|
 |
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 |
Cell Towers - Dan Bricklin (inventor of VisiCalc) has a great blog, where he has a comprehensive review of the Treo 180 phone and also talks about cell phone towers. I didn't know that they hid cell towers by making them look like trees (he even has photos), and I didn't know some of the things that he wrote about the Treo, even though I've owned one for about 4 months. It's nice to have smart guys like Dan posting to the web. [Ernie the Attorney]
5:55:04 PM 
|
|
Sir Francis Bacon. "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
5:53:52 PM
|
|
My Kit Porsche.
 Parking Spots (found via Jason Kottke) is an interesting photographic site where you take a picture of a toy car in such a way as to make it appear the site of a real car. Since I didn't have a matchbox car, I decided to use one of the Lego cars I had sitting around.
So there I am, outside, holding the car out at arms length and taking photos of it against the other cars in the parking lot at the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere and getting some rather strange looks from the kids running around while I attempt to work my way around focal length problems.
It's not easy getting keeping an object in the near foreground and an object in the far background both in focus—unless you have can have a high f/stop (an f/stop is a ratio of the diameter of the apature to the focal length and a stop is defined as the iris (or apature) opening which will allow twice or half the light as the previous or next stop) you are going to have a problem with the focus, and in order to get a small opening, you either need a lot of light or a long exposure. But the problem with a long exposure is that any movement of the camera will generate ghost images or an exremely blurry picture.
  But we are now in the world of digital photography where we can now compensate fairly easily this problem. After reviewing the pictures I had (most with slightly blurry backgrounds) I decided to take two pictures—one with the toy car (and a blurry background) and one without the toy car (of just the background, but a sharper background) and do some post processing later—namely, cutting my hand with the car out of the first photo and pasting it into the second photo, with some cropping (since I didn't bother cutting my entire hand out).
The results weren't bad—a little jagged along the thumb side of my hand, but I'm still getting used to doing the image cut-n-paste thing. I then sent the resulting image off to Parking Spots so it should show up in a day or so.
Update later today
The entry I made bounced back since their mailbox had overfloweth. I'll have to submit the entry later … [The Boston Diaries]
5:50:44 PM
|
|
RSS-ifying Auctions. ebaytools - eBay2RSS
"' nf0's Life: "I just hacked together this little perl script. Its called eBayTools . It will take a list of items, search ebay, and create an RSS feed with the results. Ideally you can set it up as a daily cron job to find your favorite goodies.'
Cool! Looks like Josh has been pretty prolific these past couple of days. Can't wait to get a chance to try this little, but useful script." [...useless miscellany]
Which begs the question, why can't eBay provide RSS feeds for individual items? Of course, I wouldn't subscribe to any of them until they fix their misguided privacy policies. [The Shifted Librarian]
5:47:59 PM
|
|
CodeCon WiFi caravan runs high-speed mobile mesh. Hackers on the way to San Francisco's CodeCon conference from Portland will recreate last year's WiFi caravan, in which the passengers in several moving cars use WiFi links to create a moving high-speed network for chat, music-sharing, and other applications. This year, they've got their hardware supplier to play along and issue a press-release.
VIA Technologies, Inc. a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that the Janus Wireless Project will use VIA EPIA M-Series Mini-ITX mainboards to form the hardware platform behind their WiFi Caravan's zany multi-car, 14-hour journey from Portland to San Francisco on 21st February 2003, running a full service wireless network between vehicles, with public online participation through specified access points.
Broadcasting music, playing games, chatting, downloading and uploading files, the WiFi Caravan aims to show how a 802.11 (WiFi) wireless network can be maintained between several high speed moving vehicles using the existing wireless access node infrastructure, much of which has been abandoned by defunct telecommunications companies in and around the Portland area. Link Discuss (via Hack the Planet) [Boing Boing Blog]
5:42:53 PM
|
|
Self-dissimilarity in word-frequency identifies hot news. A researcher at Cornell has developed a new technique for automatically identifying emerging trends online -- by measuring average word-distribution-frequencies, he can spot trendy new words as they pop out of the blogosphere.
In a simple historical test of the technique, Kleinberg analysed all the annual State of the Union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790. He found that particular word "bursts" could indeed be linked to important events at the time the speeches were delivered.
In the years that immediately followed the American Revolution, for example, sudden bursts in the use of words such as "militia", "British" and "savages" are found.
