Printer On Fire

I was walking along the road one day, when I spotted a Free Pile.

Hmm… Adobe Acrobat 6, How To Use Photoshop 7, blah, blah, a sleeve of clipart CDs.

Sixteen CDs in total.

I don’t know where they came from, but I’m now in posession of 8 gigabytes of clip art in several formats.

I’m uploading them to bunnitude as I write this.

They can be downloaded here. Most of them are in TIFF format, due to me not being able to find a decent batch image converter.

• Baction
• Befub

The Secret Internet Music project is a site/web app that I have set up to allow people to listen to various kinds of music.

http://simp.bunnitude.com

How to use:

1. Register an account. This needs a valid email to send you the activation link. Don’t worry, I don’t collect emails and sell them to evil people.

2. Go to your email and activate your account. Log in at simp.bunnitude.com.

2. Choose some playlist items. Either click on the random play links on the left, or click on the book icon () to browse around. If you want to browse, choose how you want to browse. Currently, genre, playlist, and Radio Stations aren’t very useful. I’ll get those set up later.

3. When you’ve got the songs you like added to your playlist (look to the right) with the button, click on play (). A pop-up will attempt to open with the flash player in it. If it doesn’t open, disable your popup blocker for this site. Don’t worry, there aren’t any popups.

If you’d like to add some of your own music, contact me at webmaster@bunnitude.com. I can set you up an FTP account so you can upload your music.

If there are any problems or bugs, please email me at webmaster@bunnitude.com.

And if you could do me a favor by clicking on the ad once, I’d appreciate it. It helps pay the hosting bills.

I’ve been thinking more about the idea of the boots.

The hydrogen/oxygen might be a problem, because the hot cylinder internals might cause them to prematurely ignite.

I’ve been thinking of a diesel engine, which would get its ignition power from compressing the fuel. It can’t ignite from the hot cylinder. The disadvantage of this is that there isn’t any way of controlling the ignition timing. The cylinder might fire when your leg was still coming down, which wouldn’t work very well. It might fire too late and bash the footpad into the pavement and knock you off balance.

An ordinary gasoline engine might still be a possibility. The disadvantage of the petroleum engines is that you have to factor in the fuel injection equipment/carburetor.

I need to find an expert at small, linear engines.

I’ve been developing two ideas in my head lately.

First idea: hydroxy power boots.

Wear a pack on your back with a water tank and a battery, and tubes and wires going to your boots. The battery electrolizes the water (which is also used for cooling), powers the cooling pump, and fires the spark (plug? wire?). The hydrogen-oxygen gas is sent to the boots via a tube, into long cylinders.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get the stuff through the tubes, proper spark timings, and boot articulation so it’s not clumsy. I’m also trying to figure out the force the combustion would provide.

Idea two: magnetic catapult trains.

Think maglev trains, but made out of some sort of magnet-shielding material (mu-metal?). They’d go through giant Gauss guns to accelerate them to very high speeds.

Possible problems: erasing any magnetic media in the train. I’m also trying to figure out whether the people inside would be able to survive the accleration (whether in acceleration couches or not).

Hmm.

According to Wikipedia, the chemical name for titin, a protein which gives inactive muscles stiffness, is the longest word in the world.

It starts like this:

Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyltyrosy…

More after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an archive of a QEMU package with a completely installed Debian ARM system.

Username: Pandora

Password: password

Root password: password

Sorry, but this is for 32-bit Windows only (because I don’t have access to any other systems right now).

You’ll need 7-Zip or an LZMA-capable archiver to open this. It’s been virus-scaned, so don’t worry. 

Please don’t use up all of my bandwidth:

http://eagleswingscoop.org/junk/qemu-0.9.0-arm.7z (thanks, JavaJake!)

I just had an idea.

It’s called the Aerialsonde: a compact, lightweight board for monitoring purposes.

Included in the board (there might be several variations): a radio transmitter (amateur or perhaps cellular), an altimeter, a small camera, and logic.

It could be programmed to transmit on various frequencies (via actual programming or swapping out of parts, I don’t know), to broadcast pictures at intervals, and do any number of other things.

They could be attached to balloons or kites, or dropped out of airplanes with parachutes.

They might  be useful for wind monitoring and research (extra monitoring gear could be designed in for this), or for seeing where they go, or just for taking pictures from high up.

I may or may not be developing this. Expect a website for it if I do, though.

In the sidebar, I now have Twitter as an RSS feed (because there’s no Twitter wordpress widget). I also have the Twitter facebook app for syncing my Facebook status with my Twitter account.

This is neat. Maybe once I get better at programming and learn how to do something more than make an array, I’ll write a simple Twitter client to suit my needs.

My Twitter account is here, if you want to look at it.

