Destroying the Earth

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Found this interesting article at Sam’s Archive, where Sam works through a set of methods for destroying Earth:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy
the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next
nuclear war or
cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities
of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last.

He then goes on to describe a series of possible solutions to the
problem, giving a feasibility rating and time estimates on
implementation. Rather silly but also rather fun.

Ties in rather well on my small article on Impact Calculation.

Pentax *ist DS: First impression

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I never became really happy with my Nikon 8800 (loved the zoom and the Vibration Reduction, but it was also slow and had to much noise in the images), so I sold it and got a Pentax *ist DS D-SLR instead. My first impression is very positive.

I got the camera Friday evening and I had to use it Saturday for a wedding. That didn’t really leave me any time to get to know it, so I mostly let it do it’s own thing in auto mode, occasionally turning of the flash.

I took around 600 pictures and a no time did it handle unfavorably.
Always ready to take another picture and fast autofocus being the two high point. The final results where stunning. I’ll add some test pictures to this entry later.
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OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta logo

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The OpenOffice.org page has gone to a new design and while the main product is the 2.0 beta, they are using Seagull Egg logo…. guess who took that picture, yes! I did! Just move your mouse cursor over the image and it will popup a small message saying this! I’m especially proud about this as I’ve been using OpenOffice.org for a long time (it’s a replacement for Office) and it feels good to be able to give something back.

PocketPC – Newsreaders

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Usenet is kind of under appriciated these days, but it’s usenet that’s hidden behind Google Groups and it’s a world of information if you find the right group to read. A good news reader is important to the usenet reading experience. Nice clear text, easy navigation is the thing that makes or break a news reader as reading news should be the place you spend the most time, but things like ease of usage in setting it up and downloading is also important. If you’re in groups with a lot of noise, things like filters and killfiles are important. I’ve searched for all the newsreaders I could find for the PocketPC and this is what I found. Alternatives that I haven’t tested: Kawara (can’t post and has no thread view) and the old freeware version of Qusnetsofts reader.
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Yahoo stock to RSS converter

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NO LONGER RUNNING!

Update June 2010: I haven’t used this for a while and as you probably have noticed it’s no longer working. It did it’s thing, while there was not such service, but now at least Google financial provides some of the same services. Anyway, the source is still here, if you want to run it…

Inspired by Xanadb’ RSS Stock Ticker (which in turn was inspired by the now defunct Yahoo Finance RSS), I decided to try to make my own. I wanted to add a few things, mainly the ability to calculate loss/win for each stock and a total loss/win for all stocks.

The data for the feed is gotten from finance.yahoo.com

and you need the stock symbols that they use to build up a URL string that you can feed to your RSS program. But here’s an example:

http://tc.dk/stock.php?symbols=msft:100:20+csco:200:20.9

This will give you two rss items with the current stock price of Microsoft (msft) and Cisco (csco). The total value of a 100 Microsoft stocks is calculated and the win/loss if you paid 20us$ for them is calculated. The same is done for 200 Cisco stocks brought at 20.90us$.
Here’s an example of how Thunderbird will show the data:
stock rss view
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Dell Axim x50v – part 1

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I’ve been a Palm man for a long time. I got a PalmPilot around 1997 and I’ve worked my way through a Palm Vx to my current Palm Tungsten T3. I’ve been happy with all of them. But two weeks ago my T3 died. So I send it of the the shop, and got back a message saying that it would be about four weeks until I would get it back. So I went out and got a Pocket PC – a Microsoft Windows Mobile based machine from Dell – the x50v, which is pretty much top of the line among PDAs. It’s sports Wifi, bluetooth, vga screen, CF and SD card slots, so it sounds cool, but of cause even the coolest hardware is useless if the software sucks.

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Mike’s Madness

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I found these old (from around 1990) texts called Mike’s Madness. They are in my humble opinion some of the funnies things ever written. Crude and far from political correct, but lots of fun. If jokes about Australians, Italians, Germans, Star Trek, Apple Computersm, nazies, beer and about smoking to much pot is your thing, or you think that they may be, take a look a this.

Clarkes third law is Rubbish

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I’ve been thinking about Clarke’s third law – Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -, lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s wrong or at least badly worded. I propose this instead:

For any sufficiently high level of ignorance, technology will be indistinguishable from magic

(henceforth know at TC first law 😉

The thing is that Clarke viewed technology from the point of view of the educated man who takes an interest in technology (a.k.a. himself) and he kind of forgets that other kind of people exists, when he formulates his third law. But even so I think that it may be rubbish.

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Model Toby

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The German Science magazine: Morgenwelt has used a couple of my pictures for their web-magazine.

They’ve used a picture of my son, Tobias, for one article and one of an old lady, for another article. Kind of cool if I have to say it my self.

The pictures where published using a Creative Commons license, saying that the pictures on my gallery can be used by anybody as long as it’s non-commercial and that they give attribution to me. So I’m not making any money of this, but the simple fact that something I created, was useful for somebody else, simply warms my heart.

Nikon Coolpix 8800

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I went at got my self one of these babies yesterday.

I haven’t really had the time yet, to play much with it.

The short days, here makes it kind of hard to get of from work, while there’s still a bit of light left. But I’ve managed to take a couple of pictures. Absolutely nothing special, just testing.

But I do think that this picture came out quite nice. I’ll have to test a lot of stuff on it in the near future to get a good
feel for it. Needs to find the noise level of the ISO setting, the usefulness of the Noise Reduction system and the Vibration Reduction system.