Archive for the ‘Bookmarks’ Category

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New toy! New project!

Saturday, April 9th, 2016

I was out and about earlier today with my mom and my nephew: we stopped by Hobby Lobby because I was looking for something. I’ll be posting about that something later on, but while we were there, I found one of these and ended up getting a screaming deal on it with the 40% off coupon.

Which is great, but that looks like a manual control box, right? How do you control it with a PC? Lots of soldering and a custom circuit board?

Ah. Nope. They have a USB device interface for the OWI-535. Isn’t that nifty?

But wait! The included software only runs on a PC! How do you control it with a Mac, or a LINUX system?

Surprise! People have reverse-engineered the control protocol! For example, this guy! (I love that blog title, by the way.) It looks like most of the other control examples I’ve found all loop back to Vadim Zaliva’s work documenting the protocol for the OWI-535. (He’s also documented the control protocol for the OWI-007 here.)

And look! Here’s control code in Python. running on a Raspberry Pi! Isn’t that a clever cleaver!

We’ll see if I can get the arm together and working without breaking it. Bad news: I don’t have that much mechanical aptitude. Good news: they claim all you need is needle-nosed pliers, diagonal cutters, and a Phillips screwdriver. No soldering required, which is good. I could probably solder my way out of a paper bag if someone held a gun to my head, but I’ve never been what you could call “good”, or even “competent” at it…

(As a side note, I’ve been trying to get back to “Talkin’ GPS Blues“. Unfortunately, I also decided to upgrade Project e to Ubuntu 15.10…and Bluetooth apparently doesn’t work well on 15.10, at least as of when I completed the upgrade. So once I get Bluetooth working again, and have some more time, I intend to revisit GPS, this time with some skanky Perl, Python, and possibly even Java code. We’ll see.)

Posted in Bluetooth, Bookmarks, Geek, GPS, linux, Programming Languages, project_e, Python, Radio | 1 Comment »

1D20.

Thursday, December 24th, 2015

Speaking of Ross Thomas, I’ve been meaning to link to (and bookmark) Ethan Iverson’s “Ah, Treachery!” essay for a while now. There are a few things in it that I disagree with, but I think Iverson’s essay is generally perceptive about Thomas and his writing; I find myself referring to it periodically.

Young Joseph Wambaugh and the hobo, from the LAT.

Dave Barry’s year in review, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

An OPM statement plays down the seriousness of the data breach, stressing that “if anybody publishes any photos allegedly depicting an alleged Cabinet secretary with an alleged goat, those are fake,” further noting that “it was totally a consenting goat.”

For the record: NYT obit for Joe Jamail.

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Short random notes: September 24, 2015.

Thursday, September 24th, 2015

James Mee has his job back.

I feel sure I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find the post now. Mr. Mee was a deputy with the LA County Sheriff’s Office. He was fired because of his alleged involvement in a police chase that ended when the vehicle he was supposedly chasing crashed into a gas station.

At least, that was the claim. So why was he really fired? Well, Mr. Mee was also one of the officers who arrested Mel Gibson back in 2006.

Mee’s lawyers argued that sheriff’s managers falsely blamed Mee for leaking details of Gibson’s 2006 arrest and the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade to celebrity news site TMZ.com. Mee, his attorneys alleged, was repeatedly subjected to harassment and unfair discipline in the years that followed, culminating in his firing over the 2011 crash.

This one’s for Lawrence: Frank Gehry is working on a project to rehabilitate the Los Angeles River. This has some people upset.

(Obligatory. Plus, the video I’ve linked to before has been taken down, so call this a bookmark.)

Posted in Art, Bookmarks, California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Gehry, Law, TV | 1 Comment »

DEFCON 23 notes: August 12, 2015.

Wednesday, August 12th, 2015

More slides! More stuff!

Posted in Bluetooth, Bookmarks, DEFCON 23, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

The 4-Hour Suicide Watch.

Thursday, May 7th, 2015

My brother is a big fan of Tim “The 4-Hour Workweek” Ferriss. I haven’t read any of the Ferriss books: nothing personal, just haven’t gotten to them yet.

