Geek stuff
NOTE:
Gearblog has morphed into Gibbsblog. All new postings, same great Gibbs. Come on over!
KDE for OS X
September 22, 2005
Shashdot just pointed to an article on Appletalk, an Australian Macintosh site, that explains how to get the K Desktop Environment (KDE) running under Mac OS X. The process involves installing and running Fink (similar to Debian's Jigsaw Download utility...
And now a word from the dear departed ...
September 14, 2005
What was once merely a figment of the imagination has now become a reality. Memories are no longer solely relived in your mind, but at your loved one's place of rest. While While nothing ever replaces the gift of life,...
Followup to Gearblog News for week 35 / Hold 'em or Fold 'em Dept.
August 30, 2005
Following our note in Gearblog News for week 35 in the section titled "Hold 'em or Fold 'em Dept." there's an interesting item titled "Online Games Are Written By Humans" on the blog Haacked. The item discusses an article in...
A cure for those all-night coding sessions ... if you're a monkey
August 23, 2005
According to a Reuters article: "A drug dubbed CX717, made by Cortex Pharmaceuticals, Irvine, California, reverses the biological and behavioral effects of sleep deprivation" ... except that so far it has only been tested on monkeys. The article went on...
Pen tricks
August 09, 2005
Did you know that there are all sorts of tricks your can do with pens? No? Here's a chart for learning such tricks which is from a Web site dedicated to the art of spinning, twirling, and otherwise manipulating pens....
Active Denial Technology
July 21, 2005
Active Denial Technology (ADT) "provides an effective nonlethal active-response mechanism to disperse, disturb, distract, and establish the intent of intruders." Interesting stuff. Apparently ADT is planned for use in Iraq next year. Here's how it works: ADT emits a 95...
Google goes to the moon
July 20, 2005
Never geeks to rest on their laurels, Google has followed their much-praised Google Maps and Google Earth services with Google Moon. According to Google, Google Moon's rasion d'etre is: In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place...
Hotmail Boomerang handles NDRs
July 14, 2005
Omar Shahine, lead program manager, Virtual PC for the Mac, wrote about a technology called Boomerang on his blog: Boomerang allows us to nuke any NDR messages that were not a result of YOU sending mail. ... We have some...
Writing and driving, driving and writing
July 08, 2005
Sometime ago we remember hearing an interesting idea: Mount a row of high pressure water jets on the bumper of a car and by matching the duration of pulses of water with the speed of the car "write" messages on...
Small may be beautiful but minute is hot
June 23, 2005
OK, here's a hot product: A Linux-based computer slightly larger than an RJ45 connector housing an ARM7 CPU at 55 MHz running uClinux kernel 2.4.27 and Busybox 1.0 with a 10/100 Mbit half/full duplex Ethernet and a serial port that...
Review: Virtualization - From the Desktop to the Enterprise
June 17, 2005
While the VMware book market is healthy (we liked "The Book of VMware: The Complete Guide to VMware Workstation" by Brian Ward a lot) and despite all of the excitement over virtualization (for example, see a couple of recent Backspin...
No new shell for Longhorn
June 15, 2005
In case you haven't heard, Longhorn will NOT have a new shell. Darn. The hype about Monad (that's the MS code name for the new shell which is also called MSH) got everyone way excited but it turns out that...
Google mapping cities in 3D
June 09, 2005
In its continuing quest for world domination through data capture and distribution Google has begun a new project that is very intriguing: They are going to map cities using truck mounted high resolution laser scanners. This data could than be...
Classified ads in outer space
May 30, 2005
We wonder whether the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI (small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel [Douglas Adams])...
Only slightly off-shoring
May 05, 2005
In the on-going debate over off-shoring there's usually the assumption that such activities are carried out in other countries but a recent article in the Boston Globe puts an interesting twist on the idea. According to the article, Roger Green,...
Skype me!
April 30, 2005
Yeah, yeah, we know its been around forever but we've just got interested in Skype's free Voice over IP service. It is remarkable! And free....
Geeks and haute cuisine
April 14, 2005
"It is the food which you furnish to your mind that determines the whole character of your life." -- Emmet Fox, American author and lecturer, 1886-1951. A popular image of the techie is someone who lives on a diet of...
Happy birthday Moore's law!
April 13, 2005
Well, it was 40 years ago this month an article by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore was published in Electronics magazine and the phrase "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two...
Making distributed computing contributions pay off
March 16, 2005
Distributed computing is all the rage and some of the scientific projects underway look like they might well enable profound advances. The big question is how do we make it worthwhile for people and organizations to donate computer time? We'll...
Feral Robotic Dogs
March 12, 2005
In a recent Gearblog posting discussing the launch of Make: magazine we mentioned a few of the articles in the first issue. One of those articles was titled "Hacking the Dog" by Cory Doctrow that discussed the Feral Robotic Dogs...
