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Archive for the 'Geek' Category

Internet and Satellite Phones at Burning Man

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

Yes, part of the idea of going to Burning Man is to escape all the stuff back at home, but the reality is that if something goes horribly wrong back at work, people could loose their jobs – so I carried some satcom gear just to check in once a day. Since there is little [...]

Optimizing MySQL Distinct Queries with Groups

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Here’s some fun technical stuff. If you don’t program SQL, this will make no sense to you. Just move along. I wanted to put this out for the Google to find so it benefits other programmers. I have some medium sized tables that I’m doing duplicate removal on and I tried a variety of techniques [...]

DefCon 15 Review

Monday, August 6th, 2007

While larger, the crowd has really changed. DefCon, overall, was much more subdued than in years past. To some degree, this was a necessity for DefCon to continue as some aspects were a out of control. For sure, money came and went from the scene, but it was still striking how the cDc’s presentation went from being nearly a rock concert to “hi, I’m with Cult of the Dead Cow. Here’s our presentation.”

There were also more women. Some of this is attributed us guys getting older and bringing significant others, but there were also quite a few women attending the show on their own. More power to you all. Bring your friends.

How much ink is in an inkjet cartridge?

Friday, July 27th, 2007

I have an Epson R300 Inkjet I use for printing CD labels and just replaced one of the color cartridges. You can feel a difference in the mass of a used one and new one. I weighed them just for fun and found that you use 11 grams of ink – 39 grams new, 28 [...]

Where’s My Wireless Laptop (and My Flying Car)?

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

So much for “wireless.” This is the cluster of cables stuck to the side of my iBook. Note that one of them has another splitter on it and that the power cable is on the other side. Since I’m out of USB ports, I’m hot swapping between devices. I’m too cheap to buy a hub. [...]

XM Radio Hack is an Urban Myth

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

It has been reported that XM Radios have an internal bit for being subscribed or not, that when you unsubscribe they transmit a signal to your radio for a period of time, and that if your radio is off for the weeks that they transmit your code that your radio will continue to work.

Email Backlog Graphs

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

This is what my email inbox has looked like for the last several months. It’s interesting to see how, no matter how hard I tried at cleaning out the box, there is always a “hum” going on of messages that just came in, messages that go with current issues at work, and messages I just don’t want to throw out or know where to file. It’s normal for me to get 50-75 emails per day, so having that many in the box doesn’t seem that odd to me.

WAMP Security Tips

Monday, August 14th, 2006

I know a bunch of people who are using WAMP, an Apache, MySQL, PHP pre-compiled package for Windows. It’s a very good product as it is kind of challenging to install all of these services together on Windows, but it does leave several things in the default configuration and is therefore not very secure. Here [...]

A Peek Inside My Head

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

Here is a page with about 200 news articles from my RSS reader. These are articles that have accumulated over the last year or so that I thought were neat enough to not delete. So, if you’ve ever wondered what kinds of things catch my attention, here’s a good sample.

I Watched a Space Shuttle Launch

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

I went to Cape Canaveral with a few friends. We figure there are only a few more shuttle launches left and the timing worked out well where we could take off a few days and be able to wait it out of there we any delays. As it turned out, there were several, but we [...]

                  

 
     
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