But this was linked from the Y Combinator Hacker News twitter, and deserves some linky love:

Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

Some pull quotes:

Given the purported jump in “suicidal gestures” at Princeton and its close cousins (Harvard appears to have 2x the national average for undergrad suicides), I hope the administration is taking things seriously. If nearly half of your student population reports feeling depressed, there might be systemic issues to fix.

Left unfixed, you’ll have more dead kids on your hands, guaranteed.

This.

It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to think that your entire life hinges on one thing you’ll barely remember 5-10 years later. That seemingly all-important thing could be a bad grade, getting into college, a relationship, a divorce, getting fired, or just a bunch of hecklers on the Internet.

This, too.

Posted in Bookmarks, Clippings | Comments Closed

This day in history.

Thursday, January 30th, 2014

Our great and good friend Borepatch has a post up about all the folks who died on January 30th, including Gandhi, Sir Everard Digby, and that guy who crossed the 47 Ronin.

Borepatch’s post, and an email from Chartwell Booksellers, reminded me: Winston Churchill died on January 24th, 1965, but his funeral was today er, on this date in 1965.

A couple of years ago, I read John Keegan’s Winston Churchill: A Life, and there was something in it that I found striking and moving:

Queen Elizabeth II attended his funeral.

I know that sounds like something you’d expect for Churchill, and I doubt there was any question about her going. But the royal family almost never attends the funeral of a commoner: they only go to funerals of other members of the royal family. I have this mental image of Elizabeth arguing with her people: “I’m going. I don’t care about tradition. He won the war, you…” Well, I doubt Elizabeth would say “assholes” but she might think it. I know it is fashionable to sniff at England and wonder what they need with the royal family, but it does seem like Elizabeth II is the class act of the bunch.

(And he got a state funeral, too. According to Keegan, the last commoner to get one of those was the Duke Of Wellington. In 1852.)

While I was working on this post, I found that the BBC has a nice archive devoted to remembering Churchill. I haven’t had time to go through it all yet, but I’m bookmarking it here.

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings, History | 2 Comments »

Making book.

Monday, October 21st, 2013

Not much going on today, so here’s a few links I found interesting.

  1. Jim Sherman at the HouChron‘s “Bookish” blog did a very nice tribute to George V. Higgins back in August. You may remember the late Mr. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle and other crime novels….

    No American novelist has ever mastered dialogue the way Higgins did. If anything, he may have had too fine an ear for the mainstream. I read Eddie Coyle when I was a Midwestern high school student, and I just didn’t get it. Then I spent 10 weeks in boot camp in the company of 20 or teenage boys from Southie and when I revisited the novel it made much more sense: Oh, that’s why he put that comma there! That’s why he murdered the verb tense deader than a stool pigeon! That’s the way those people talk!

  2. I don’t much like talking about religion, or my religious beliefs, here. But my brother forwarded me an article over the weekend that I’m going to make something of an exception for: “‘Mr. Spock goes to church’: How one Christian copes with Asperger’s syndrome“. I’m a little verklempt, so feel free to talk about this one in the comments.
  3. Not bookmark fodder, but I did want to point this one out: this year is the 100th anniversary of the introduction of Camel cigarettes, which inspires one LAT writer to invective. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I do smoke a very occasional cigar. But every time I read an article like this one, or see one of those TheTruth commercials, I’m tempted to start smoking just to spite these people.

    Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University and the author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.”

    “the case for abolition”? We’ve seen how well prohibition worked for alcohol. We see how well it works for marijuana. If you outlaw cigarettes, I promise you: the resulting chaos will make Prohibition and the War on (Some) Drugs look like a Sunday School picnic.

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

Bookity bookity bookity.

Tuesday, August 6th, 2013

Two more things that I wanted to bookmark:

Peteris Krumins’ “A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat“. Actually, I want to bookmark his entire site, as there’s a lot of good stuff there, including “Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know“.

Also: Michael Ossmann’s HackRF Kickstarter, which is fully funded and has 29 days to go. This is a project I’m really excited about and will probably end up backing. Short version: HackRF is a project to build a software defined radio that is about the size of a USB hard drive, runs off of USB bus power…and if you back the project (and if it ships, this being Kickstarter and all), the cost is around $300, which puts it into “Shut up and take my money” territory.

Posted in Bookmarks, linux, Radio | Comments Closed

More bookmarks.

