This Old Blog

Last post I wrote about what I wanted in Project2015. This post is about what won't be here. In general, technology. Posts about Linux are a good example of this, as well as reviews of hardware (camera gear, primarily, followed by computers). I have a second blog, Arcane Science Lab , that is specifically for my technology side. If you want to read what I have to say about technology they you should meander over there. I wrote this post after looking at the statistics on this blog and noticing that folks are still finding my old Linux posts. The last time I wrote about Linux was back in November of 2013. It was about Ubuntu 13.10, among other distributions. Since then I've moved on to 14.04 LTS, and now to 14.10. Ubuntu is my primary (my only, to be honest) Linux distribution. It works well and I know how to tweak it to do exactly what I want in a mere minutes after initial installation. It runs the latest Oracle Java, as well as the latest Android tools (see above), among...

You're looking at the cover of a short story written by Cory Doctorow in 2007. That's a good six years ago. Note the title of the story. I've known about "Scroogled" since 2009 when I first stumbled across it. So it's not like Microsoft or anyone associated with them came up with the term. Lately, Microsoft has been selling merchandise , titled appropriately enough, Scroogled. You can get tees and ball caps and coffee mugs and other paraphernalia with Scroogled emblazoned across each item in the Google logo colors. And everybody has been making fun of the Microsoft efforts, including, interestingly enough, Cory Doctorow via BoingBoing . But as Cory writes in his latest article on the subject: It's a clever parody and Microsoft's point is actually a good one, but Microsoft doesn't have much moral high-ground here. The company's long history of dirty tricks against free and open source software, its role in patent trolling, and its eager ...

My 2012 Nexus 7, which is barely a year old, updated over-the-air to Android 4.4 yesterday. This occurred after a long home commute across Orlando through some fairly heavy (and welcome) rain. When I finally plopped down in my La-Z-Boy and reached for my tablet, I was greeted with a notification that the full upgrade had downloaded to the tablet and the tablet was ready to reboot and install Android 4.4. It took around 30 minutes for the installation to finish, but when it was done the Nexus 7 actually looked a bit better and was better behaved than it had been when I first bought it back in October of last year. My tablet, which has been discontinued and replaced by the 2013 version of the Nexus 7, has been faithfully upgraded by Google over the past year. The 2012 Nexus 7 first shipped with Jelly Bean, Android 4.1. Since that time my Nexus 7 has been upgraded with every successive release of Jelly Bean. Over the year I've owned it my 7 has been the best value for a tablet I...

I have carried this with me since I created it, starting in 1980, through my dating with my future wife, our marriage, and on down to my current home in Orlando. It's been sitting in its case in the garage until I went out today, pulled it out, and took these photos of it. It is a single board computer (SBC) designed and built around a 6502 processor, the same processor that wound up in the Apple ][ and the Commodore computers of the era (PET, VIC-20, and C-64). And believe it or not, I can still power it up and it still works. More or less... This top-level view gives a better idea of the components and the density of the components. Again, keep in mind that this was built on a proto-board from the company I worked for at the time, Digital Communications Associates (DCA) of Atlanta. I was an engineer working for them (first a customer engineer, then a software engineer, then a field engineer; that last position is how I got to Orlando). It was interesting building this boar...

o·di·ous    /ˈōdēəs/ Adjective Extremely unpleasant; repulsive. Synonyms hateful - obnoxious - detestable - loathsome - abominable ol·i·garch    /ˈäliˌgärk/ Noun A ruler in an oligarchy. (esp. in Russia) A very rich businessman with a great deal of political influence. ol·i·gar·chy    /ˈäliˌgärkē/ Noun A small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution. A state governed by such a group. The last few weeks have been bitter-sweet for me. In spite of finding and starting a great new job I've had to deal with the decisions of corporations from which I purchased goods and services, specifically Adobe and Yahoo. First I had to deal with the fact that the oligarchs who rule Adobe decided the only way to purchase the use of Photoshop going forward is via a monthly fee through their Creative Cloud. I have been a purchaser and user of boxed Photoshop si...

We spent Thursday going to the doctor for my wife and filling in the time doing other tasks. Friday we decided to make a quick trip over to the Kennedy Space Center and spend a few hours just touring the latest. I'd hoped to see something of the Atlantis exhibit, but it's still under construction with a tentative opening date of 29 June. We were also somewhat shocked at the cost of admission. The last time we were over there was in the mid-1990s with our two girls, who were still in elementary school at the time, but old enough to appreciate what they were seeing. Ticket prices at that time were pretty low. I don't remember what we paid as adults, but the kids cost $5 each. When we stopped in to check on prices we were shocked to see prices were $50/person and up, depending on what type of tour you wanted. Since the Atlantis exhibit wasn't ready we decided to pass and to just drive around Merritt Island and the general area from Rockledge to Titusville, including Coco...

Blackmagic Design's Pocket Cinema Camera caught me by surprise when I first read about it on Thom Hogan's sansmirror.com web site . Up until yesterday I was pretty well settled about not buying any new camera gear, until I came across this announcement. What's scary is that the $995 suggested price isn't a problem with me. My first line of defense, my inherent cheapskateness, has failed to protect me and my wallet. What is remarkable (to me) about this camera is that it appears, on paper at least, to be a real digital cinema camera, not a stills camera with video bolted onto the side. I'm certainly no video expert, but I've been dabbling in video with the Pens as well as the NEX-5N. And I have not been particularly satisfied with the results. I'm now going to commit the timeless amateur photographer's sin by saying that I would get better results by buying a different piece of equipment. I'd be the first to look askance at anyone making that kin...

