Last post?

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This might be the last post from here. I’m having all sorts of troubles with comment spammers, ddos attacks on our VPS, port scans and probes. It’s all become too much, and it bogs down the system so it becomes so frustrating to work with. Doing this, running my own server, blogs, wikis, email and so on has been sorta fun. But I think it’s time I moved on from that. This may resurface on tublr or something, if I feel like it.

This blog (as well as the others I’ve been running) has never really developed any sort of audience, and certainly not generated any sort of interest, community, or even communication. So it’s not really doing much of anything anyway.

If you are a reader, of any stripe, post a comment, give me some feedback via the contact form, or send me an email. It’d be good to hear from you; let me know what direction if any I should go in.

This item seems quite essential for outdoor gear…

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Running through a little article at NatGeo about must have gear for outdoor adventuring, this was the last item on the list, and I just thought, “Oh, Yeeaaahhh”. :)

“There are caffeine addictions and then there are passionate expressions of personal commitment to the elixir that is coffee. No matter where you draw the line between the two, the Handpresso Wild Hybrid is going to need to be in your kit. The portable espresso machine works just like a bike pump to create the perfect amount of pressure: Pour hot water into its small chamber, add espresso grounds or ESE pods, press the button, and … dark, liquid goodness comes out. It even produces a skim of crema, that delightfully savory brown foam.”

Handpresso Wild Hybrid Espresso Machine

via Gear of the Year Spring/Summer 2013 – National Geographic.

Found at Auction: The Unseen Photographs of a Legend that Never Was | Messy Nessy Chic Messy Nessy Chic

Gallery

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This gallery contains 5 photos.

This is a most amazing piece, written up by Messy Nessy Chic about unknown Chicago photographer Vivien Maier: Picture this: quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to … Continue reading →

Patton Oswalt says it

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We Outnumber You

Patton Oswalt · 206,929 like this

9 hours ago ·

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I’ve had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

via Patton Oswalt’s Facebook.

Dangerous things

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Someone linked me to this article about a very dangerous substance, chlorine trifluoride which will even set sand on fire!

From Sand Won't Save You This Time. In the Pipeline:

Sand Won’t Save You This Time.

I’ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:

”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Sound advice, indeed. I’ll be lacing mine up if anyone tries to bring the stuff into my lab.

Very important date in computer history.

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On this day, in 1943, the ENIAC project was begun.

ENIAC was the first electronic general-purpose computer. Built initially for the military to calculate artillery balistics, the first application was actually simulations for the atomic bomb.

ENIAC Programmers were women:

Sixty years ago, six young women programmed the world’s first all-electronic computer, the ENIAC. Their ballistics program used hundreds of wires and 3000 switches. Never introduced, they never became a part of history. Forty years later, Kathy Kleiman was told that the women in pictures with ENIAC (1946) were “Refrigerator Ladies,” models posed in front of the machine.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The ENIAC Programmers worked tirelessly to make programming easier for all. They created the first sort routine, software application and instruction set, and classes in programming. Their work dramatically altered computing in the 1940s and 1950s. They paved the path to the modern software industry.

Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor

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Okay, so this is probably one of the coolest components coming along for Web 3.0:

Firepad, an open source collaborative text editor.

The implementation shown of just the editor is a little goofy considering you have anyone and everyone who wants to be editing on it. I suspect it’s turned off.

However, Socrates.io is a collaborative Markdown editor and shows results of edits in web real time, allowing multiple people (whomever has the link) to be editing the same document simultaneously. Really very, very awesome.