Hobbies

Build a cheap, solid-state A/V switch

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Now here is a great hardware hack. Build a cheap (about $1 per input) A/V switch with as many inputs as you like.

The link comes from Hack A Day, a great hardware hacking site.

I’m going to have to build one of these.

Although I can already think of some hacks to improve it. They are using on-off push buttons, so you have to turn off each input to switch to another. With some latches or flip-flops you should be able to use momentary push buttons.

Also a copper perf board of some sort would clean up the wiring quite a bit.

Gee, with all the spare time I have…

Hobbies

Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

PZ Myers points out this list of “Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years”

I’m not sure I agree with all these titles being on the list, and I’m sure I could come up with more personal favorites, but it’s a good starter list in general.

Following PZ’s and Tikistich’s lead, I have marked the ones that I have read. (Quite a few of them.)

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Bold = I’ve read ’em
Italic = I read the first three chapters and now they’re in a box somewhere

Politics

I will dance in the fucking street…

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

If it actually comes to pass that Alberto Gonzales gets canned.

I don’t think it will happen, but it sure if good to see them finally catching some heat for all the bull shitting around they have been doing with the constitution.

Let me paste some quotes in here that make me feel good:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Slapped even by GOP allies, the Bush administration is beating an abrupt retreat on eight federal prosecutors it fired and then publicly pilloried.

Just hours after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales dismissed the hubbub as an “overblown personnel matter,” a Republican senator Thursday mused that Gonzales might soon suffer the same fate as the canned U.S. attorneys.

Oh man, I so hope…

Gone were the department’s biting assertions that the prosecutors were a bunch of “disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress.”

And the department no longer tried to shrug off the uproar as “an overblown personnel matter,” as Gonzales had written in an opinion piece published Thursday in USA Today.

Agency officials also ceased describing majority Democrats as lawmakers who would “would rather play politics” than deal with facts.

Oh yeah, time to start back peddling…

Life

A post about being a “Nice Guy”

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

There is a wonderful post over at Pandagon about being a “Nice Guy“.

It’s well thought out, well written and has plenty of food for thought about the interactions between men and women.

This archetype isn’t helpful to anyone. It’s obviously not helpful to women, since it’s a two-dimensional and non-agency role, trapped by their gender into destructively desiring the “bad boy” and ignoring the tender mercies of the Nice Guy. It’s not helpful to Nice Guys, because it serves to validate both their self-pitying and their attitude towards women. And it certainly doesn’t help the “assholes”, because they always die in a motorcycle wreck at the end of the second act.

And the way to escape the Nice Guy trap is, like almost everything else in life, psychosexual. It’s very obvious when you meet someone who hasn’t had the right challenges to their worldview, because their psychosexuality is absolutely either/or. Either nice girls don’t, or they only do with you. (Non-nice guy misogynists maintain a sexual duality, too, only it’s more like and/and: Nice girls don’t, so you’re a slut.)

But as you mature psychosexually, you realize there’s a Third Way: Nice girls do whatever the fuck they wanna do, like men. That the society hasn’t caught up to this doesn’t mean that it’s not true, and when you embrace that fact, it’s like the clouds part. First, you slide an important part of fully-humanizing women into place. The phrase “My sexuality is my own” is gender-neutral, and the sooner a man understands that, the sooner he moves HIMSELF closer to being fully human.

Second – and being still someone whats-in-it-for-me about the whole thing, this was the one that first hooked me in – you realize something about yourself. “Ohh! The reason I haven’t been getting laid isn’t because women don’t like sex that much, and it isn’t that they only like sex with assholes! It’s because I haven’t been bothering to ask!!!” Our sexuality is our own, too, which means that it’s no one else’s responsibility to take care of it for us. If we’re looking for partners, we have to learn how to fit our sexuality in with that of someone else.

I like to think that I’m a “Nice Guy”, but this article made me really think about what that means. And neatly lays out some of the stuff that happened to me (and probably plenty of others) in High School and beyond.

I actually got dumped by one girlfriend because I was “too nice”. I’m still not sure what that was about.

WWW

I Like Big Butts!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

This is hilarious.

Apparently Jonathan Coulton did a folksy version of Sir Mixalot’s Baby Got Back. That in itself is a funny thing, but someone else took Jonathan’s version and married it to the original video. You can watch it here:

As if that’s not funny enough, Mike Hightower made a Gilbert and Sullivan version of the song and then created a video using scenes from the movie The Pirates of Penzance! Watch that version here:

Security

CYA Security

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Bruce Schneier has an excellent column on “Cover Your Ass” security, which is pretty much all the airline and homeland security BS.

Since 9/11, we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective. In short: much of our country’s counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.

…

Airplane security seems to forever be looking backwards. Pre-9/11, it was bombs, guns, and knives. Then it was small blades and box cutters. Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane, and suddenly we all have to take off our shoes. And after last summer’s liquid plot, we’re stuck with a series of nonsensical bans on liquids and gels.

Once you think about this in terms of CYA, it starts to make sense. The TSA wants to be sure that if there’s another airplane terrorist attack, it’s not held responsible for letting it slip through. One year ago, no one could blame the TSA for not detecting liquids. But since everything seems obvious in hindsight, it’s basic job preservation to defend against what the terrorists tried last time.

Hobbies

The Wood Whisperer

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The Wood Whisperer is Marc Spagnuolo, a Gen-X wood worker who has a weekly(?) podcast on wood working.

It’s pretty amusing, but I wonder how he can afford all that nice equipment in his garage. 🙂

I searched the archives and am working my way forward from episode 1 (there are 11 currently.)

There is also some other useful information on the site. I think this might go into my daily read list.