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By Dave, April 6, 2008 8:12 pm

A Low Impact Woodland Home

I know I’ve posted about this house before but I think he’s got a new site, and I know that some of the stuff on the site is new. Good stuff! And I still want to build one!

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 8:09 pm

Mike’s Electric Stuff

All kinds of neat and nasty electronics stuff. 😯 🙄 😉

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 8:02 pm

The Register: The Home of the Mighty BOFH

The current years index of BOFH stories. Getting better all the time!!! 😆 😆 😆

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 5:24 pm

Basildon Coder » Blog Archive » The P.G. Wodehouse Method Of Refactoring
I am much given to ruminating on refactoring at the moment, as one of my current projects is a major overhaul of a fairly large (>31,000 lines) application which has exactly the kind of dotted history any experienced developer has learned to fear – written by many different people, including short-term contractors, at a time in the company’s life when first-mover advantage was significantly more important than coding best-practice, and without any consistent steer on the subjects of structure, coding conventions, unit tests, and so on.

In other words, here be dragons.

Interesting method of cleaning code and viewing the progress. I certainly don’t envy him the job!

I’ve always liked P.G. Wodehouse’s work, and this is an interesting look into a current day use of his method of deciding when a page was finished. Cool! 😎

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 5:16 pm

Linux.com :: It’s time to learn Scheme
Have you ever peeked into one of those bazillion .el files in your Emacs installation’s lisp folder and wondered what it meant? Or have you ever looked at a GIMP script .scm file and scratched your head over all the parentheses? Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in common use, and Scheme is a streamlined dialect of Lisp. Many universities use Scheme as the language to introduce students to the Computer Science curriculum, and some of their teaching methods are based on the assumption that Scheme is the one language they can count on their students knowing. Even so, many active programmers and system administrators are unfamiliar with Scheme. This article will get you on your way to adding this tool to your developer or sysadmin toolkit.

I’ve looked at it before but never taken any time to get to know anything about Scheme. From what little I’ve looked at this article it looks like a good starting point. Will give it a read and see if any of it sticks.

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 11:54 am

Cloud EV – Home

The motors and controllers aren’t cheap, nor are the batteries, but with the cost of fuel skyrocketing with no end in sight I’m looking at converting something to electric or building it from scratch. Going to have to spend some serious time doing research as to the how, which, and what… 😉

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 11:46 am

The Cost of E-Voting | Threat Level from Wired.com
One reason election officials around the country have given for purchasing touch-screen voting machines is that they say the systems save money — both in the cost of printing paper ballots and in storing them after an election. Officials have made this claim, despite the fact that the machines carry a steep price tag (about $3,000 per machine).

So SaveOurVotes (.pdf), a voting integrity group in Maryland, decided to see if the 19,000 touch-screen machines their state purchased really did save money. The results aren’t really a surprise — the machines are wildly more expensive than anyone anticipated. But just how expensive they are makes their analysis mandatory reading for any legislators and state or county budget committees that approve voting equipment purchases.

Talk about untruth in advertising and long term hidden costs! Looks like the true cost is FAR more than we have been led to believe. 👿

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By Dave, April 6, 2008 11:33 am

MIT Scientists Build Nanowire Structures for Use in Tiny Lithium-Ion Batteries
MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small “nanowire” structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries.

The goal of the work, led by MIT Professors Angela Belcher, Paula Hammond and Yet-Ming Chiang, is to create batteries that cram as much electrical energy into as small or lightweight a package as possible. The batteries they hope to build could range from the size of a grain of rice up to the size of existing hearing aid batteries.

Now THAT’S some serious nanotech! Cool stuff!

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 9:12 pm

After a rainy start the day got better but I stayed in a very do nothing mode.

Finally got up the energy to get a shower so decided to try out the olive oil for shaving. It worked (I guess) but with my year and a half old razer blade it took a while. Not much razer burn even though the stubble was a quarter inch long so guess it did it’s job. Will have to try it again Monday and see how it works with less hair. 🙄

Also decided to try out the baking soda instead of shampoo. That I like. Kinda strange not having the suds but it cleaned the hair and took very little to rinse out. Fewer tangles when combing afterwards too so am gonna use this rather than the store bought smelly stuff. I think that was what I liked best, no stink in the hair afterwards.

