Month: August 2006

Top 10 ways to destroy the earth

LiveScience.com has a guide for all you future evil genuises who are trying to figure out the best way to destroy the earth. And since I know I have some vil geniuses reading the site, I’ll help you out and get some of the details up here. I can clue you in up front that there is no mention of sharks nor frikkin’ laser beams.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.

So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do not think this will be easy.

Continue reading “Top 10 ways to destroy the earth”

What to pack for college

(via LifeHacker)

In case any of you are leaving for college soon, here is a list of some of the things you need to take that you would otherwise forget or didn’t know you needed (along with links to other lists of stuff you need to take).

7. If you’re a drinker… Girl? No Alcohol. Guy? Bring Alcohol!
If you’re a girl, celebrate. It will probably be 4 years before you pay for alcohol ever again. Guys, we don’t have it so good.

[tags]College packing list[/tags]

How the first color cartoons were made

Sometimes, we need to look back at the past and learn our history.  I don’t really know why, but I hear that if we don’t, we’ll repeat it.  Not, mind you, that I’d have problems repeating some of my past.  But then, there are things from my past that I’d rather not repeat – mononucleosis ranks high on the I’d rather not repeat that part of my past list.  Although I guess that’s not what people mean.  But I digress…

So, let’s look at the information the January 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine had to tell us about cartooning and how these magical mystical marvels of modern movement are made (yeah, baby – high five for decent alliteration there).

mm-xlg_color_cartoon_crop.jpg

After years of a successful black-and-white career, animated cartoons are due to take on the additional appeal of color, thanks to the perfection of a process which is explained in detail in this article.

THE first of 13 one-reel animated cartoon comedies in color have just been completed in Hollywood, marking the beginning of a new era in this popular form of entertainment which has already made Mickey Mouse and his cohorts the highest paid actors in the movie world, although they draw no salaries. Ted Eshbaugh, a Boston artist, is the man who has at last succeeded in producing animateds in color. Making the colored comics duplicates the manufacture of black-white comics excepting the intricate application of color to the characters and transferring that color to the double negative that creeps through the recording camera a frame at a time. When you consider that 15,000 separate drawings on celluloid must be made by a staff of artists for a single reeler, composed of 16,000 frames, and that each figure or group of figures on each celluloid will display possibly six color combinations, you get some idea of the intricacy and tediousness of the process.

It’s a rather lengthy article, and in a rare showing of restraint on my part, I’ll pass on copying a large part of it and filling up my page with things you have to skip over if you aren’t interested in seeing.  Instead, head over to the Modern Mechanix web site if you want to view the complete article and image.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, How color cartoons are made[/tags]

Illuminate your wallet

(via LifeHacker)
Got a little spare time and a desire to better see your wallet’s contents at night?  It’s time to mod that sucker and put some night-lighting in.

I first got exposed to the glorious field of illuminating wallets when shooting Gear Live’s The Bleeding Edge ( http://www.bleedingedgetv.com/ ), a weekly video show. They had been sent the Walit ( http://www.lazyboneuk.com/store/pro240.html ), an electroluminescent glowing wallet, to review. I was excited at the idea – I had personally never thought of a glowing wallet and was eager to see how it worked.

I was, however, completely disappointed. The Walit was terrible. It was dim, the batteries took up too much space, and it had a flimsy clip to turn the light on and off.

. . .

led-wallet.jpg

Parts list:

  • A leather wallet
  • At least four small surface mount LEDs (Search eBay for “white smt leds” or salvage them from an old cell phone)
  • Two colors of thin, flexible wire (I used wire wrapping wire)
  • Two CR1616 watch batteries
  • A small amount of sheet brass, or something to make the battery holder out of :
  • A 1/8 watt 100k-ohm resistor (though anything betweek 10k and 1 megohm should work)
  • A generic PNP transistor
  • A small tactile snapdome button

Now go, mod, and come back with pictures.

[tags]Wallet mods, Light your wallet, Night-light for money[/tags]

Cool Tool – Fluke VoltAlert

(via Cool Tools)

The Fluke VoltAlert is a non-conductive device which beeps in presence of an energized conductor. As noted on the Cool Tools web site, there are other manufacturers of similar devices – with the Fluke, you’re getting a known quality provider, which is why this is the specific tool recommended. Some details from Amazon:

  • Quickly locate the hot, neutral and ground terminals in any receptacle
  • Just touch the tip to a control wire, conductor or outlet
  • Made of injection molded PVC & ABS that’s high-impact & non-flammable
  • Detects line voltage from 90VAC – 600VAC

Priced at $22.95 at Amazon. This product is actually provded by an Amazon partner, so is not eligible for free standard shipping nor Amazon Prime shipping prices.

