I recently bought a Nook Color with the main purpose of hacking it to become a $250 Android Honeycomb tablet. Before I talk about the hack, I’ll just talk about the unmodified device.
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Feb 102011
Oct 262010
October 23rd 2010. Word of a potential zombie outbreak in downtown Denver. According to eyeheartbrains.com, it will be a controlled outbreak. As the Denver chapter president of the Zombie Research Society, I saw the perfect opportunity to gather information to support our cause. My notes and photo gallery can be found after the video:
Jun 232010
Zombies have the unusual ability to tell us apart from them. Some have theorized that this is due to odor, others suggest that zombie skin changes colors and reflects light differently. However, there may be a better answer. Human brains emit alpha, beta and gamma waves all the time. These signals range from 8-100 hz and are capable of interfering with radio transmissions (and vice-versa). This could explain why stress seems to interfere with phone calls and why we can sense the general emotion in a large room of people. This would also explain why monks (and anyone else who has trained themselves to quiet their minds) can usually tell when someone enters the room, even when they don’t make a sound. Continue reading »
Open-Source programs have historically been able to do everything, though not necessarily very well or easily. This has been especially true of multimedia. Creating and editing pictures, audio, and video have historically been the greatest weakness of open-source software, but now that hole is closing rapidly. I’ll run down the list of goodness for you: Continue reading »
Jun 172010
All right, I have figured out how to do a wiki within WordPress. I will celebrate by giving you the great wiki on Things Not To Do Naked, a work-in-progress book. Anyone can register and be a part of this informative project, so have fun!
I have given this a great deal of thought over the years, and my conclusion is that the statement “everything is relative” is by definition false. To make an absolute statement that denies the possibility of absolute statements is an oxymoron. However, I realize this is not necessarily the question asked, so I will divert to how I justify absolute truth.
People often hold that there can be no absolute truth because every experience is subjective. I do not believe that these viewpoints are in opposition. We can all witness the same event and come away with a totally different, yet accurate, understanding of whatever it was that we saw. Why? Simply because the thing that was observed did not change, only the interpretation of what was witnessed changed. Continue reading »
Jun 042010
I work for a video email marketing company. It’s pretty cool. We’re a smallish startup trying to stay on the cutting edge of video technology. I have been tasked with figuring out HTML5 video, and all that’s required to get it into emails. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Kaltura, our current video provider, had some really promising announcements about updating its platform to support HTML5 video. All the relevant pages they had on it are now inaccessible. I hope someone in the community knows what’s up.
I got plain HTML5 video working on Thunderbird, Opera Mail, and Apple Mail. Thunderbird has a bug that keeps the controls from showing up, so I filed a bug report. I’ll be testing Outlook 2003/2007/2010 video support once I get a virtual machine set up with Win7/IE9.
Gmail scrubs the tags in the web client. I posted to their Labs user group asking for a remedy.
When I encountered mail clients that didn’t support the video tags, the Flash fallback was scrubbed along with the offending video tag. I’ll have to come up with a clever workaround this.
HTML5 video is really cool, and I hope to get it up and running inside email soon.
Ultimate Backup Script for Macs
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May 182010
So, I have been working on the best possible way to back up my Mac. I’ve tried Time Machine, but didn’t like how all the files end up as a hardlinked blob (in layman’s terms, the files could become unusable at the slightest problem). So what is a geek to do? Fix it of course!
I wrote a command-line script that does the job better than Time Machine or any other backup client. It’s literally push-button and does an amazing job backing up your stuff. It even goes faster the more often you use it, thanks to the magic of rsync. Here’s what you have to do to use it: Continue reading »
Mar 232010
Being bored in my geology class, I left to get an 8-shot coffee and chased it with 16 oz of caffeinated tea. From that, I was tweaking pretty hard. While I was tweaking, I ended up developing an astrophysics problem that I had. This is the sort of thing that happens when I have too much caffeine: Continue reading »