Not that late but am gonna read for a bit then call it an early night. Till tomorrow… 😎

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 7:55 pm

Home built (DIY) small electric buggies and go kart plans – plans for simple single motor trike.

Interesting site with a number of plans for small electric vehicles. Several quite good ideas and much info.

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 5:14 pm

Linus versus GNOME

Now I understand why I don’t like GNOME. God knows I’ve tried MANY times to use it, on several different distros, and never been able to get past the fact that I couldn’t get there from here. There were always things I COULD do in KDE, EASILY that were seemingly impossible in GNOME. Now after reading the article I understand that one of the underlying principle of GNOME is to make things EASY by REMOVING options. HUH??? Sorry folks but that AIN’T the way I work and now that I understand that is the way GNOME is MEANT to be I won’t try waste my time with it again. IMHO Linus is right and GNOME is wrong. Options SHOULD be easy to both find and change. Taking away the users ability to change things is one of the big mistakes I’ve seen MicroSloth making more and more with each new version of their OS and one of the reasons I moved to Linux. I really hate to see any Linux distro and/or desktop being dumbed down like this! But now that I know what the problem is I will make sure to point out that if you want to be able to make your own decision’s just use KDE. Simple enough. Thanks again Linus!

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 4:50 pm

OLPC computers on their way to Birmingham, Ala.
Anyone who has thought that, as nice as the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child computers are for the target market of third-world children, they’d also make a lot of sense for U.S. kids too, is in good company. The mayor of Birmingham, Ala., Larry Langford, had the same thought and the result is that the city will be deploying 15,000 OLPCs to its school system.

So cool that an Alabama city is the first in the US to do this! This news is a month or more old but I just found this post on it and had to share. Hope it works out for them.

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 4:12 pm

Microsoft Threatens to Go Hostile on Yahoo | Epicenter from Wired.com

It’s this type of bullying that keeps getting them into trouble in the courts. You’d think they’d have learned by now to at least give the appearance of playing nice. Yet another reason I will never purchase another Micro$oft product and promote Linux every chance I get.

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By Dave, April 5, 2008 11:44 am

Streetsblog » On Potato Omelets and Winter Cycling
A Spanish tortilla, unlike the Mexican version, is essentially a potato omelet. You fry some diced-up onions and potatoes in oil, and then pour in some beaten egg. Flip it over, and voila, you have a tasty, round golden thing to cut into slices and eat.

Interesting take on why folks cycle (and do other things) in one place and not another. Makes a WHOLE lot of sense.

Posted the bit above to assist my memory cause I want to try them. Sounds quite yummy! 😉

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 9:57 pm

I spent most of the day getting through the last of the backlog of stuff in the feedreader, so this should be the last day with 20+ posts in a day for a while anyhow. 😉

Lots of storm warnings around here today. And quite a few storms came through too. Had a couple of close lightening strikes but no damage at least that I know of. Am glad that it’s fairly quite tonight. Hope it stays that way…

Think I am gonna call it an early night. Till tomorrow. 😎

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 9:33 pm

DIY Electric Kawsaki Motorcycle : TreeHugger

This is freaking awsome! Has a 15 mile range and a top speed of 40 mph. Gonna have to look through the bits and pieces of several motorcycles that I have in the barn and start looking for a motor and pricing batteries. 😯 😎

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 9:25 pm

Brass Goggles » Blog Archive » Remnants of Skystone, Upcoming Flash MMO

Gonna have to check this out when it goes live. Not much for games as a general rule but this looks quite interesting.

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 9:21 pm

BBC NEWS | Health | Daily caffeine ‘protects brain’
Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

And a good reason to drink coffee… 🙄 😉

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 9:01 pm

Hanging Stair by Blencowe Levine : TreeHugger

Interesting concept and one I rather like.

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By Dave, April 4, 2008 8:45 pm

Survey: Do You Read Books? : TreeHugger

Maybe Steve Jobs doesn’t read anymore but that doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t. Go and take the survey and help prove just how wrong he is.