Bathsheba Grossman makes fantastic sculptures by printing in 3D with metal.
I wish I had the spare cash to spring for one of these. Though, the “Mini” models are somewhat affordable (less than $100).
I found about about the artist from Make Magazine‘s video podcast.
For the same perverse reason people think it’s a good idea to put a chicken inside of a duck inside of turkey, I gave Parallels Workstation a try. Parallels Workstation allows you to run multiple operating systems from within a single host operating system. Here’s an insane shot of my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Linux (the new Dapper Drake Flight 6 bleeding edge version) simultaneously with Windows XP; and, for extra credit, Karate Champ in MacMame:
Click for full gory detail.
I get a kick out of the fact that both XP and Ubuntu boot faster in the virtual machines on my Macbook Pro than I’ve ever seen them boot on real hardware.
Hmmm, here’s more potential to notch up the nerdiness level: Apple ][ emulators. Though summoning dead ancestors with such tools seems vaguely… unnatural.
Posted in computing, crackbaby, meaningless, tech
On Monday my new Macbook Pro arrived. Three days earlier it was in a factory in Shanghai! Why can’t everyone be as efficient as FedEx?
When I was in 2nd grade, there was a computer in our class and the teacher would let me stay after class to type in programs from a magazine. One of the programs I typed in made some kind of cool graphics display when I finally finished typing. Well, cool at the time, anyway. I was sold onto computers ever since. Picking up on my interest, my parents got me an Apple //c for my birthday which ranks up there as one of the most influential things they did for me.
I kept typing away. While the cool kids were outside playing, I was busy typing in programs from Nibble magazine, which is probably what created my appreciation for programming. Makes me wonder how such an interest is conveyed to today’s kids.
Sure, Lode Runner LOOKS colorful, but all I had on my Apple was green on black! The kids that had Commodore 64s had it better, since the games were superior.
So, I’ve now come full circle with my return to Apple. And like a million other dorks, I’ve posted geeky pictures of my Macbook on my blog.
The cool styrofoam all the Mac dorks keep talking about.
The little square box contains all the user manuals and CDs. Very compact and well designed. And the little remote is cute. You use it to control Front Row, a media center for OS X.
Behold the shiny X. Your brain shall be imprinted and uploaded for review by the cult of Steve.
The machine is very fast. From poweron to desktop took all of some number of seconds that I didn’t count.
Since I am such a greedy bastard I have three laptops now. One runs XP, the other runs Ubuntu Linux, and now I’ve got the Macbook. A buffet of the best and worst of each world.
Overall, I’m enjoying the Macbook Pro quite a bit. I’m still trying to get used to the Apple way of doing things. They certainly put a lot of effort into the look-and-feel of every application. I hope that the attention to detail extends beyond the “ooh, shiny” aspect of the machine.
I’ve been trying very hard to avoid regurgitating content from other blogs but I couldn’t help myself in this case: a post on boingboing about a fart-powered missile launcher:
To operate the assembly, the player who may be fully clothed places the inlet of the tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the gas in the chamber and fire the missile into space.
So since I have no real direction in life, I thought I’d contribute to their post by extracting the original patent’s images from the US Patent Office’s website, whose document image system is very cumbersome to deal with. Highlights:
It must be fun to work at the patent office sometimes.
Here are the full page extracts of the original patent:
Posted in funny, meaningless, tech
That look is Bill Gates’ reaction to a hilarious dig by the inventor of control-alt-delete, who at a gathering at the twentieth anniversary of the IBM PC said this:
I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill (Gates) made it famous.
Here is a great video of this moment.
In a recent TWIT episode, Kevin Mitnick described a new service called SpoofCard that gives you some interesting new abilities when you make phone calls, all by using a special kind of calling card:
How can I change my voice?
SpoofCard offers the ability to select a Male or Female voice when making a call. The feature works in real-time and allows the caller to speak in a normal tone while the person on the other end will hear the changed voice.
What are the advantages of Caller ID spoofing?
Caller ID spoofing gives business professionals the ability to manipulate their identity to their choosing and stay anonymous. Caller ID spoofing is also valuable in defeating popular telephone services such as “*57 Call Trace”, “*69 Last Call Return”, “Anonymous Call Rejection” and “Detailed Billing”. Private Investigators will find Caller ID spoofing valuable for pretext calls.
Now, we can all be one of the Jerky Boys!
Posted in tech
