Some visual entertainment after the jump…
Reason I Hate My Commute #156
Driving home tonight (around 5:40 or so) from Sunriver on the newly constructed northbound lanes (which are very nice), I came about three feet from clobbering a gigantic bull elk (who had an enormous rack of antlers) who decided to skip across the highway in the dark. My car is little and weighs about 42 pounds and would have easily been totaled had I not slammed on my brakes and swerved at the last second.
What’s funny (and sad at the same time) is that the area where the near-miss occurred was less than 100 yards (at most) from the underpass on the northbound lanes that was built specifically for wildlife to use to avoid going across the road (it’s not on the map, but it’s there). Needless to say, Mr. Elk didn’t get the memo to use the safe(r) passage.
Reading Material
- Autopsy of a Pentium III (I still have several of that exact processor in servers around here — mostly firewall/routing boxes running pfsense).
- Ask joins Jeeves in retirement, leaves search engine space.
- Anti-pollution efforts in Chinese city are too effective for city to afford.
- Anybody who knows me knows I used to be a hardcore college media junkie, even have contributed to a book on the topic, so I always like to see what the big boys are using to manage their sites.
- A map that’s bound to offend everybody.
- Speaking of maps, what if the largest countries had the biggest populations?
- Opera holds the Web’s most valuable secret.
- Great way to visualize how a regex expression works.
- What the U.S. can learn from the Dutch about teen sex.
- Quote of the day: “Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” (Plato)
- Handy commit message generator.
- After the repair guys at Geek Squad finally get me my phone back (has been two months now), I’m probably going to try to install Android on my Touch Pro.
- I may or may not have linked to this before, but I couldn’t remember: MakeMKV is a simple program to make MKV files from DVD and Blu-ray disks.
- Think you can fix the nation’s finances? Have fun.
- That “missle” off the California coast that nobody could explain? It was a plane.
- Interesting service and device that allows you to take credit card payments on your iPhone or Android.
- Among other things that your cell phone might be able to do: Diagnose STDs
- 10 Free Drupal Themes for Small Business.
- Awesome Fonstacks is a quick and simple way to create a font bundle with ready-to-go CSS code.
- Fake Science is for when the facts are too confusing.
Good Thing This Had Subtitles
As I couldn’t understand a word they said:
Time Killers For The Day
Nothing like being stuck at the office on a Sunday (and I know there are a few of you out there) and wanting to kill some time.
- All We Need Is Brain is a too-short little Zombie Puzzler game, but still quite fun.
- Brain Waves will either make you feel really stupid or really smart.
- Gravitee Wars is like Worms in outer space.
- This game flat-out sucks with a touchpad, but Avoider is still pretty dang fun. It’s in Japanese, but the game is simple: Keep the little angry dude from grabbing your cursor.
They Crapped Their Pants So We Don’t Have To
I cannot imagine looking up and seeing this and not being scared to death. Yet they still moved on, which I can’t say that I would’ve done. Those were brave folks. That being said, I think I’d be even more frightened if I saw this.
Happy Veterans Day and thank you to all that have served.
(Photo/headline/links via Reddit.)
Solving The Problem Of Violence In Video Games
John Hodgman has the solution:
How Far Could A Home Run Be Hit?
We’ll probably never see it, as it requires a bunch of perfect situations (and a lot of luck), but the theoretical maximum distance for a Major League home run is around 748 feet.
The Internet Is A Bunch of Pipes
I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.
Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir’s capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.
It’s actually a great explanation on how network bandwidth, latency, capacity, throughput and such work for folks who wouldn’t otherwise understand.
Someone Implements xkcd #576, the eBay-buying Bot
xkcd #576 is about a eBay-shopping bot that buys random $1 items with free shipping every day — and somebody has implemented it. You can follow what the bot is buying on its twitter feed.