From 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen. And from 1949 to 1959 "atomic" is the word with the greatest "burstiness". Later in the 20th century, words such as "Vietnam", "Soviet", "communist" and "Afghanistan" increase sharply in usage. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
5:41:46 PM
|
|
Self-motivated Learners. Fascinating article in Silicon.com, as the father of a 13-year-old who has designed and managed her own US-based schooling from London describes the experience and draws from it lessons for everyone interested in propagating learning as a lifelong discipline. But in the end, we're back to the intrinsic need for self-motivated learners if all this is going to work. More and more, I think the role of public schooling in the US is to force-feed some rudimentary level of essential knowledge -- how to read road signs and cigarette labels, understand a credit card statement, fill out a minimum-wage job application -- and a dose of current political doctrine into people regardless of their motivation. It's a sort of self-preservation thing for society. To be anything more than that requires a lot of effort and motivation on the part of the student. This really is the challenge with all learning, and not many students have this kind of motivation:
[...] Only the story doesn't end there. Far from it. My daughter is nothing if not resourceful. She took to the net and soon found tutors who specialise in preparing UK kids for US schooling and vice versa. Soon she was in a position to sign up for tutors twice a week and then do the rest of her schooling via distance learning, over the net. [...] Few students show this kind of determination. Fewer still are the parents who know how to support and manage it. But it is something we must understand, and must learn to engender it in our students if we are to ever see the true benefits of extended learning tools.
Will elearning's day ever come?. E-learning - will its day ever come? Quote: "E-learning can work but it is not about the technology, which is now relatively cheap and available... What is important is providers understanding their customer base, making tools simple to use and having self-motivated users.[elearnspace blog] [b.cognosco]
5:36:13 PM
|
|
Location-aware recommendation system. Mobile computing adds a new, mostly unexplored dimension to data mining: the user's position is now a relevant information, and recommendation systems, i.e. services that select and rank a small number of links that are probably of interest to the user, have the opportunity to take location into account. The use oflocation discovery systems, that automatically detect the device location, relieve the user from the burden of explicitly inserting that information when formulating a query. In this paper, a mobility-aware recommendation system that uses the location of the user to filter recommended links is proposed. To avoid the potential problems and costs caused by systems where the bindings between locations and resources are inserted by hand, a new middleware layer, the location broker, collects a historic database where user locations and links explored in the past are mined to develop models relating resources to their spatial usage pattern. [Smart Mobs]
5:34:39 PM
|
|
Man scared by government, media will suffocate in house before surrendering to Saddam
On the "Perhaps this is going too far" front: Paul West of Winstead, Conn., wrapped his house in plastic sheeting and duct tape after government warnings blasted through the media scared the wits out of him. Now, I ask you, do you think the media's doing us any good when this is the result of its unreflective regurgitation of idiotic advice from the Department of Homeland Security? I think not.
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]
5:25:39 PM
|
|
Wi All Fi in a Yellow Subcompact: Cory Doctorow and others form the Wi-Fi caravan from Portland to San Francisco on Feb. 21 with the technical assistance of VIA Technologies. A multi-car, high-speed, mobile Wi-Fi network. Pull over and set a spell boys, and spin us some bandwidth. [80211b News]
5:12:29 PM
|
|
Wi-Fi phones are coming (requires paid Wall St. Journal registration): My college classmate Kevin Delaney writes from Cannes, Frances, for the Wall Street Journal about the coming wave of cell phones that will work over Wi-Fi networks all within about 12 months. Motorola Inc. expects to unveil a cellphone by the end of next year....Texas Instruments Inc., which supplies an estimated 50% of cellphone chips, says it is releasing at least two cellphone reference designs...within the next few months that would allow its manufacturer clients to make dual-mode devices. Chip makers Intel Corp. and Philips Semiconductors are pushing forward along similar paths....Meanwhile, Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. in December unveiled a hand-held computer with built-in Wi-Fi and cellular capabilities that also enables users to make voice calls....At the 3GSM World Congress here [in Cannes] this week, Hewlett-Packard Co. is showing one of its iPaq hand-held computers connected to a cellphone seamlessly switching back and forth from Wi-Fi and cellular networks...Nokia Corp. also sells a dual Wi-Fi and cellular card to be used in laptops....Nokia, Palm Inc., Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, and Qualcomm Inc. all say they are looking into Wi-Fi phones and either don't have exact plans yet or won't reveal more until they announce specific products. [80211b News]
5:11:53 PM
|
|
© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
|
|
|