[tags]Cool Tools, Fluke VoltAlert, Fluke[/tags]

The robots, they do all the work now

I know we all dream of the future when the robots do all the work (and prior to the robot uprising in which they cleanse the earth of us miserable puny humans, of course) and we get to sit on the porch, sipping lemonade, chatting amicably with our neighbors, and just generally enjoying the bounties of the mechanical workers we command.  But would it interest you to know that we’ve already passed that time?  Yes, we had robots doing the work, and we flat missed it.

You don’t believe me, do you?  Well here, let me prove it to you.

mm-lrg_robot_plows.jpg

ROBOT PLOWS WHILE FARMER RESTS
While its owner sits comfortably on his porch, a new farm tractor operated by radio control plows his field for him. Radio impulses governing the tractor’s movements are supplied by an automatic radio transmitter, and are picked up by an antenna on the tractor. A receiving set starts the tractor’s engine, works the throttle and controls the steering. The new robot, exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair, is an improved model developed after earlier experiments.

See?  I told you.  This happened all the way back in September 1934, according to Popular Science magazine (thanks as always to the Modern Mechanix web site for  providing this delightful look back on the world as it was).

[tags]Modern Mechanix, Popular Science, Robots do the work, The robots before the uprising in which they crush all the puny humans[/tags]

How to get robbed

Well, if you’re going to be ballsy enough to steal a laptop in front of several employees, this looks to be the way to do it.

At 3:30pm today, I asked one of the other guys at work to setup a new machine we’d had delivered, he goes out to do it, and noticed that one of the laptops we have on display is missing, which he thinks is odd, because if anyone was going to sell one they would have sold one of the ones we have out the back, so he comes and asks me if I had sold it, or lent it to anyone, yadda yadda. We search the shop, workshop and our store, and can’t find it anywhere, so we resort to the video camera footage.

So we’re searching through the footage, rewinding hour by hour, at 2pm, it’s not there, at 1pm, it’s not there, at 12pm, it’s not there, but at 11am, it bloody is there! So we watch from there on in. We have a lady that works out in the shop, mainly receipting stock into our POS system, sales, accounts, banking, that sort of thing, and shes helping a couple of people with a hire purchase agreement, when this old dude, probably early 50s, walks in with a large coat on. I go out to serve him.

. . .

I go back out to the workshop, and think nothing of it. He walks around the shop a bit more, looks out the back to where he can see our security monitor, so he can see exactly what we’re recording, and then heads over to one of the laptops. He folds the lid down, then looks up at the counter where there’s still the couple and our retail lady are. He gets in between the line of view from those three and the laptop. He picks it up with one hand, walks away with it a bit, does a kinda swing around motion, and then slips it into his jacket, grabs his cellphone out of his pocket, and pretends to talk on it as he walks out of the shop!

So this video is all over the net now, and hopefully someone will know who this guy is and they’ll get the laptop back soon. The kicker for the thief is that this is a brand-new laptop with no battery. He didn’t get the charger, and because of a higher power drain and a new plug, the older HP laptop transformers don’t work, nor do current generic transformers. The laptop won’t work for this guy until he gets a battery and a transformer, and HP has put an alert out for any orders of batteries and/or transformers, and warned all their retail shops to do the same.

[tags]Laptop thief[/tags]

Your Blackberry can expose your company’s soft underbelly

(via Engadget)
That would be the internal company network, by the way.  Discussed at DefCon 14 was some information on the newfound attack via Blackberry.

Jesse D’Aguanno, a consultant with Praetorian Global, has developed a hacking program that exploits the trust relationship between a Blackberry and a company’s internal server to hijack a connection to the network. Because the data tunnel between the Blackberry and the server is encrypted, intrusion detection systems at the perimeter of the network won’t detect the attack.

The technique is successful, D’Aguanno says, because most companies aren’t equipped to detect someone trying to deliver an exploit from inside the network. It also works because few companies view the Blackberry as a plausible attack vector.

Continue reading “Your Blackberry can expose your company’s soft underbelly”