benford | 
12 9th, 2009| 
Visited the Computer History Museum recently in San Jose, California, and the results were quite epic. To summarize, It was like looking through the combined Attic and Garage of the entire Silicon Valley. If all we wanted was a twitter post, my work would end here, but I have far more in store.
Jan
14
We’ve got a double-whammy of Benford doing stuff today.
Feel free to take a look at this pdf containg several plans of pretty cool things.
Jan
4
When cleaning my parents house I stumbled upon an old HP Pavilion desktop computer, though clocking in with a 533 Mhz Pentium II with 256 MB of ram, it must have been a screamer back in its day. Most notably, it is mini-tower, not too much bigger than a shuttle case by volume, and only has a 100W power supply, making it both fairly quiet as well as easy on the electricity bill.
Currently, my sister’s computer is a psudeo print server for my parent’s house. The printer itself is in another room, with cables strung to her computer. Unfortunately, since her box is also a regular desktop machine, it will typically be powered down when she is not using it. This means that others in the house might sometimes find themselves without a printer for no apparent reason.
Seeing a computer that really was not working well as a print server juxtaposed with a small, relatively quiet, and low-power drain computer gathering dust, I knew there must be a better way. My new goal was to make the dusty computer into a headless networked print server that could share printers with windows boxes.
Dec
27
Please join me as I once again delve deeply into the history of televised gaming. Back in the day, before Nintendo was a household word and Mario or Link was a mere twinkle in Miyamoto-san’s eye, the video game world was quite a diffferent landscape. Atari was king, though numerous other manufacturers were in the fray. The biggest looming threat to any game console at the time was the consistently falling cost of home computers. After all, if you could buy a full fledged computer for only $100 more than a dedicated game playing device, would you not be tempted to take the plunge? With so many platforms, hardware configurations, and market fragmentation, any newcomers must do something significant to distinguish themselves or be lost in the noise.
Dec
22
Just updated to wordpress 2.7, and the new quickpress seems like a nifty idea, on par with twitter! Kindah.
Dec
7
I heard back from Mario, who works with Second Cine, the organization that had an in-second-life film festeval. This included “Super Maniro Kart”.
He sent me a slideshow of screenshots from his film festeval for all to enjoy. Get them here!
Be sure to note the Super Manrio Kart T shirt. I’d wear one in real life!
Nov
28
Digging (doing stuff) through my (Benford’s) closet I found a few true gems. This included the entirety of my pogs collection, including a canister full of slammers. 8-Ball slammers were cool, as were shiruken slammers, but by far the coolest are the 8-ball shiruken slammers. If manufactured today, my collection would be a scrap metal heavan for all the scrap copper/iron/any metal theives who routinely destroy statues and priceless fireplaces to sell the metal for pennies on the dollar. I sincerley hope that the ninties will never suffer the fate of a retro-craze because our civilization would probably not surive a second coming of Hammertime. Also, if I hear the phrase “it’s the ninties” anytime before 2090, many other places will be safer than the one I am currently in.
Nov
8
I could begin this post with an epic recap, but is pressing pgdown once or twice really that difficult?
At any rate, continuing the Shenanigans (Shannon-ignans?) :
While at Powell’s bookstore someone actually recognized my costume (The Shadowman, of Red Hat Linux fame) of which I was impressed. Living in somewhat of an Open Source Holy Land pays off from time to time. (Pics after the break)
Nov
5
Halloween quickly became a chaotic event that can only be described as Bu Henderson’s Grand Day out. For the uninitiated, Bu (allegedly stands for ‘butt-ugly’) Henderson is a fish, but not of the ordinary kind. He is of a rare species of cotton-filled salmon/trout/some endangered, yet delicious. Furthermore, the rare cotton-mutation has taken away his ability to swim (he absorbs more water than he swims) but has vastly reduced his deliciousness; this has equally drastically increased his odds of surviving to the next generation.
I guess this is really just tough luck for the Patagonian Toothfish.
Oct
23
I found this posting that I thought was eaten by the internet whilst I was in San Fransisco. Here it is in its original glory:
Train ride from Portland to Emryville was fairly smooth, though at 17 hours it was still a bit tiring. However, unlike an airplane, there were in-transit meals that were actually pretty good, and there was an observation car where you could hang out if you didn’t want to sit down all of the time. The breakfast special was a wierd omelette pizza, which suprisingly did not give me any stomach trouble.