Technology
gregladen | January 19, 2015Just a note to celebrate the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, who died on this day, 2000, at the age of 85.
Lamarr had a very interesting career that involved major acting accomplishments, milestone acting events, and direct involvement in the invention of the technology that now forms the basis of WiFi, BlueTooth and other similar modes of communication between electronic devices.
The story of Lemarr's life is complicated and understanding that story is made even more difficult because of the way it has been told in the past, with multiple versions of multiple events told by biographers (…
illconsidered | November 13, 2014Humankind has touched the surface of the solar system's most alien of objects.
Image taken from NAVCAM top 10 at 10 km – 10.
There are no words...
illconsidered | November 12, 2014Dear Readers,
Find below an interesting press release I may as well share verbatim:
The rapidly melting ice sheets on the coast of West Antarctica are a potential major contributor to rising ocean levels worldwide. Although warm water near the coast is thought to be the main factor causing the ice to melt, the process by which this water ends up near the cold continent is not well understood.
Using robotic ocean gliders, Caltech researchers have now found that swirling ocean eddies, similar to atmospheric storms, play an important role in transporting these warm waters to the Antarctic coast—…
gregladen | October 24, 2014NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor
See: Ubuntu Unleashed
Here is a list of things to do after you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn.
There is some discussion of whether or not you should upgraded to 14.10 here, but the short version is, for most people an upgrade from 14.04 is not necessary but not a bad idea, and an upgrade from any earlier version is a very good idea. Mostly, though, you should just upgrade.
One could ask the question, should you be installing Ubuntu with Unity. You have to like Unity. I personally like to have a wider range…
gregladen | October 14, 2014I might.
This is a preliminary look, based just on the web site and some tweets with the developer, of the imp (all lower case), a small computer somewhere in technology and power, perhaps, between a Raspberry pi (which is mainly a hobbiest toy) and the Intel Nuk (which is sort of a non-Mac Mac Mini). It is called by its makers "The Open Source Computer: Made for consumers." It is a Linux-installed device, as is your smart phone and, well, the entire Internet. So the technology is well tested at that level.
The imp team describes it this way:
imp is a small, yet powerful computer designed…
gregladen | October 4, 2014The Ubuntu 14.10 Release October 23, 2014
Ubuntu 14.10 will be released shortly and I know you are chomping at the bit and want to know all about it.
There is some important news, for some, and there is some exciting news for others, and there is some boring news, and frankly, some bad news.
Before diving into the shallow pool of Ubuntu 14.10 (shallow in a good way) I want to go over some other ground first. I want to address this question:
"I have installed Linux and I don't like the default desktop. How do I change that without ruining stuff?"
If you are a long time Linux user you know…
gregladen | September 10, 2014How much will the Internet Slowdown slow down my Internet?
It won't. That is not what it is for or what it does even though that is exactly what it says it does. The name is more of an attention getter, and it is apparently working.
Who is slowing down the internet?
Nobody (see above) but it is these guyz here.
Why are they slowing down the internet.
They are not slowing down the Internet, please try to pay attention.
This is a protest against big business trying to take over the free and open Ineternet and control it for their own nefarious purposes.
Can I slow down the Internet too?…
gregladen | September 6, 2014You can now see what happens when you tweet something. Twitter has a web page that tells you how many "impressions" a tweet has, how many "Engagements" (any kind of click on your tweet) and, for convenience, the percentage of tweets with which your tweeps engaged. There are also summary graphs for engagement rate, link clicks, and retweets. There is also a graph that shows your daily frequency of impressions from your entire twitter feed and a few helpful summary statements such as your current day's impressions in relation to your 28 day average.
If you click on a tweet, you get a graph…
gregladen | September 4, 2014Twitter is about to ruin itself.