I’ve found that I work much more efficiently when I listen to music while I work. It has to not be discordant (S.P.O.C.K. and Kraftwerk work well, as well as some classical and most techno), and a steady beat is good.

I think that maybe with the beat combined with the other tones, it acts like a clock signal does in circuit design and puts my brain in synchronization with itself. If I have ADD, my brain being out of sync might be part of the problem - different parts aren’t thinking about the same thing.···

I’m going to try various different sounds, like binaural beats and a solo percussion track with just C64-style noise drums and see if it still works.

Wish me luck. I’ll report my findings here.

Well. Your technologically advanced society is about to run out of [neon|magnesium|silicon|oxygen] for your superweapons or starship drives. You need more than you can get by extracting it from planetary crusts and atmospheres. What are you going to do?

My answer:

Go and find a star that’s near collapse. You ought to be able to do that; if you can’t, why are you needing so much of the element?

Use one of your advanced methods to accelerate a cloud of dust at relativistic speeds towards the star. It ought to be pretty big.

Wait for the dust to hit the star and blow it apart. Then wait for everything to cool before you wade into your new artificial nebula.

Now go and collect the material that got spewed out of the star you just ablated apart. You ought to be able to find enough of whatever element you need.

Why, instead of having a fixed amount of upload and download bandwidth, can an ISP not allocate a “total” amount of bandwidth with automatic adjustment?

Say you have a ten-megabit connection. You start downloading a Linux ISO torrent (of course), and the connection shifts to have much more download than upload speed.

You leave your computer and your disc image finishes downloading. Your Bittorrent client starts seeding, and the connection shifts to 9.5 megabits of upload speed, because it’s doing almost no downloading.

What would also be cool would be manual mode, which could be controlled with a software program or a physical slider. Imagine reaching over to move a control to adjust your bandwidth proportions.

I like this idea. I also like controlling computers with more physical controls than software controls. They fit perfectly!

Instead of running the program to see if there’s an infinite loop, why doesn’t the loop-detector detect loops in code, and see if there are any other parts of the programs that would satisfy them?

If a loop requires a variable with value 1 to exit, and there’s nothing that adjusts the variable to 1, why couldn’t it detect that?

This might not work too well on programs that take input.

If you fed the program its own code, it wouldn’t be able to detect any infinite loops because the code would require taking input.

Hmm…

While I was doing my school work the night before last, I had an idea.

I was reading about the difference between normal population density and arable land population density, and how Egypt had a huge arable land population density and a tiny normal one because most of the people lived in a tiny strip of land along the Nile, while the rest is desert.

Here’s my idea:

Set up a huge photovoltaic array. The panels would deliver their power by cables along the ground, with a monitoring line in each one to detect breaks.

Each panel or set of panels would have a wireless mesh transceiver that linked with all of the panels around it. Each would monitor voltage, current generation, panel integrity, and that sort of thing.

This would keep the various panel systems running at night, and in case of blockage of the sunlight.

Each panel would have a rotating brush to clear sand off of it. This would be sealed to keep the sand out of the mechanism. Each set of panels would have a sun tracking system, also sealed.

Every few miles would be a shortwave transmitter for monitoring of the panel array. The entire array could be monitored remotely, and by stations in or around the array (through the mesh network). This would allow for on-the-fly changing of power routing.

Egypt could fund this by exporting the power to other countries as the solar array was being built.

This might help the energy crisis a lot.

My calculations show that Egypt’s desert area recieves 503.250 gigawatts of energy. Assuming a twelve percent efficiency, and no loss of power from malfunctions or transmission lines, and zero power consumption of the wireless and other panel maintenance systems, this would yield 60.39 gigawatts of energy for Egypt, about the same as sixty nuclear power plants. That would mean energy production of 529,367 gigawatt-hours per year.

I’m not sure how much energy Egypt consumes and imports, but I think that this could reduce their energy needs by a significant amount and bring them a lot of money from exports.

Why don’t they do it?

Something I’ve noticed about a lot of people who call themselves “gangsta” and engage themselves in the “gangsta” culture:

They waddle.

Seriously. 95% of the people I’ve seen wearing “bling”, flashing gang signs, listening to loud rap music, and otherwise being “gangsta”, have a distinctive way of walking. They tend to sway their upper bodies from side to side.

This happens no matter how fit (or unfit) they are, no matter how old they are, and no matter what race they are. I’ve seen extremely muscular people do this, and I’ve seen fat people do this, and black and white and 12-year-old and 25-year old people do this.

My father theorized that this is because they’re mostly unfit and wear baggy clothing, thus lowering their center of gravity. I think that it’s some sort of memetic virus implanted by rap music, which will eventually reach the end of its incubation period, and network all rap listeners together into some sort of telepathic hive mind and take over the world.

Maybe.