tech
stoat | October 26, 2010Or, more oddities in the Cyberwar stakes. I can't help thinking that the cyberwar stuff, much like conventional terrorism, is vastly overblown as a threat to national security, or indeed anything. A case in point is the normally very sensible Bruce Schneier with a short recommendation of a New Yorker piece about the crashing of a EP-3E Aries II in 2001 in China.
So, to recap: the pane is monitoring Chinese comms, crashes, and so is physcially in the hands of the Evil Hordes of Fu Manchu who naturally take it to pieces. Apparently this included operating system created and controlled by the N.…
stoat | October 16, 2010Nick Barnes has an excellent opinion piece in Nature. And the comments are good too. There is a comment-on-the-piece by Anthony Fejes which I think is less good: too much like the kind of people who put you off cycling by insisting you have to wear a cycle helmet or walk. And you should read Nick's follow up a CCC.
I've decided that I agree with Nick's overall argument: yes you should publish your code. Which means, everything that is yours, including the little fiddly bits. Even if no-one will understand them. Even if people will deliberately misunderstand them.
I have a number of quibbles…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2010
Apples in Stereo mastermind Robert Schneider demonstrates his latest technical combo: a vintage 80s synthesizer hooked up to a recently released EEG game controller, which allows him to change the pitch of the synth's output with his thoughts.
I particularly like the non-glitzy surroundings. The guy is sitting in shorts and t-shirt on a beat-up couch, unshaven and with his hair poking out in all directions, looking like a stoner and showing off his bizarre invention. It's very far from the Kraftwerk esthetic, yet some of the tech is decades later than Kraftwerk's.
Check out the latest Apples…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2010Reports Swedish Broadcasting, Dagens Eko:When two school girls in the 13-16 years age bracket found a lost key ring for their school's teacher break room, they had an idea. They bought simple audio surveillance equipment in a tech store, waited until everyone went home, and installed the bugging gear in the break room.
Their idea was to snoop on a grades conference planned for the following day, thereby to glean information that they might use to improve their grades.
The plan failed, as one of the girls happened to reveal it on Facebook.
Instead of secret information and raised grades, the…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2010I used to play a lot of computer games, and 12-y-o Junior loves them. His gaming experience is of course different from mine back in the day, not only because the games look much better now, but also because of on-line interactivity. There are a couple of developments that surprise me a great deal.
One is the Let's Play film clip. These are clips on video sharing sites where someone plays a computer game while commenting on it, and they're really popular with kids. You don't have to be extremely good at the game or record clips of hidden or hard-to-reach areas. You don't have to say anything…
stoat | July 29, 2010I have a funky new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. It lets me do kewl stuff like:
although you only get that after post-processing, of course. In fact I haven't even worked out how to make it work like a GPS when running, i.e. display lat/long or grid refs. Nor have I worked out how to persuade the stupid post-processing software to give me mph instead of mins/mile like all the hard-core runners want, pah. But the upload-from-watch (via the provided nipple clamp) to-web-and-graph is impressively smooth and painless.
You're fascinated - I know - so let me tell you that we did two laps: the…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2010
I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader: either old ones whose copyright has expired, or newly written ones with a Creative Commons licence. Austen, Doyle, Lovecraft, Twain, you name it! I can also buy copyrighted e-books and put them on my phone. The cost works out to about the same as if I mail-order a used paperback from the UK, the…
aardvarchaeology | July 7, 2010
A metal detector is very nice, particularly when there isn't a lot of aluminium in the ground. Archaeology cannot do without it. But what I really want now is a holographic radar instrument. Still in the prototype stage, this technology is being developed by Tim Bechtel of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and colleagues, who primarily have land-mine removal in mind. It will image underground metal objects in 3D. Gimme gimme gimme!
And oh, how I hope that my country's legislators will allow a responsible metal-detector hobby to develop here before holographic radar…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2010Using the @johndoe method to communicate over Twitter is a really stupid way to use the medium. Aren''t people aware that all their followers receive those tweets just as if they were normal ones? And aren't they aware that many of their followers will thus receive only half of a usually pretty pointless chat conversation? It's as if the newsreader on TV left his mike on and broadcast his lines in a water-cooler conversation about sports.
I think this behaviour is amazingly stupid. If I subscribe to a Twitter feed and discover that it's full of banal lines from one-on-one conversations, I…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2010
For me, the main drawback of switching to an Android phone was not having a physical keyboard any more. Typing on the touch screen keyboard is infuriatingly slow and error-prone, even if you use the word-suggestion feature. (It isn't very smart, offering word suggestions not in order of how frequent each word is in everyday text, but in alphabetical order.)
