Archive for February, 2006
Repairing a Scratched CD
Monday, February 20th, 2006
You can buy one of those expensive CD-repair kits, or you can polish away the scratch with toothpaste.
Stone Skipping
Sunday, February 19th, 2006I remember skipping stones as a kid, typically getting about 3-5 skips and occasionally reaching 10 or so. Kurt Steiner was participating in a stone-skipping competition and had the toss of a lifetime. The judges determined it was a total of 34 skips (and how they came up with that number I’ll never know—it looks like the stone is sliding across the water). Subsequent analysis of the slow-motion video showed the actual number of skips to be 40, which put Steiner in the Guinness Book of World Records. The site includes videos of the toss, at both regular speed and slow motion.
A Wood-Powered Automobile
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006
Yes, it’s a wood-powered Yugo. This story has been picked up by Jalopnik and appears to be legitimate. Apparently the gases produced by the (incomplete) combustion of wood are as flammable as gasoline vapor. And in Serbia, wood is much cheaper than gas. Despite the fact that it’s old technology, I still wonder how he managed to come up with the idea in the first place.
Controversial Pictures of Mohammad
Monday, February 13th, 2006
Here are the 12 cartoon pictures of Mohammad that are causing so much controversy. Given the reaction, I was expecting something much worse.
A Whiskey PC
Friday, February 10th, 2006Given the amount of time I spend surfing the internet, I see a lot of interesting and unusual case mods. But this one is original enough to really get my attention—it’s a working computer (motherboard, hard drive, and power supply) inside a 1.5-liter whiskey bottle.
And What Have *Your* Kids Done Lately?
Thursday, February 9th, 2006Ms. Sierra Stiles, age 8, was credited with the first bear kill in Maryland in the limited October hunting season, downing a 211-pounder from 50 yards away with her .243-caliber rifle. (She had won one of the lottery-awarded permits and then aced the safety test.) And Aidan Gold, age 8, of Bothell, Wash., recently climbed 20,300-foot Indian Peak in the Himalayas with his dad, adding to his previous climbs in the Cascades and the Alps. Aidan said the last part of the Indian Peak climb (a 45-degree stretch of rock and ice) was “the (hardest) 3,000 feet I’ve ever done.”
Thanks to Leon Stankowski for this article.
Every Codec You Could Ever Want
Wednesday, February 8th, 2006
I used to have problems playing video clips on my computer. Every so often I’d get a video file in a format that wasn’t recognized, or the audio track would not sync up with the video. I’d try it with different players: Quicktime, Real, Windows Media, VLC—all to no avail. It turned out to be a problem with codecs. If I didn’t have the right codec installed, it didn’t matter which player I used. (“Codecs?” you ask, “What are codecs?” Essentially they are plugins for media players that allow them to understand various formats. More info here.) Enter the K-Lite Codec Pack, which contains every known codec. Since I’ve installed K-Lite, I haven’t had any problems playing various media formats.
Note that the “official” site requires you to register with a pay service, but the codec pack is available for free at the link above.
The Future of Cameras
Monday, February 6th, 2006
Apparently we are at the end of an era for cameras and picture-taking—but I think the author’s vision of the future is still mired in the old paradigm.