I'm convinced that the people who made and run both Facebook and Twitter don't have a clue as to what Facebook and Twitter are for. And by "for" I mean how the users use them. I know, I know, if you are not paying for the product than you are the product. I get it. But it is also true that for a service to be successful it should meet a need or two, and knowing what those needs are is ultimately linked to success or failure. It seems like on line services like Facebook and Twitter are too big to go away or fail. And that is exactly how we humans tend to…
gregladen | September 2, 2014In order to install a new operating system on a computer, you can make a bootable DVD that includes the software to install the new system, put it in the DVD/CD reader, and reboot your computer. If all goes well your computer will boot off the DVD/CD reader and then you follow the install process and there you go.
But sometimes this doesn't work. The most common reason is that your computer is not configured to boot from the DVD/CD reader first (if it has a bootable disk in it). You have to go into bios and change the "boot order" so "boot from DVD" is on top of the list, above "hard drive…
gregladen | August 29, 2014UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads.
So, I'm no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody!
Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with…
gregladen | August 27, 2014I've designed an outline, which can be used as a table of contents, for a computer book about anything. In this case, about foo bar.
Preface
Forward
Introduction
Overview
What is foo bar?
Before you start
A brief history of foo bar
A longer history of foo bar
Why you want to use foo bar
Why you might not want to use foo bar
Alternatives to foo bar
Obtaining foo bar
Installing foo bar
Getting help on foo bar
Getting help on reading this book about foo bar
Alliterative methods of installing foo bar
Installing foo bar from source code
Installing foo bar from alternate binaries
Installing foo…
carlyo | August 19, 2014The USA Science & Engineering Festival is proud to announce the return of Lockheed Martin as its 2016 Founding and Presenting Host and expanded outreach activities to engage our nation's youth in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
"The USA Science & Engineering Festival provides an essential introduction and gateway to the exciting world of STEM," said Dr. Ray O. Johnson, Lockheed Martin senior vice president and chief technology officer. "It's an exhilarating event not only for the students, but also for the parents, teachers, and professionals like me to get hands-on…
dr. dolittle | August 18, 2014Researchers at DARPA are using geckos to create biologically inspired methods of scaling vertical walls.
Check out this video demonstration of "Geckskin":
gregladen | July 19, 2014We are celebrating an anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon. Here, I simply post a memo from William Safire, speech writer, to H. R. Halderman, felon, providing text to be read by Richard Nixon, World's Worst President (of the 20th century), related to that Moon Landing:
gregladen | July 18, 2014Cardboard, some velcro, a rubber band, a couple of magnets, some other stuff, and your smart phone:
gregladen | July 7, 2014When I first became a regular user of Linux, several years ago, I tried out different text editors and quickly discovered that emacs was my best choice. By coincidence, about that time I ran into an old emacs manual written by Richard Stallman in the dollar section of a used booksore. In that edition, near the end of the book, was a section on “Mail Amusements.” This documented the command “M-x spook” which adds “a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that suggest you are discussing something subversive.” (I note that the…
illconsidered | May 5, 2014In the video below Gavin Schmidt gives a "TED Talk" on climate models, taking us from an overview of their construction to the resulting emergent processes and their skill at reproducing much more than a global average temperature trend.
Gavin is an excellent communicator and a true hero in humanity's fight against itself over the impending and tragic disruption of our global ecosystem services. Well worth the 12 or so minutes to watch!
carlyo | April 29, 2014It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of what was accomplished not only this past weekend, but also the entire two years leading up to the 3rd USA Science & Engineering Festival. The official numbers from the Washington D.C. Convention Center reveal that over 325,000 attendees visited our Nation's Capital to partake in the largest celebration of STEM or as we have dubbed it- the Superbowl of STEM! In addition to our Expo Finale weekend, we reached over 180,000 students and teachers with our STEM initiative programs including our Nifty Fifty and X-STEM School Programs.
Numbers of course…
gregladen | April 24, 2014MOST CURRENT INFORMATION WILL BE FOUND HERE: Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor
See: Books on Linux and Ubuntu
NOTE: This may not be the blog post you are looking for. If you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 and want to tweak that, GO HERE.
Continue on for 14.04.
Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr has just been released, and I’m sure you are about to install it. I’ve put together a few ideas for what to do after installation in order to make it work better for you. You’ll find that below. First, a bit of ranty…