But now it seems I've found the solution, that allows me to type fast in English and a few other large languages. Swype is an input method where you write each word by drawing a continuous line on the soft keyboard from key to key. When…
stoat | June 8, 2010More boring links blogs stuff. But just for once I do actually have something else to say, so I'll try to clear this out asap.
* Do you need context to understand the CRU emails? Or can they be understood on their own? An analysis. No prizes for guessing the answer. But links to...
* The secret life of bugs which is a fun analysis of how much could you understand bugs from what was recorded about them? Answer, often not much. Mind you, some of the stuff in there is weird - how does The missing link to source code change-sets is one of the most problematic omissions. For the last bug of 70% of…
aardvarchaeology | May 25, 2010The National Heritage Board of Sweden has released a beta version of a location-aware heritage-data browser for Android. The name is Kringla Mobil, and it talks to the central mash-up database that collates information from museums and organisations all over the country. My Visby buddies Lars and Johan are driving forces in the project.
I just stepped out into my yard, pressed Kringla Mobil's map button and searched for gravfält, "prehistoric cemetery". Immediately I got a number of markers on the map: not all the cemeteries in the vicinity, but the ones for which the database contains some…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2010Facebook has turned up security a notch and effectively locked me out when I'm on the road.
I have hundreds of Fb contacts that I don't actually know and wouldn't recognise if I met them in the street. Mention their names to me and they ring no bell. This is partly because of this blog, partly because skeptics around the world like to have exotic Scandy contacts. Now, Facebook notes that somebody's trying to log onto my account from an unfamiliar location. Imagine what happens when it starts to show me pictures of random people from my contact list, with a selection of seven names each to…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2010It's been more than four years since the first time I blogged about how cool it is to have broadband on a train. But I still haven't gotten over it. Trainblogging again! The sun is shining and Södermanland zips past outside the window.
I'm on my way to Linköping to drop off finds at the County Museum and teach a class on Late Iron Age elite settlement in Ãstergötland. The finds drop-off is one of the loose threads that remain for me to tie up after my last book project. Backpack and a cardboard box full of goodies from Sättuna in Kaga and other great sites!
BTW, is anybody reading this in…
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2010
I recently switched from a 2008 smartphone running Windows Mobile to a Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica that runs the open-source operating system Android put out by Google. Here are some impressions after two weeks of use.
I really miss the old phone's hardware keyboard. Typing on the touch screen is slow and error-prone, especially since the Swedish layout has to cram in three extra keys. And for some reason the Swedish dictionary never makes any word suggestions. What's up with that?
Everything is so much prettier under Android than under the 2008 version of Windows Mobile.
The web browser…
aardvarchaeology | April 1, 2010Like Swedish Mail, many mail services worldwide, I believe, offer a service where you e-mail them a letter and a list of addresses and they do the paper mailing for you. But now Finnish Mail is trying something pretty badass: they're doing it the other way around to cut costs and CO2 emissions. Instead of delivering paper mail five days a week to the village of Andersböle-Anttila, they are opening all the mail, scanning it, sending it to the villagers by e-mail and then delivering the paper originals only twice a week. Participants opt in. Those without computers are given machines by…
stoat | February 24, 2010Google has signed me up to their "buzz", which seems to be like facebook but with fewer people and no silly games. This link might work, or it might not. Who knows. Is it any use? I don't know.
Which brings me on to wireless mice. I've had a lot of trouble with my wireless connection over the past couple of weeks, and very annoying it is too. Eventually I realised that this coincided with Miriam buying a wireless mouse. And sure enough, now I've turned the silly thing off things are much better. This seems really dumb: everyone is going to want to use both together. She should have got a…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2010
There was a lot more ice in the heat-pump box than I had thought, a 10 cm cake covering its floor, but getting rid of it proved easy. All I needed was a screwdriver and a small axe. The hot air gun wasn't much use.
I turned off the power feed, took the hood off the thing, removed the rotor and hacked away the ice, taking care not to bash the fine heat-exchange lamelles lining the walls. The ice was laminated from the many defrosting cycles that had built it up, and it fractured into large easily manageable chunks. After reassembling the box I hacked away most of the remaining ice on the…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2010This morning when I got my bike out of the yard to take Juniorette to school, I heard a loud clattering noise from the box-like outdoor part of our air source heat pump. At first I thought the ball bearing on the rotor had crapped out. But the guy who installed it explained over the phone that the problem was most likely not as severe as that.
A heat pump like ours dribbles condensation water through a spigot on the under side. It's been an unusually cold winter, and so the water has collected as ice on the ground beneath the box, building up layer by layer until it made contact with the…
stoat | February 3, 2010 A small excerpt from the true horror at The C Programming Language Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft:
Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.
(bonus points for spotting the error in Cthulhu).
blog postings devoted to it, not that this is.
Hat tip: Paul.