benford | 
08 19th, 2009| 
All flights went according to plan, my ransfer wnet Ok, and I met up with Barry, no problem. Taiwan is quite humid, but Barry knew of some good antidote, with the corwning achievement being Winter Melon ice tea. Experimentally, I must agree, this is quite the fine drink, and seems to have helped stave off the heat significantly. We managed to find our Youth Hostel, but got there rather late. I’ll be headed off to bed soon so we can get some god adventuring in tomorrow.
Aug
18
I’m at the airport right now, and soon I’ll be off on a journey to visit my friend Barry in Taiwan. I know that we will be touring Taipei, the capital, and several other cities in the northern parts of this island. The trip to the airport was smooth, so I hope that the rest of the trip will be so as well. I have an epic trip to Tokyo (Narita) airport, in which I will transfer to Taipei. I will be able to meet up with Barry then, and we will be in all kinds of good times.
Some things I am looking forward to seeing in Taiwan include the night markets (like Saturday market, but every day) and several prominent museums. There is also a zoo and an aquarium, and I might spring for an amusment park if I can get over my fear of rollercoasters. I’ll be reporting every day, at least as long as I have internet access.
To all my friends back home, see you next week!
Jul
19
TSo in today’s episode of computing anachorism, I present to you the Fujistu Stylistic 1000, one of the first mass market attempts at putting an ordinary computer into a touchscreen, tablet-based, form factor. Hailing from 1996 this fantastic piece of technology was not just the future, it was made of the future: A fully functional computer in a package weighing less than 10 lbs (~ 5 kg) with a battery life of much greater than 30 minutes, and multiple shades of greyscale. Instead of using a mouse, you could poke the screen with a special kind of pen to click things. It’s like having one of those funny PADDs from Star Trek or something.
Jul
3
No pictures today, but I have some progress to report on the iShell project. I needed to regrind the clamps that I made last time so that the monitor section of the case could fit cleanly into the rest of the unit. During initial fitting I found that the area near the LCD monitor mount screws was far too close to the edge of the case, or on the lower half, the clamps would run right into the speakers. I marked the excess metal with white out, as black sharpies would not show up so well. Then, one at a time, I took each clamp and ground out the white out marked sections. By removing them one at a time, then replacing them, I could guarantee that each clamp returns to its original spot, preventing further need for grinding.
Jun
7
Okay folks, another weekend, another ishell update! This time I got to play with a number of sharp and / or blunt tools, and used them to persuade metal to bend into different shapes than it would originally have liked. My goal this week was to fasion and install mounting brackets for the ishell’s LCD monitor, securing it safely to its newly found plastic frame for many a future LAN party, or $tarbuck$ visit, or more significantly, the rare LAN party hosted at a $tarbuck$ establishment. Randomly assorted bits that happen to resemble JPEG images follow after the break.
May
30
On a particularly messy day of web development, you might be faced with trying to find deprecated web pages among a pool of thousands upon thousands of pages within your website. This effect, magnified by a succession of webmasters past (complete with wildly divergent design philosophies) lead to a post pre-cambrian era of technological diversity. Unfortunately, this scenario was most notably non-hypothetical for me.
May
15
Threre’s more progress on the iMac project now; the iShell (iMac sans the blinky bits) now is notably less shell like. Instead of being an empty vessel, fish tank materiel or a catbed, it now has a working lcd screen, and furhtermore, takes the cake as one of the world’s largest lcd monitors relative to its screen size.
How, you might ask? More deatils after the break…
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Apr
19
So one day I had the need to programatically resize images using a php webserver. Subsequent research leads me to imageMagick, a port of the java library of the same name. The best part is that the library is Open Source, and therefore freely available to the public at large. A more difficult part was configuring it to play nicely with my local development server, XAMPP running on my MacOS 10.5 box.
With occasional fumbling and chasing after red herrings I eventually succeded in installing the imageMagick library, enabling all kinds of OO image resizing goodness.
Apr
8
After nearly a week of great anticipation, the wonderful Postal Service (the United kind) delivered my desired computer components to my parent’s house. My mother was in town Saturday, so she decided to bring “that box” with her. Unfortunately she forgot to tell me about it, and I forgot to ask, though I knew that she would likely bring them. As a result, she drove back to their hometown, with “that box” still in her possession. It was a noble effort, at least. I stopped by the next day to finish the delivery, and within a few days, had the opportunity to put the pieces together. The parts list begins after the break.
Mar
29
I got this great idea one day to take an old-timey iMac G3 (the gumdrop kind, with an integrated CRT monitor) then gut it, swap out the CRT with a LCD flat panel monitor, then put modern intel kit inside to make a modern PC that appears to hail from the turn of the century. This way, one second, I could be running flying toasters, and the next, very modern games. It would probably also catch all sorts of eyes at a local $tarbuck$ since my mac would be significantly heavier than average.
Other equally valid uses for such an iMac include a boat anchor, an aquarium, or a cat bed, but the upgrade idea eventually won out. Particulary because my model is the graphite grey kind, which looks super classy as a computer. Were it blue or lime, it would definitely be a pet’s home (though grey still makes for a pretty nifty cat bed).