Thursday, August 1st, 2013

Thanks to Joe D. for the SQL injection by automobile photo in the earlier post.

Something else I happened to stumble across, while reading a Stack Overflow thread (“We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup application when his last name is used as the search term (which happens to be quite often now).”). There’s a website devoted to preventing SQL injection.

Is that unusual? No. But the URL sent me into giggling fits. My hat is off to the folks behind this site.

Something else I’ve been meaning to link, and which Tom Ritter’s Twitter feed reminded me about: “Applied Cryptography Engineering“.

Applied Cryptography is a deservedly famous book that lies somewhere between survey, pop-sci advocacy, and almanac. It taught two generations of software developers everything they know about crypto. It’s literate, readable, and ambitious. What’s not to love?
Just this: as an instruction manual, Applied Cryptography is dreadful.

Applied Cryptography was an important book for me, and I don’t have the chops that would allow me to intelligently criticize Schneier or Thomas Ptacek. But even I have to admit that AC is almost twenty years old; that’s two or three lifetimes in cryptography. (Also, that makes me…f’ing old.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Geek | 1 Comment »

Bookmarks.

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

The camera that shot Che. And a bunch of other people, too.

I’ve been going to Precision Camera about once a week to poke around and drool over the used Leicas. One of these days…

Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask). My only complaint about this article is that the author failed to include the XKCD link required by Internet Law.

Posted in Bookmarks, Clippings, Geek, Photography | 2 Comments »

Random notes: June 10, 2013.

Monday, June 10th, 2013

LAT obit for Iain Banks.

As best as I can tell, there has been no mention of Banks’s death in the NYT yet.

At dinner Saturday night, Lawrence, Andrew, and I were talking about how bad the Marlins (and Astros) are. I remembered that someone on FARK posted a link to a site that provides updated win-loss projections for each MLB team, but I was unable to find that site in my history, on FARK, or in Google.

“DeWayne Mann” on FARK was kind enough to respond to my inquiry with three links, which I provide here for bookmarking purposes:

CoolStandings, which currently projects Miami at 106.9 losses and Houston at 103.1.

Baseball Prospectus, which has Miami at 102 losses and Houston at 99.5.

FanGraphs, which has Miami at 104 losses and Houston at 99.

(As Dewayne notes, all three sites use a more sophisticated model than (winning percentage * 162). Based only on that calculation, the Marlins project out to 115 losses, and the Astros to 106. For comparison purposes, the 1962 Mets lost 120 games and had a .250 winning percentage. The 2003 Detroit Tigers lost 119 games, and had a .265 winning percentage.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings, Loser, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 21, 2013.

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

Here’s your obit for Herbert Streicher, aka “Harry Reems”, the male star of “Deep Throat”: NYT. A/V Club.

Leaving alcohol, drugs, and pornography behind for good, Reems settled in Park City, Utah, where he got married, embraced Christianity, built a thriving real estate career, and—with the exception of interviews he did for the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, and a round of interviews to promote its release—he made a concerted effort to stay as far out of the public eye as possible.

Oh, look! New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is re-thinking his hastily passed and poorly thought out gun control measures! It couldn’t have anything to do with his declining popularity, could it?

The gun-control law, approved in January, banned the sale of magazines that hold more than seven rounds of ammunition. But, Mr. Cuomo said Wednesday, seven-round magazines are not widely manufactured. And, although the new gun law provided an exemption for the use of 10-round magazines at firing ranges and competitions, it did not provide a legal way for gun owners to purchase such magazines.
As a result, he said, he and legislative leaders were negotiating language that would continue to allow the sale of magazines holding up to 10 rounds, but still forbid New Yorkers from loading more than 7 rounds into those magazines.

But gun control works!

A 47-year-old psychiatric patient was beaten to death in a locked shower room at Interfaith Medical Center in central Brooklyn late on Tuesday, officials said, and another patient, a 20-year-old, has been charged with second-degree murder in the killing.

I have not had time to go through all of it yet, but the NYT special section on “Museums” looks interesting. Call this a bookmark.

Here’s the LAT‘s second day article on the Bell convictions.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the national recording registry…

(Also: The Ramones first album! “Einstein on the Beach”! “South Pacific”! “Sounds of Silence”! The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack?)

Posted in Bookmarks, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Stupid | Comments Closed

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