I have over the last few years written about my wants in a camera. And then today, for whatever reason, I realized I pretty much have what I've yearned for. How did that happen, you ask? The sensors, specifically the Sony sensors, came along and gave me pretty much all I ever asked for with regards to image quality, my biggest want. In particular, the sensors in the NEX-5N and E-M5. They're pretty well matched where it matters to me. Yes, yes, the NEX-5N scores slightly higher numerically than the E-M5 according to DxOMark, but in practical use, they're essentially equal, and compared to the three Pens in my collection, they are well beyond what I'd been working with in regards to overall sensor capability. And to be honest the Pens aren't all the bad to start with. Model DxOMark score color depth, bits exposure range, EV low-light, ISO Year announced NEX-5N 77 23.6 12.7 1079 2011 E-M5 71 22.8 12.3 826 2012 E-PL2 55 21.4 10.2 573 2010 E-PL1 ...

You're looking at my latest digital gizmo, an ARM-based Stellaris LaunchPad development board . At the heart of the board is an LX ARM Cortex-M4 32-bit CPU running at a modest (by today's standards) 80MHz. It comes along with 256K of FLASH and 32KB of SRAM. It won't run Linux or Android or any other major operating system, but for writing executives, interrupt handlers and I/O manipulators in C or assembler down at the bare silicon, it has more than enough raw computational power. I started my professional life nearly 40 years ago by building embedded systems with the 8-bit MOS Technologies 6502 and Zilog Z80. In both those instances the embedded systems had a lot less RAM and EPROM and I was very glad to have them running at a then-blistering 1 to 4MHz. The  also comes along with a lot of hardware-based timers and very flexible I/O pins. It is, for an old hacker like me, something of a dream come true. And I got it all for free from an old friend who had in turn g...

Once upon a time, in a far more innocent era (the late 1990s), I had a personal website on Geocities along with a lot of other people. I'd been introduced to HTML and the web while working for Time Warner's Full Service Network (FSN) in 1996. The irony of that last statement is that Time Warner wanted nothing to do with the web, as they rightfully saw it as the ultimate destroyer of what they were trying to accomplish at the time with the FSN. But I stood up an early copy of Apache (version 1 vintage) on several SGI workstations, and showed management how to use the web and browsers to manage all the far-flung SGI hardware we had to manage at the time. In the end I took those hard-won learned skills with me to another company called MicroClinique and used them to help build a web front end for a project called Theater Telemedicine Prototype Project (T2P2) using Java and Microsoft technologies. In the mean time I discovered Geocities, and decided to set up a small personal w...

You're looking at a blocked page I encountered on my Nexus 7. I was at a local restaurant, Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza . Anthony's, like so many restaurants in the area, provides an open WiFi point. Unlike other restaurants this Anthony's uses Solid Oak Software's CYBERsitter to "filter" ( censor ) sites it deems unfit for the general public. In this particular case, it flagged  BoingBoing.net as undesirable for one of the possible reasons listed to the left. In particular I found the last reason, about being located in a "blocked country," a bit humorous. A simple WhoIs lookup (via GoDaddy, of all people) shows BoingBoing to be hosted in Toronto Canada. The only thing BoingBoing is "guilty" of is acting as one of the leaders against uncontrolled and blatant Internet censorship and IP fascism. Solid Oak Software has been, and continues to be, the center of controversy. From its heavy handed censorship to accusing the Chinese for pir...

WARNING: NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH After a year of limping and increasing pain in the left knee, I finally went under the knife on Friday to have a partial knee replacement. I'd already gotten three separate opinions that all said essentially the same thing: the knee was a bit of a mess and needed some degree of work/reconstruction/whatever. I eventually went with the Florida Hospital Fracture Care Center . My wife had her left knee replaced by them (a second time) in 2008. Her surgeon was Dr. J. Dean Cole. I knew and trusted the group, but I was still too chicken to do it before now. My surgeon from that group was Dr. Brian Vickaryous (pronounced "vicarious" or simply Dr. V). I like Dr. V for a number of reasons, but the most important is his past. In the mid-2000s he was a Major in the Army and an orthopedic surgeon with the 8th Forward Surgical Team in Iraq ( In Iraq, 'it's us versus death'; Mass.-based unit on constant call ). Dr. V has seriously got his...

Polaroid of my past You're looking at something I'd completely forgotten about, something I built around 1980. It's a custom perf board I built on a slab of aircraft-grade aluminum, on which I wired a complete 6502-based embedded computer. It has 4,096 bytes of static RAM, 16K of EPROM (2716), a combo-peripheral chip that included two serial ports and two eight-bit-wide parallel I/O ports, a fully decoded keypad and a six digit display broken into four digits for an address and two for data, all in hex. I was proud of those displays. They were special HP multi-segmented alphanumeric displays that read ASCII bytes. I had them display hexadecimal and special words, and then got them to scroll text. Although the keypad looks like it will only handle hex digit input, I had added software so that if you held the key down it would give you a display of the function and an alt function. Primary and alt key functionality was toggled by the tiny switch on the top left. The cal...