Tag Archives: Silliness

General

TV firmware

2007/09/23 – 15:17

I wonder when the day will come when the firmware in more consumer-electronics devices, like TVs, will go open-source. I would love to be able to modify the firmware in my TV. For one thing, there’s a very annoying video bug that I’m 98% sure is a firmware bug, but Sharp (ooops, I didn’t mean to say the name of the company, but it’s too late to backspace now) refuses to acknowledge that it’s a bug or fix it. I bet if I had a source tree/build tools/loader I could fix it in about a day, regardless of the fact that I don’t know anything about TV firmware.

But the real reason is this: some PS3 games do 720p and some do 1080p. When the mode switches, my TV has an indicator that comes on briefly that says “Video: 720p” or “Video: 1080p”. I want to change the former indicator to “Video: 720p (teh suck)” und express the anger than I am feeling about games that don’t do 1080p.

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General

Domain name speculation goldmine

2007/08/12 – 01:03

Hmmm, I wonder if The Simpsons is a goldmine for domain-name speculators. In a 1999 episode, Homer is picking through the Sunday newspaper looking for something he cares about, and reading the names of the sections aloud:
“Now to trim away the fat: Outlook [tosses in trash], Vista [tosses in trash], Spotlight [tosses in trash], Mosaic [tosses in trash]”

Though I’m sure the writers only intended it to be (partly prescient) commentary on bloated software, a smart speculator could have looked at that list and predicted the name of two future popular packages and grabbed up all the good domains, ya know, *.com, *-help.com, *-for-dummies.com, *-sucks.com, a-*-ate-my-baby.com, *-forums.com, viagra-and-*-for-fathers-day.com, learn-*.com, learn-*-underwater.com, that kind of stuff…

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General

Perverse geekery

2007/08/10 – 21:38

Have you ever run NetBSD/x86 on qemu in Linux on your PS3? Don’t bother, it’s not that cool.

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General

Legacy weirdness

2007/04/10 – 14:10

It makes me chuckle when I notice some of the weird information my computer gives me as a holdover from the old days. Some people probably don’t remember the days of ‘lower memory’ and ‘upper memory’. Here’s a little reminder about it, in case you need it.

There was a time when a BIOS boot-up report of available lower and upper memory was useful, back when the numbers were like “640k lower, 384k upper” and it was likely someone was running MS-DOS with a memory manager. But my laptop’s BIOS still reports it, in the days of Linux and Windows, when the numbers are “640k lower, 2096512k upper”.

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General

Tricky translation

2007/03/19 – 08:58

Hmmm, language translation is tricker than I understood. Here’s a translation from an article I just saw:
“Simple DS Series Vol.14 The Jidousha Kyoushuujo DS [translates to] Simple DS Series Vol.13: The Vehicle Learning DS.”

I never knew a Japanese 14 was an English 13.

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General

Spam brain

2007/03/04 – 02:23

Ha, I was amused to find that a sci-fi story had the same idea I’ve had, about spam filters eventually being a source of artificial consciousness:

“AOL is the origin of intelligence?” She laughed, and
he couldn’t tell if she thought he was funny or stupid.
…

“Spam-filters, actually…”

— Cory Doctorow, “I, Row-Boat”

Great story, by the way. And free for download, thanks to Doctorow’s enlightened attitude about sharing-as-marketing.

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General

PCHDTV

2007/02/23 – 01:18

I was pondering new business ideas, and came up with a great new convergence device. I really need some help with it, so I’m posting a plea to the wide world. However, I don’t want to give away too much information about my design (patent pending, patent pending, patent pending!).

So, I’ll just say this: if you have experience relevant to designing lubrication systems for machines that feed card stock at 7700 mph or faster, please contact me for a great partnership opportunity.

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General

Kids’ TV

2007/02/19 – 12:27

[This doesn’t count as my next post, relative to my last post. Skip this, mentally.]

Man, kids’ TV is some weeeird shit sometimes. I grabbed some Boohbah because I wanted HD test content. Well, I gave you the link, I don’t need to explain too much what the level of weirdness there is, as you’re listening to primary-colored blobs of stem cells farting their way across the screen.

It makes for some good HD test content. They’d sell at least as many HDTVs with this playing in the stores as with football.

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General

License

2007/02/04 – 10:35

Carrying a cup of hot chai gives one social license to walk awkwardly. Other ways to obtain this license are to be on a moving bus, or to be probably-drunk.

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General

My armpits are cat food

2006/12/26 – 13:06

Since I couldn’t find that phrase in a web search, I figure I should publish it so that other people who might search for it will find a hit. Those people will know what it means, the rest of you can ignore it.

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