Illusory Follies

Giving my fuel economy in rods per hogheads.

Thankfully Google does the conversion for you!

Here’s something I didn’t know until recently: Pharmaceutical companies rely heavily on horseshoe crab blood to ensure that their products are bacteria free.

Here’s some other interesting things I learned:

1) Their blood is pale yellow or white and turns blue when exposed to air.

2) A single crab can be worth $2,500 over its lifetime for periodic blood extraction.

3) Although kind of freaky looking, they’re completely harmless to humans.

4) Horseshoe crabs possess the rare ability to regrow lost limbs.

5) Although not yet an endangered creature, horseshoe crab populations are declining.

Here’s the Wikipedia article, a neat article on the medical uses, and a nice general information site.

Well, the high-def video format war is over. Blu-ray is the winner. With Toshiba and now Microsoft pulling out from supporting HD-DVD, we can finally feel at ease buying a video player. Interestingly, the DAY of the announcement from Toshiba (February 19) I got an email offering me a $89 HD-DVD player with 7 free titles! Someone’s triyng to clear some stock… I’m glad to see the format resolved and looking forward to my Blu-ray purchase (coming soon!).

Anyone out there reading this purchased a Blu-ray player yet? If so, any details — recommendations? I’m considering getting a Playstation 3 and using the built-in Blu-ray player on that. We’ll see though. Currently the electronic focus at our house is on my wife’s brand new, high-tech, sewing/embroidery machine. It’s pretty spiffy and can create some high-def embroidery patterns with ease!

Sorry about the comments bug… When I moved my website just a few days ago I failed to update one thing so the link to make comments was working. No wonder it was quiet.

Well, my wife is thinking about starting up a business… There’s definitely a market and the concept makes sense to me. In the past, she had sold craft items (specifically faux sealing wax) but had been somewhat limited since she was essentially just buying in bulk and repackaging for individual sales. Not many other people were selling assorted sticks in small quantities so there was a small market. However, it’s a somewhat unusual item and it was hard since margins were so low. There were other sellers and since most of the labor was making a post on eBay with the item, it was hard to justify very much markup.

The new concept is better… Diapers, nursing accessories, and other stuff that babies excrete gross stuff on! Yes, that’s right. It’s apparently quite the thing. In addition to making them, you can also embroider and customize them! This is all very new to me, but at the same time the results are impressive. In my opinion, one of the good things about this is that it takes a professional (i.e. expensive) embroidery machine to do a good job on this. Because of this, there’s at least a somewhat high-entry into the market. We’ve now invested in that and hope to have some success.

The next step (and the really fun step) is to make a website to sell these items on. Something fairly secure and “check-out” friendly but still with a personal, small-shop feel.

I think a good name would be “Ye Olde Smelle Diaper” but the wife has other ideas… Your name ideas here! My wife promises to spend as much time considering the name that you suggest as she considered the name I suggested.

Hmm… well this is kind of a blow for the security departments that have been relying on this. My “work” (notice the parentheses) laptop has whole disk encryption and it’s terrible. For some reason it usually (like 4 out of 5 times) does not ask me for my password anymore (and it really does seem random) and it takes noticeably longer to do anything on the machine (which is why I barely use it and didn’t even take it with me this trip). Now it’s revealed that it apparently doesn’t even really protect anything!

So much for “corporate security”.

I like the idea of widgets in OS X and the way Dashboard works. However, other than the calculator I don’t find myself using them very much. But I finally found a Dashboard widget that really is handy. It’s a tool that lets you track packages from a variety of places (Amazon, UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc.). You enter the tracking tag a nice little widget is created. It will change status and will also integrate with Growl to give you notifications (so you don’t have to always look at Dashboard to notice a change).

Here’s a screenshot.

And a link to the author’s (very nice) website. Any widgets that any of my readers use and find useful?

I’ve been looking for a multi-function (print, scan, copy, fax) printer for the last few months. I’ve been really disappointed with what I’ve found.

What I want to be able to do is the following:

• Print documents from any modern operating system across the network
• Scan documents/pictures from an auto-document feeder or a flatbed and in some way have this data end up on whatever system on the network I want
• Copy documents/pictures by standing at the printer unit itself
• Receive faxes and send faxes from anywhere on the network

I know that there are problems with some of these — specifically Scanning and Faxing. I see multiple issues with these:

1. Storage (where does the scanned or faxed document get stored physically?)
2. Notification (even if a fax is stored, how does a user know when it arrives?)
3. Configuration (the above should ideally be accomplished without configuring anything on the end-systems)

I see a solution but I’ve not found a sub $1000 printer that accomplishes it. Some of the high-end “counter-top”-sized systems (that run $10,000 and above) have something similar but are usually way overblown.

• Storage would be provided by flash memory (something as simple as 1-16GB Compact Flash card).
  • Sharing of this storage would be accomplished by using a Samba server running on an embedded Linux kernel (similar to the sort of functionality that currently exists on home routers).
  • Samba shares would be exposed to Linux, Mac, and Windows systems by using something like Avahi (or whatever the Linux version of ZeroConf is that works best at the time). Bonjour could be used on the client end if you’re running Apple to easily see these auto-configured shares but it would have to be installed specially on Windows clients.
• Notification could be accomplished via email. If a simple SMTP setup is configured once on the printer unit itself, it could automatically route emails to a specific user, multiple users, or different groups depending on the fax number used or other variables. There are many other alternatives using things like the XMPP or even SMS for notification.
• Configuration — as mentioned this would work like magic on a Mac and slightly less magically (and unfortunately much less beautifully) on a Windows PC. Any system on the network could access recently scanned or faxed documents or perhaps be only restricted by a username/password (heck — even tie it into an LDAP server if you’ve get centralized directory services). Basically, this largely gets rid of the need for client software other than just the printer driver itself. In reality, I’m not clear why we even need a specialized print driver when a web interface (again, hosted on the device) could likely provide any custom features (software-based maintenance, looking at the queue, etc.)

So why isn’t it out there?

You’ve seen Ron Paul’s support. Now there’s a fund-raising “money bomb” for the Republican Party (which allows you to donate to McCain, Romney, or Huckabee). It’s at http://www.february7.org/. Here’s the dazzling results as of 6:44am PST: