream edges, under fences or treelines, and alongside roads. You can keep to the safe ground and reach out to one side.
The bad thing about them is that they are pretty much giant scissors, so they are tough to sharpen, and just as dangerous to wildlife, kids and misplaced property as any other mowing system. I think snakes would argue that they are even more dangerous, because they are relatively quiet.
“Man Ass”
Unix-derived operating systems have a tradition of making commands short and easily typed regardless of social conventions.
So, in order to consult the manual page for the Autonomous System Scanner, you would type “man ass” at the command line. People involved with AS work would not find this remarkably odd or offensive – we’ve already got jobs to do, that don’t involve complaining about other people’s sense of propriety.
However, if one creates a site that automatically generates HTML-formatted web pages from the man pages of the Ubuntu V13.04 linux distribution, popularly called Raring Ringtail, one ends up hosting a page describing “raring man ass”.
The Internet being what it is, such a page may have unexpected effects on your google analytics results…
Square D car charger after two months
Back in June I blogged installing a Square D Model EV230WS level 2 electric vehicle charging station.
The new charger is connected by 8 gauge copper wire with a NEMA 14-50 plug and receptacle, a Square D QO series safety switch, and a 40 amp breaker. The actual current draw of the charging station is 30 amps at 240 VAC, so I am still well within code for the 100 amp subpanel in the barn, and having the 14-50 plug means we can potentially support other 240 mobile loads like Teslas, large RVs, plasma cutters, and portable welders.
As promised, the system charges our plug-in Prius in roughly 1.5 hours, and the Nissan Leaf in 5. It’s very simple, no unnecessary bells or whistles, you just plug in and walk away. There’s no need for anything more complex, because the cars themselves both have externally visible charge indicators (the Prius just tells you if it’s done charging or not, but the Leaf gives you a rough indication of charging progress with three top-of-the-dash LEDs) and both cars can give you detailed charts and graphs of charging status and history from their on-board computer systems.
We’ve had a total of one unusual incident – last week the system lit its red “alarm” LED when the Leaf was plugged in. Since I installed it with a safety switch, it was easily rebooted, which cleared the alarm and restored normal function.
Last night a nearby lightning strike spiked our power, causing computers to reboot and making the HVAC system noisily unhappy, but the charger (which was plugged into the Prius at the time) didn’t seem to care much, it just rebooted itself and carried on normally.
All in all, we are quite pleased with everything about the charger except the price. All electric vehicle charging stations are ridiculously expensive right now, though, and at $600 the Square D EV230WS was the most cost-effective charger available without building our own.
Building a spring-pole lathe
Master craftsman Peter Follansbee builds a sweet medieval-style lathe.
I’ve seen this done with a live, rooted sapling instead of the cut green pole Peter’s using.